Defining storage locations

Organizations that exist in multiple geographic locations, or that have a large single campus can reduce costs by decentralizing the parts inventory. Maintenance departments can keep lower inventories of parts at any one location by enabling part transfers between sites.

Archibus shows you the location and quantity of all your critical spare parts, and facilitates the transfer of those parts to the location where they are needed. This enables you to keep lower inventory levels, and avoid problems with imbalances and outages.

Developing tools and other resources

You can use the following tasks to develop your tools and other resource types:

• Develop a Tools Inventory by defining tools and their types
• Define Other Resource Types . When supervisors add an estimate for a work request, they can estimate costs for labor, parts and tools. These estimates contribute to the costs summaries shown in reports. If you want to track other types of costs, such as costs for transportation, or permits, you can add Other Resource Types that provide ways of categorizing these additional costs.

Developing and managing parts and their locations

The following tasks are available from the Business Process Owner - Maintenance Process:

• Define Vendors . Enter vendor and vendor accounts if you have not already developed this data in another Archibus application. See Entering Vendors
• Define Parts. Define parts so that you can track and manage them in the application. See Define Parts
• Define Parts Vendors . Associate parts with vendors so that you can generate purchase orders for these parts. See Maintaining a List of Part Vendors.
• View Parts by Vendor. : Generate this report to review key information for parts by vendor. For example, you can see whether the part is understocked ,and the average cost. From this report, you can run the Update Calculations action to ensure that the data is up-to-date. See View Parts by Vendors
• Define Parts Storage Locations . Parts are associated with a storage location to help you better track and mange your parts. Storage locations can be warehouses, storage closets, mobile carts, or even vehicles. If you do not want to track parts by location, all parts are assigned to the 'Main' (default) storage location. See Defining Part Storage Locations,
• Define Subroom Locations. If you define parts storage locations to the room level, you can assign the part an aisle, cabinet, shelf, and bin number. his form includes the fields for aisle / shelf / cabinet / bin. This detailed location information is defined using the Define Subroom Locations task .
• Manage Parts Inventory . Manage all aspects of your part inventory, including reviewing all storage location inventories, bulk transferring parts to redistribute them to the locations needing them, creating purchase orders when the part inventory is low, assigning parts to storage locations, and locating parts using a map. See Managing Parts Inventory.
• Manage Purchase Orders. As you review your inventory, you can generate purchase orders for parts as long as the part is associated with a vendor. See Managing Purchase Orders for Parts.
• Physical Inventory Variance. In addition to tracking their parts with an electronic inventory, some sites like to periodically survey their facility and physically count the parts on hand. They can then use the Physical Inventory Variance report to compare the physical inventory to the electronic inventory. See Comparing the Electronic Inventory and Physical Parts Inventory.
• Adjust Inventory . You can manually adjust the inventory, such as when you receive new parts, want to transfer parts from one storage location to another, or want to reconcile the electronic inventory with a physical count you have done. See Manually Adjusting the Parts Inventory.
• View Inventory Transactions . This report provides an historical audit of your inventory transactions. See Reviewing manual adjustments: the Inventory Transactions report.
• Manage Supply Requisitions. After reviewing your parts inventory, you might decide that certain parts that are available at one location are needed at another. To track the transfer of the parts you can create a supply requisition. See Managing Supply Requisitions.

• track the transfer of the parts you can create a supply requisition. See Managing Supply Requisitions.

Developing Equipment

You define the following to establish your equipment inventory:

• Define Equipment and Define Equipment Standards . First define the standards that categorize your equipment, and then develop your equipment inventory by entering. key information for the equipment. See Maintaining an Equipment Inventory.
• Define Equipment Parts by Equipment . Use this task to associate equipment and equipment parts. See Define Equipment Parts by Equipment.