Sustainability & Risk / Green Building / Scoring - Track

Defining a Rating Project

Each time you want to assess your building against a certification standard to self-score on how you meet the criteria or to prepare for a certification application, you must set up a rating project to store your data. The rating project stores the details of your certification efforts, such as the area being assessed, the time frame for which you are assessing performance, the standard against which you are measuring your building, and so forth. Additionally, you can store associated documents with a rating project.

As you manage a rating project through the process of self-scoring, submission for certification, responding to comments, and so forth, you can update the rating project's Status field to indicate its current position within the process.

You can set up rating projects to:

  • record your current data to determine the certification standard and level for which you qualify at this time
  • record your data throughout the entire certification process, including entering the official scores from the certifying agency
  • determine the cost of reaching the next certification level. For example, you can enter self-scores for meeting your target level, as well as the cost of changes you must make to meet this level.
  • analyze various scenarios for achieving certification. See What-If Analysis for Certification Scoring .

Determining the Scope of your Rating Project

With the Archibus schema, rating projects can pertain to the entire building, or just a specified floor or room. The detail at which you define your rating project depends on the classification standard that you are using. For example, LEED scores to the building level. BREEAM, on the other hand, can certify an asset that consists of: the whole building, a floor of a building, a room of a building, a wing of a building, or separately managed areas.

Depending on your the policies of your certification standard and the situation at your building, you may wish to manage only a particular floor or room. For example, if you are seeking BREEAM certification and have a new addition to your building that was built using green conventions, this area may immediately qualify for a higher certification level than the rest of your building. Accordingly, you could set up two rating projects for this building: one for the new portion of the building and one for the original portion of the building.

Although you can use Archibus to define rating projects for buildings or rooms, the application's sum data to the building level only. Configuring the reports to other levels requires customization.

Procedure

To define a new rating project:

  1. Select Define Rating Project.
  2. Choose Add New.
  3. In the right pane, complete the following fields:
    4. Building Code Choose the building which will be assessed in this project.
    Project Name

    Enter a brief name for this project which uniquely identifies it. You may wish to include the date and building as part of the name. If you work with multiple certification standards for this building, you may wish to also indicate the standard in the name, such as HQ2011-LEED09.

    Certification Standard

    From the available list, choose the certification standard against which you are assessing your building.

    Floor Code/Room Code

    If you are applying to certify only a particular room or floor, enter it in these fields. See the above discussion on rating projects for information.

    If you are applying to certify the entire building, leave these fields empty.

    Certification Area Description Describe the exact area that you are assessing. For example, if your project pertains to only a portion of a floor, enter the exact area here.
    Performance Period Start Date/End Date Enter the date range for which you will be measuring performance.
    Project Description Enter a description of this project.
    Certification Status

    As your project moves through the certification process, you can enter its current status in this field. For example, when preparing your application, you would choose In Preparation; when the certifying organization communicates their findings, you could choose Certified or Responding to Comments.

    Goal Level Enter the goal level you seek to achieve. The levels available for you to choose correspond with the value you complete for Certification Standard.
    Certified Level

    Holds the certification level returned by the certifying agency.

    If the building is certified enter the current certification as returned by the certifying agency. The levels available for you to choose correspond with the Certification Standard that you chose above.

    If the building is currently not certified under the chosen standard, choose the appropriate value to indicate this. A good practice is for the person defining your certification levels to include a value such as "unclassified" that you can use as a starting point.

    Registration Date Enter the date when your certification process formally begins, for example, the date that you register the building with the certifying authority.
    Certification Part Number This field is defined for use with the BREEAM In-Use standard, which is divided into three parts. Each part is a separate certification. The Green Building application does not provide reports using this field; sites using BREEAM In-Use standard can customize reports to take advantage of this field.

As you move your rating project through the process of applying for certification, responding to comments, approval, and so forth, you will change the values of some of the above fields as well as complete additional fields that are not listed in the above table. For information, see Update Rating Projects .