by AF 1008a3 — October 12, 2009—Archibus, Inc., a developer of real estate, infrastructure, and facilities management software, has released a new version of its industry-leading ARCHIBUS solution.
New Web-based applications designed to improve space occupancy management, planning/forecasting, reporting, and decision-making include:
- Space Inventory & Performance. Assists in simplifying the creation, management and reporting of space inventory to maximize efficiency and reduce costs.
- Space Chargeback. Streamlines the chargeback process to increase space accountability and reduce occupancy cost.
- Personnel & Occupancy. Provides precise reporting on employee headcounts, average areas, locations, room availability, and occupancy to help plan for future expansion, consolidation, or space re-balancing.
Major features of these new Web-based applications include:
- Unified Method of Space Inventory. Simplifies space inventory using a single methodology that integrates both rooms and groups.
- Workstation Management (“rooms within rooms”). Incorporates more flexible room categories that allow users to calculate physical areas, such as areas for housecleaning or energy management, separate from occupiable areas for department assignment and chargeback.
- Improved Forms and Reports. Makes full use of the form-driven ARCHIBUS Web Central environment to provide intuitive summaries and drill-downs by organization and space hierarchies.
- Enterprise Graphics. Provides interactive plans for quickly visualizing and editing your space data and quickly performing functions such as department reassignments. The new paginated reports application uses the enterprise graphics for delivering integrated text and drawing reports over the Web.
New Web-based applications have also been added to the ARCHIBUS Real Estate Portfolio Management product suite. They include:
- Cost Administration. Makes centralized monitoring of portfolio occupancy costs faster and easier through Wizards that track and analyze costs by time, location, or organization.
- Cost Chargeback & Invoicing. Improves the process of charging back costs, invoicing, and tracking receivables through an easy-to-use interface to reduce administrative expense.
- Portfolio Forecasting. Supports managers in evaluating, forecasting, and allocating space needs and associated occupancy costs of organizational units using multiple scenarios and time periods, supports cost forecasting and cost allocation.
A new Web-based application, Condition Assessment debuts as a convenient, team-based approach to evaluating the condition of buildings and equipment across even the largest and most dispersed facility portfolio. It assigns and captures checklist data from assessors who can report results via hand-held devices and Web forms. The application analyzes conditions based on safety, risk to the organization, and other criteria. It then groups them into capital packages for funding, as well as issues on demand work requests routed to in-house or outsourced service providers.
The new Web Central Localization activity in ARCHIBUS allows users to more easily translate their own personalized extensions, applications or even the entire Web Central product into their own language and others.
For improved maintenance practices, ARCHIBUS, Inc. has also delivered significant enhancements to its existing Web-based Preventive Maintenance application. The improvements include bulk scheduling of equipment for preventive care, the assignment of pre-defined Service Level Agreements, scheduled generation of PM work requests, and work load balancing, among other features.
The core ARCHIBUS Web Central platform offers a wealth of new features, including Paginated Report, a new and entirely Web-based reporting engine that produces high quality, editable reports in Open Office document format. Results can be edited in Microsoft Word with the option of changing colors and formatting. ARCHIBUS content can also be cut-and-pasted into other documents. Users can add floor plans and other drawings as well as use the View Definition Wizard to define their own paginated reports.
Web Central now also supports intuitive Adobe Flash-based interactive forms to more quickly visualize a portfolio and interact with representations of buildings without requiring specialized plug-ins. Support for Flash-based drawings for work order locations, conference room reservations, move management, and space management gives enterprise users “self-service” access to floor plans, thematic plans, and graphics.
Beyond those advances, Web Central also offers a streamlined Data Transfer action between Web Central and Excel spreadsheets, data export improvements, and a Cascading Update and Delete feature for one-step entry and edits of data between tables related to rooms, equipment, work requests, and more.
For those organizations requiring GIS capabilities, the new ARCHIBUS delivers ESRI ArcGIS Online, which provides upgraded GIS-enabled views from ESRI ArcWeb Services to ESRI ArcGIS Online.
Finally, the new release of ARCHIBUS features a number of improvements for ARCHIBUS for Windows Client/Server users including Overlay for AutoCAD 2010. The new version of the ARCHIBUS Overlay application upgrades the Overlay to support the latest AutoCAD DWG format used by this industry-standard platform.
Overlay for AutoCAD 2010 offers other new features including Enterprise Graphics. It indexes AutoCAD plans in a format that makes the graphics interactive and accessible from Web-based forms and reports in ARCHIBUS business activities.
Additional features include Convert to Unified Method, for converting a Composite Inventory to the Unified Methodology, and an Enterprise Graphics Folder Structure that clarifies the default project folders so that the Overlay and Web Central follow the same conventions.
For more information visit the ARCHIBUS Web site as well as its FMLink ad.
