Managing Maintenance-Specific Background Data

For the On Demand Work, Preventive Maintenance, and Service Desk applications, the business process owner will develop the space and organizational hierarchies, accounts, and service contracts as described in Manage Background Data (Operations Applications).

For use with On Demand Work and Preventive Maintenance applications, the Business Process Owner must also define the following:

Budgets and Budget Items

You may wish to set a budget for your on demand and preventive maintenance expenses and then use the Management Reports to compare your planned and actual costs to budgeted amounts.

Use the Budgets task to define your budget, such as Preventive Maintenance 2012. You then use the Budget Items table to define individual line items and budgeted amounts for the budget. For example, for your Preventive Maintenance 2012 budget, you may want to create budget item records for each month in 2012 and define a budgeted amount for each month. Or, as another strategy, you could define one overall maintenance budget and then use the individual budget items and their associated cost category to distinguish between preventive and corrective (on demand) maintenance.

When completing the Budget Items table, note the table is used by other applications and offers several fields which are not relevant to maintenance budgets. Consider the following when completing the Budget Items table:

Enter your budgeted maintenance amount in the Income Expense field and define the period for the budget item in the date fields.
You can ignore the seasonal date fields as they are not used with maintenance budgets. Similarly, you can retain the Source and Yearly Factor fields with their default values.
The Budget Items table is also used with the Real Estate Portfolio Management applications and includes fields to associate properties and leases. If your site doesn't work with the Real Estate applications, you can leave these fields blank.
If you want to use the default maintenance budget reports, complete the Cost Category field with either MAINT - PREVENTIVE EXPENSE or MAINT - CORRECTIVE EXPENSE as these are the categories that the maintenance budget analysis reports use.

Note: You may notice that the Cost Categories field contains several other MAINT values. Although the standard reports use only the MAINT values described above, ARCHIBUS ships with additional MAINT values for a few reasons:

Different users will want to report on their costs by different levels of categorization. Having more categories illustrates that although currently ARCHIBUS only reports to two categories from the Operations applications, ARCHIBUS has the flexibility to report at more refined levels.

Real Estate managers typically have to budget maintenance costs at a more refined level than just On Demand and PM. They typically sign contracts for things like snow removal, landscape maintenance, and HVAC. They they need costs broken out at this level to obtain competitive bids from contractors and to negotiate leases, etc.

Real Estate managers may have clauses in their leases or property management contracts that require some other entity to cover the cost for certain types of maintenance even if the real estate manager is the one who initially pays the contractor or has in-house staff do the work.

Craftspersons, Trades, and Work Teams

Use the Trades table to record basic information about the trades of the craftspersons who work at your site. Trade Code is a required field and defines skill categories by which you group craftspersons; mechanic, plumber, and electrician are examples. Note that the system uses the rate information to estimate the cost of on demand jobs.

Use the Craftspersons table to record information about your in-house and external craftspersons. Be sure to include their hourly and overtime rates for cost calculations. Associating a craftsperson with a trade enables users to search for craftspersons according to trade.

Craftspersons and Work Teams

Craftspersons can be part of one work team - a work team having supervisors, planners, estimators, and workers.

Each work team must have at least one supervisor.

Use these fields of the Craftspersons table to specify the members of a work team:

Work Team Code -- the work team to which the craftsperson belongs.
Is Planner? -- the craftsperson may schedule jobs assigned to the work team
Is Estimator? -- the craftsperson can make estimations, regardless of the work team assignment
Is Supervisor? -- is a Supervisor of the Work Team
Can have work assigned? -- can have worked assigned to them. Use this field to specify if a Supervisor/Planner also executes the work.

Note: To include the work team member in email notification, verify that the Email Address in the Craftspersons table is the same as the corresponding record in the ARCHIBUS Users table. For information, see "ARCHIBUS Configuration Options" in ARCHIBUS System Management Help.

