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Space Planning & Management / Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory (Non-Transactional)
Space Planning & Management / Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory - Set Up & Manage (Transactional)
Workplace Services / Hoteling / Business Process Owner

Define Rooms

This task presents the records of the Rooms table. There are a few reasons you might work with this task:

• If your CAD specialist depicted rooms in a floor plan drawing (by creating asset symbols), the system created records that link to these room polylines. The CAD specialist may have completed many of these fields from CAD; use this task to further edit or review the generated records.
• If your CAD specialist used the Building Performance process to depict vertical penetration areas and service areas in CAD drawings, the system created records in the Rooms table that link to these polylines. (Note that these items' Room Category values indicate that these are vertical penetration areas and service areas.) Use this task to further review or edit the generated records.
• If your site uses a room list, a space manager uses this task to enter room information. In this case, the space manager will manually enter the area of each room rather than derive it from its linked polyline in the CAD drawing.

Note: If you wish to edit a room's type, category, standard, division, or department for rooms depicted in CAD drawings, you can use the process's "Assign" tasks, such as "Assign Room Standards to Rooms" task. With these tasks' embedded room plans, you can assign information by locating the room on the floor plan and clicking on it. For information, see Assigning Room Data Using Room Plans.

To edit or create a room:

1. In the Process Navigator, choose one of these tasks:

• Space Inventory & Performance/Room Inventory/Define Rooms
• Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory - Set Up & Manage / Define Rooms
• Workplace Services/Hoteling/Business Process Owner/Define Locations task.

2. You can use the drill down in the left frame to drill down from sites, to buildings, to floors, to rooms. If you have several records to drill through, you may wish to use the filter at the top of the view. The filter limits the drill-down frames to showing just the data that you indicate in the filter. For example, if you want the drill down frames to present only rooms in the HQ building, set the Building Code to HQ in the filter console.
3. Once you locate in the left pane the floor in which the room exists, select the room and it appears in the right frame for editing. Or, if you wish to create a new record, click Add New and choose Room in the resulting pop-up dialog; a new record appears in the right frame.
   
4. In the right pane, complete the following information:

• Building/Floor Code -- The building and floor in which the room is located. The system completes these fields with the values you selected from the drill down list. Note that if your rooms derived from CAD, you should not edit this information from Web Central.Since the room exists on a floor plan drawing that represents a specific floor within the building, the building and floor assignments should be changed in the CAD environment.
• Room Code -- Enter a value, that combined with the Building Code and Floor Code values, can uniquely identify this room to the system.
• Room Name -- If you wish, enter a descriptive name for this room.
• Room Category/ Room Type --To distinguish rooms as occupiable or non-occupiable, complete these fields by choosing from the existing lists. If you are using the Transactional Room Inventory method, all rooms must be assigned a room category. For information on these fields, see Room Categories and Room Types.
• Room Standard -- To classify the room according to its size and other information, complete this field by choosing from the existing list. For information, see Room Standards.
• Division/Department Code -- Whether or not you directly assign a room to a department depends on operations at your site.
  • If your site manages all department assignments through space requests, you can leave the Division Code and Department Code fields blank. When the space request is approved and a room is assigned to a division and department, the system will complete the Division Code and Department Code fields. For more information, see Space Requests.
  • If you do not need to make all room assignments by space requests and if the room is used by a specific division and department, complete these fields by choosing from the list of existing divisions and departments.
  • If the room is to be designated as common area, see the below discussion.
• Room Area Manual Entry -- If you are creating a room list, enter the size of this room in square feet or meters. Remember, to have the system use this value in its area calculations, you must run the Update Room Area from Manual Area action. If the room is represented in a CAD drawing, the area is already recorded in the Room Area field (not visible from this task) and you can leave this field empty.
• Prorate -- If this room is a common area (such as a lobby or kitchen) and you plan to charge departments for the use of this room, set this field to Floor, Building, or Site to indicate if the departments on this floor, in this building, or throughout the site pay for this area. For more information, see the Designating Common Area Rooms discussion, below.
• Employee Capacity -- Enter the number of employees that can be housed in this room. Rooms whose room type and category define them as occupiable, should have a nonzero value for Employee Capacity. The Employee Capacity value is used to determine availability when assigning employees to rooms and processing move orders. For rooms that have an employee capacity of 1, you can automatically complete this field based on the room type. See Setting Employee Capacity for Rooms in Bulk.

5. Click Save in the upper right corner.

Specifying Rooms as Common Area 

In addition to departmental areas, a floor often contains rooms used by all departments (common areas). When a room is used by multiple departments, and you want to bill these departments for their use of this area, you can designate the room as common area by setting the room's Prorate field  to a value other than NONE and not assigning a division and department to the room. This is the first step in the chargeback process.

You can set a room's Prorate field to one of these values:

• NONE -- If the room represents a specific departmental area, and not a shared area, set the Prorate to NONE. The chargeback routine will change the group's department for this area. You will want to complete the Division Code and Department Code fields to associate this room with a departments. If the room represents a vertical penetration, its Prorate field should be set to NONE. See below note.
• FLOOR -- By setting a room's Prorate field to FLOOR, you are designating that this area is shared by the departments occupying rooms on the floor. Typical examples of floor common areas are lounges and reception areas that serve all departments on a floor.
• BUILDING -- By setting a group's Prorate field to BUILDING, you are designating that this room is shared by all the departments within the building. A typical example of building common area is an auditorium or business center serving all departments in the building.
• SITE -- By setting a room's Prorate field to SITE, you are designating that this area is shared by all departments across the facility site. A mail center serving all departments across the site is an example.

Note: As mentioned, vertical penetration and service areas, developed with the Building Performance process, are stored in the Rooms table and their Room Category indicates that they are not traditional rooms but vertical penetrations and service areas. Vertical penetrations are part of the structure of the building and should not be considered as common areas used by departments. Therefore, if the room category and type indicates that a room is a vertical penetration, be sure that its Prorate field is set to NONE. Service areas, on the other hand, are considered to be common areas and can be charged to departments. If the room category indicates that a room is a service area, be sure to set its Prorate field to FLOOR, BUILDING, or SITE so that it can be included in the common area calculations.

See Also

Comparing Room Lists and Room Plans