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Cost center updates

8 REPLIES 8
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Message 1 of 9
bellj
663 Views, 8 Replies

Cost center updates

Our staff of about 1600 are assigned to about 90 different departments. New departments are created and deleted every couple of months and people are reassigned when projects come and go. During our last reorganization, I changed departments (cost centers) for about 200 people, using the Occupant form and Cost Center pull-down. This was rather time consuming, but seemed to be the only way to do this. The big shock though, was that when we viewed the data-enabled plans and also ran reports, the new department info was either missing or reflected the old cost center data. The only way to update the allocation data on the plan was to move the person out of their office and then back in! If the database is "live" shouldn't these changes be updated automatically? Our vendor is telling us that the tables that link the occupant and space data don't get updated automatically and is suggesting doing the updates manually in Access. We really think this should happen in Facility Manager, either automatically or via a menu command. Are we missing something?
8 REPLIES 8
Message 2 of 9
mark.evans
in reply to: bellj

Banjoguy,

What version of FMDesktop are you using? If you are using version 6.5 or earlier, there is a step or two to make the updates happen on the plan views. You shouldn't have to do anything in Access.

Mark Evans


Mark Evans
Senior Product Manager
AEC Division, Simulation Product Line
Autodesk, Inc.

Message 3 of 9
bellj
in reply to: bellj

We're currently using version 6.5. We just received 7.0 for SQL, but haven't made the jump from the Access version yet. That should happen soon, but it would be good to know about the extra steps we need to take now.

Thanks for your help.
Message 4 of 9
mark.evans
in reply to: bellj

Make sure I am understanding your issue. In version 6.5 and earlier, when you make changes to the cost centers or occupants, if you want to see those changes reflected on the floor plan, you need to go into Facility Link and republish the affected floor plans. I think this is the situation you are describing.

In version 7.0, labels on the floor plans in Facility Manager are user defined and dynamic. If one of your label definitions includes cost centers or occupants and you change a cost center or occupant, the floor plan display in Facility Manager is updated immediately.

Ask more if this hasn't addressed your issue! Let us know how you like 7.0 when you get there.

Mark Evans
Autodesk


Mark Evans
Senior Product Manager
AEC Division, Simulation Product Line
Autodesk, Inc.

Message 5 of 9
bellj
in reply to: bellj

Thanks, Mark. We'll give that a try. My guess is that should fix things.

Will let you know how we make out with 7.0.
Message 6 of 9
bellj
in reply to: bellj

Mark, I'm sorry to report that it didn't fix things. Maybe I wasn't clear about the problem. Here's the test I just did:

- On the Occupant form, I changed the Cost Center for an employee to a new department and closed the form.
- I then went to the Drawing Viewer and called up the floor plan where the employee resides, clicked on his office number, and then clicked on the Allocation tab. His old Cost Center appeared, rather than the new one.
- I then went into AutoCAD, called up the floor plan, and checked the Space Data for that office. It still showed the old Cost Center. I republished the data-enabled drawing as you suggested.
- I went back into Facility Mgr. 6.5. The Occupant form showed the correct Cost Center, the data-enabled floor plan did not.

Something else I tried... I opened the floor plan in AutoCAD and checked the Space Data's Allocation tab. It was still incorrect, so I highlighted it and clicked the "remove" button. The Allocation immediately changed from the old, wrong one to the CORRECT one!

So, I need a way to easily change many employees' Cost Centers so that the changes are reflected on the Occupant form, the data-enabled floor plan, and in reports. Obviously I don't want to make the changes in AutoCAD (possibly 200 employee locations on 20 drawings), but rather in Facility Manager.

Surely our company isn't the only one that has staff changing departments on a regular basis and needs to update the database.
Message 7 of 9
mark.evans
in reply to: bellj

Now I see the problem. Their are two somewhat independent relationships at play here. The allocation of a space to a cost center is one. The assignment of a cost center to a person is another.

Unfortunately, that means that a reorganization that changes all the cost centers MAY mean having to edit both the cost centers on the people, and the cost centers on the spaces. I think there are two approaches to your editting problem, well possibly 3.

1. If you plan to use the Move commands in the future and you set the System Settings for Moves to update space allocations to match the occupants, then you have to edit the cost centers related to the people so they will be correct for future moves. You will also have to edit the allocations for all the spaces because you aren't currently "moving" people to cause those updates. One way to speed it up is to edit the people's cost centers, then cycle through the spaces using the space form and hit the "By Occupants" button on each. (I'm making a note that we could add commands to change many space allocations to match occupants at one time.)

2. If you only really care about cost centers assigned to spaces and don't use the Move commands to effect them, then don't bother to maintain the cost center field on each person. Just edit the allocations for the spaces. One way to speed this up is using Version 7 of Facility Manager where you can graphically fence multiple spaces to edit at one time. (Usually, you have areas where one cost center is used.)

3. There is a 3rd way to do this, but it requires special skills. If there is a direct mapping from the old cost center numbers to the new cost center numbers, you could have someone with SQL language skills run a set of queries against the database that would update all the old cost center numbers/names to the new ones. I wouldn't recommend trying this with anyone other than a good database administrator who is used to doing this sort of thing.

Once the edits are done, the same steps about the graphic updates in 6.5 still apply. Reports are updated as soon as you run them.

Sorry for the heavy work load -- we have to be able to support a wide variety of approaches to managing cost centers for people and spaces and the relationships between them. If you really have the entire staff changing cost centers on a regular basis, it might be worth having someone develop a script or program to take the changes from your HR system and update the FMDesktop tables automatically.

I've asked one of our people with more experience than I have to see if they have a faster way to do this -- so you might see another response.

Mark Evans
Autodesk


Mark Evans
Senior Product Manager
AEC Division, Simulation Product Line
Autodesk, Inc.

Message 8 of 9
mark.evans
in reply to: bellj

Banjoguy,

Now that I look back at your original post, I see that you do use the move commands and you aren't changing everyone in a massiv reorganization. Thinking about it in that context, I see what we need. There's no way to avoid having to edit the cost centers on the people that are changing. But we need to make it possible to update allocations for many spaces at one time to match their current occupant cost centers. I know a simple change that we could make in a future version to enable this easily.

Thanks for helping me understand your issue!

Mark Evans


Mark Evans
Senior Product Manager
AEC Division, Simulation Product Line
Autodesk, Inc.

Message 9 of 9
bellj
in reply to: bellj

Thanks for your efforts. From our standpoint, the Cost Center really only needs to apply to the person, not necessarily the space. In our previous CAFM system, the Cost Center applied to both, but we disregarded the space info. Using the Move command is fine if the person is actually moving, but typically the org change doesn't require a move, the employee just may be assigned to a new project in another department, but stay in their current space. (Just today I received a report from HR that 230 people were changing departments.)

In our previous CAFM system, we could easily do an "on-the-fly" query in a dialog box, highlight all the folks who were being reassigned, pick the new Cost Center from a list, hit "update," and we were done. It would be nice to see something similar in Facility Manager that updated all the records -- people, spaces, and drawings.

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