Quick-Start / Building Operations

Manage Equipment

Many office and manufacturing equipment items require routine maintenance, such as cleaning or lubrication, that must be performed in order to maintain the item. Similarly, many maintenance tasks involve equipment that is not working properly: the copier is jammed, the air conditioner is too cold, the humidifier is leaking. Once you are processing your work requests using the Building Operations Console, you might decide that you want to enter your equipment into the application so that you can manage work done on your equipment.

Benefits of Maintaining Equipment Information

Having an accurate equipment inventory entered into the application optimizes the maintenance process, and thereby minimizes the direct and indirect costs associated with maintaining equipment. Having your equipment entered into the application enables you to:

Track the repairs done on the equipment to help you determine when to replace it.
Enter preventive maintenance schedules for the equipment to generate work orders for this preventive maintenance. See Setting Up Easy Preventive Maintenance.
Generate the following equipment-related reports that help you analyze costs and amount of work that is equipment-related. The following reports are included for Quick-Start:

Report	Description	Notes
Open Work Requests by Equipment and Status	Count of work requests for equipment that are not yet closed by its status. This enables you to answer such questions as: Which pieces of equipment are causing the most work? Is any equipment-related work on hold for access or labor?	You must be using the application to enter equipment information to generate this report
Archived Work Requests by Equipment Standard	Count of closed work requests by equipment standard. This report helps you answer such questions as: Which types of equipment are causing the most volume of work? Is equipment associated with a particular division experiencing a higher volume of work?	You must be using the application to enter equipment and equipment standards to generate this report.
The Cost Analysis Dashboard includes the following equipment-related reports:
Total Costs by Equipment Standard	Pie chart showing the costs for each equipment standard for the selected year. This helps you analyze which types of equipment are driving costs.	For these reports, you must be updating work requests with the actual hours. The application uses this to calculate actual labor costs. You should also enter any other costs when updating (that is, costs that are not labor or parts). To have the cost total include parts, you should enter the parts when estimating. See Estimating Trades and Parts.
Equipment History by Equipment Standards	Line chart showing the cost of completed work for the selected year by equipment standard. This enables you to see how your maintenance costs for different types of equipment are trending. You can generate this report as a table to see the exact cost amounts for each month.

How to manage equipment

Step 1 - Set the application parameter to show equipment on the Report Problem form

By default, equipment is not shown on the Report Problem form, but if you want to manage your equipment, you should change the setting for the ShowEquipmentOnCreateRequest application parameter so that equipment is shown. See Setting the Quick-Start Application Parameters.

Step 2. Define Equipment Standards

Before you create an equipment inventory, you can establish the types of equipment at your company -- the equipment standards. Typically, a company will purchase multiple quantities of like equipment items. For example, it is likely that your company has purchased the same type of telecommunications equipment for multiple offices. ARCHIBUS defines this type of telecommunications equipment as an equipment standard.

Setting up equipment standards offers the following advantages:

You can associate equipment with the standard, so that the information recorded for the standard is automatically associated with the equipment. This is an efficient way to maintain equipment information.
You can also search for equipment by standard. For example, when setting up preventive maintenance schedules, you can locate equipment by its standard, and then set up the same preventive maintenance schedule for all the equipment in one action.

For the step-by-step procedure to add equipment standards, see Adding and Editing Equipment Standards.

Step 3 - Optionally, define warranties

It can be very useful to have warranty information stored for each piece of equipment. This information can include the vendor to call if you need to execute the warranty, the vendor's contact information, and information about the warranty's expiration. As a best practice, you define warranties before defining equipment, so that you can associate the equipment with the warranty. See Define Warranties.

Step 4 - Define equipment using the background data task

You can add your equipment as you submit a work requests (See step 6). However, using the Define Equipment task, you can define more information, such as the location and the division and department the equipment is associated with, key dates, usage information, and cost and warranty information.

To define equipment using the background data task:

From the Quick-Start Home page, select Define Equipment from the Building Operations Background Data section.

For a description of the data you can enter, see Defining Equipment Information.

Step 5 - Optionally, Set up Quick-Start Preventive Maintenance

Once you have equipment defined, you can set up preventive maintenance schedules for equipment, so that the application can automatically generate work requests for this preventive maintenance. You enter a schedule for the equipment that you want to manage in this way, and a schedule for how often you want the application to generate preventive maintenance work requests.

See Setting Up Quick-Start Preventive Maintenance.

Step 6. - Add equipment as you submit work requests for the equipment

When you enter work requests that involve equipment repair, you can select the equipment from the Equipment section of the Report Problem form. If you have not yet added the equipment, you can add the Equipment Code and Equipment Standard from the form. To add more details, such as warranty information, see step 4.

To enter equipment from the Building Operations Console:

From the Building Operations Console, select the Report Problem task.
On the Report Problem form, in the Equipment section, mouse over the Equipment Code field, and click the Select Value button .
The Select Value Equipment form appears.If you have added equipment, it appears in the list so you can select it.
If you have not yet added the equipment, at the bottom of the Select Value form, click Add New.
The Add New Equipment form appears.
Enter the Equipment Code, the unique identifier for this piece of equipment.
Tip: It is a best practice to have a naming convention for your equipment so that the equipment codes for similar equipment are shown together in lists. For example, you could have the equipment code begin the same for the same type of equipment, and then follow this with a unique designator for the particular piece of equipment. For example, all air handler units could begin with AHU. If you have four units, they could be designated AHU1, AHU2, AHU3, and AHU4.
Type the equipment standard in the field, and select the equipment standard from the list of standards that appears as you type. This list shows all the equipment standards that match your typing. If you want to select from a list of standards, mouse over the Equipment Standard field and select its Select Value button; then select the standard from the list.
The Report Problem form appears showing the equipment you added. This equipment will be available the next time you create a work request.
Complete and submit the work request. See How to Create Work Requests for step-by-step instructions.

When you select equipment, the Report Problem form:

Shows the warranty expiration date, and the warranty vendor. It also includes the View Warranty Details button to see more information, such as contact information for the warranty vendor.
Includes the List Request for Equipment button that shows any open requests for work for this piece of equipment.