Work Classifications

Your site may wish to analyze your maintenance costs and histories in terms of categories. Use the following tables to establish classifications for problems and their resolution.

Problem Types -- Use this table to define frequently occurring problems, such as installation, leaks, and safety. The Problem Types table is used by other applications, including Clean Building and offers the unlimited-tier hierarchy feature so that you can optionally prefix the problem types to show related items. For example, the sample data uses the parent CB for the various Clean Building actions, such as CB|INSPECT and CB||ABATE. To create a multilevel value, complete the Problem Type Code field in the format PARENT|CHILD, such as LEAK|CEILING and LEAK|RESTROOM.

Cause Types -- This table defines typical causes of maintenance and repair problems, such as accident and vandalism.
Repair Types -- This table defines common resolutions to problems, such as cleaning, replacing, and moving.
Problem Description Codes -- Use this table to enter a list of common problems by completing the Problem Desc. Code field with a unique value and the Problem Description memo field with a memo describing this problem. When users report problems, they can automatically complete the work request’s Problem Description field with a descriptive memo from the memos stored in this table. This is useful for minimizing the typing required when requesting work.
Problem Resolution Codes -- Use this table to enter a list of common resolutions by completing the Problem Resolution Code field with a unique key and the Problem Resolution memo field with a memo describing this solution. When craftspersons record details about the job, they can use these values to automatically complete a work request’s Craftsperson Notes field with a descriptive memo from the memos stored in this table. This is useful for minimizing the typing required when updating work requests.

Warranties

The Warranties table holds data about warranties for your furniture and equipment items. Multiple items may be purchased under one warranty, so you can first define the warranties and then associate furniture and equipment items and furniture standards with warranties. Note the following fields:

Warranty Code	The primary key field that uniquely identifies each warranty.
Description	A description of the warranty coverage. Can also document the location of the warranty paperwork, as it may be required to execute the warranty.
Meter Expiration	The warranty expiration in terms of metered units, such as miles, hours of runtime, or rotations. The Meter Units field describes such units. The Meter fields do not mandate that items assigned to the warranty expire on the same date, only that they are warranted for the same period. For example, if Meter Expiration is 90 and Meter Units is Days, any tagged furniture or equipment asset that has a 90 day warranty, regardless of the exact date the warranty expires, can be assigned to the warranty
Expiration Date	The date that the warranty expires. The expiration date may be in addition to, or instead of, a meter expiration.
Warranty Vendor	The provider of the warranty, that is, the vendor to call when you need to execute the warranty.
Contact Info	Contact information on the provider of the warranty.
Warranty Document	Use this document field to hold files referring to your warranty. For example, you could scan the paper copy of the warranty, store it in a PCX or other file, and then reference this file in the field. Such a procedure saves you from manually entering the details of the warranty into the database.

Equipment, Parts, and Tools

For use with the Preventive Maintenance application, the Business Process Owner must additionally define the following. (For the On Demand application, this information is developed by the Inventory Manager role.)

Roles and Processes

In addition to establishing the above information, the business process owner needs to set up users and roles and assign them to processes.

Dispatcher role: To include a dispatcher in your Service Desk workflow, in the ARCHIBUS Roles table, define a role for which the value for Role Name is similar to "%DISPATCH%".
Craftsperson and Supervisor roles: Some sites prefer to directly access work requests without first viewing the parent work order. This makes it easier to issue, complete, and close a set of work requests at one time. If you don't want your craftspersons and supervisors to review work order information, assign them the "Supervisor (Work Requests)" and "Craftsperson (Work Requests)" roles. The tasks of these roles hide Work Order information so that users can directly access work requests.

For more information on users and roles, see:

"Getting Started with Roles, Users, and Processes" in System Management Help.
Updating Users, Employees, and Emails

Quick-Start / Building Operations

Building Operations / On Demand Work / Business Process OwnerBuilding Operations / Preventive Maintenance / Business Process Owner