Asset Management / Asset Portal / Background Data

Background Data: Process Overview

The Asset Portal Background Data task enable you to:

Establish fundamental standards data. See Developing Standards Data.
Develop the geographical, space, and organizational hierarchy. See Developing the Geographical, Space, and Organizational Hierarchies.
Define and review classification codes to organize your asset data. See Defining and Reviewing Classification.

Developing Standards Data

The Asset Portal Background Data tasks focus on establishing fundamental standards data about your office, facility, and telecom equipment, and tagged furniture. Adding standards is optional, unless you are developing a furniture standards inventory that requires you to develop standards.Standards can help you track, manage, and update your equipment, tagged furniture and furniture standards inventories.

If you develop standards that are associated with a drawing block, you can asset insert to create equipment, tagged furniture, or jack asset symbols in a CAD floor plan drawing.

From the Smart Client, you can develop standards using grid views that are an efficient method when bulk updating data.

You can develop standards using the following tasks:

Define Equipment Standards (Smart Client only)
View and Edit Equipment Standards
Define Furniture Standards (Smart Client only)
View and Edit Furniture Standards
Define Jack Standards (Smart Client only)
View and Edit Jack Standards
View and Edit Software Standards
View and Edit Faceplate Standards
View and Edit Punch Block Standards
View and Edit Patch Panel Standards
View and Edit Cable Types: Develop cable types, so that you can associate these with cable standards.
View and Edit Cable Standards
View and Edit Telecom Hierarchy Levels

To review your existing standards, the Background Data process includes the following tasks:

View Furniture Standards Book. See Tagged Furniture Reports.
View Equipment Standards Book. See Equipment Reports.

After developing your standards, you can use the Equipment and Furniture processes to add tagged furniture or furniture standards and equipment records using the standards you have created.

Developing the Geographical, Space, and Organizational Hierarchies

When entering your equipment and furniture assets, you typically want to also enter the location for the asset, and perhaps the division or department that uses the asset. If your geographical. location, and organization data has not been defined using another ARCHIBUS application, you can use the Asset Portal Background Data tasks to do so. The Background Data process includes the following tasks:

Define Geographical Locations: Define geographic regions, countries, regions, states, cities, and sites for your equipment. See Developing Geographic Data.
Define Locations: Define sites, buildings, or floors. See Developing Locations.
Define Organizations: Define Business Units, Divisions, and Departments. An organization is often divided into business units, which are composed of divisions. Divisions, in turn, are composed of departments. However, not all organizations use this three-level hierarchy, and instead might have just departments and divisions. You can define the units that are relevant to the way you manage your furniture and equipment assets. See Developing the Organizational Hierarchy.

Defining and Reviewing Classifications

Classifications are categories of building elements and systems (such as Mechanical, Concrete, Electrical) that you can use to manage your equipment assets. When performing a condition assessment, you can use these categories to organize your assessment data. See Defining Classifications for Assessment Items.

You can review the Classification Codes used at your site by selecting the Asset Management / Asset Portal / Background Data / Classifications task. You can export the data to a paginated report, or to a spreadsheet.