Quick-Start / Space

Tracking Room Size Definitions (Room Standards)

In addition to Room Category and Room Type which track the function of a room, your site may wish to classify rooms in terms of its design and intended use. Room Standards define design capacity and room dimensions and represent your business requirements. For example, OFF-B might be a large room designed to hold two employees, whereas OFF-A is smaller and designed to hold one employee.

Room standards are independent of room categories and room types. Whereas room categories and room types focus on a room's function and whether or not a room is occupiable by personnel and is part of the floor's usable area, room standards focus on the size of the room.

Why track room standards?

Taking the time to develop room standards and assign them to your rooms can provide important information on how you are using your space.

Since a room standard defines a room's dimensions, you can compare the actual room sizes to your corporate standard and see if they match; that is, are rooms in this building the correct size based on our corporate standards? If you have several rooms that are larger than their standard definition, you might be able to reconfigure space and use it more efficiently.
You can review occupancy and determine if rooms are being occupied according to their standard definition. For example, is a room whose standard specifies that it should house one employee actually housing more employees?
You can understand how rooms are used at your facility. For example, how many executive offices, manager offices, and standard offices do you have, and what are the total areas of these classifications?
You can represent more information about the types of rooms in your facility. For example, you might have a room category of OFFICE that specifies that rooms of this category are occupiable and that they are offices, but doesn't provide information on the size or the number of employees that should occupy the room. Since a building's offices are often different shapes and sizes, you can define a room standard for each type of office based on its size, such as OFFICE-120, OFFICE-100, OFFICE-48, for offices that are 12x10 and hold 3 people, 10x10 and hold 2 people, and 6x8 and hold one person. Thus, a room's Room Category of OFFICE designates that the room is usable space; its room standard of OFFICE-102, OFFICE-100, or OFFICE-48 describes its size and the number of employees it is designed to hold.
CAD specialists can use the asset inserting functionality to add rooms to floor plans based on their room standard definitions. CAD users simply choose a room standard from a list of available room standards, and the asset inserting command draws a room of these dimensions at the point the CAD specialist specifies. This methodology ensures that rooms are drawn according to your business definitions.

Including Room Standards on the Space Console

If your site wishes to track room size definitions, you can do so from the Space Console. You can:

create room standards
specify the room standard for each room on the floor plan
solid-fill highlight rooms on the floor plan by room standard
border highlight rooms on the floor plan by room standard

By default, the options of the Space Console do not display room standards. To work with room standards, you must run the Show Room Standards command, which is located on the Gear icon of the Floor Plan ribbon. The command makes the following changes:

adds Room Standard as an option for the Highlights option and the Borders option
displays the Room Standards tab at the bottom of the Space Console

Once you display the Room Standards tab, you will find that it has the same features as the other Space Console tabs. For information, see Review Organization, Room Category, Room, and Employee Information (the Space Console's tabs).

Note the following:

The sample Quick-Start database does not include any room standard data. You need to define these yourself based on your business practices.
You need to turn on the Room Standards tab for each ARCHIBUS session. If you run the show Room Standards command, the next time you sign in, you must run the command again.

Procedure to track room standards

Activate room standard information in the Space Console by choosing the Show Room Standard option from the gear command located beneath the Occupancy mode button.
Define the room standards that you want to use at your site by using the Add New button to access the form for creating a new room standard. For information, see Define Room Standards.
Once your room standards are defined, you can assign them to rooms. This requires a few steps:

Highlight the floor plan by room standard so that you can see the current assignments.
Determine the rooms that are not highlighted and therefore do not yet have a room standard assignment.
For each of these rooms, locate the desired room standard in the tab and choose its Assigned button.
Click on the room and the system highlights it with the color for this room standard.
Commit your changes. For more information on using the system's assignment features, see Change a Room's Division or Department Assignment