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What exactly is FM?
FM is an acronym for Facilities Management. For the uninitiated, FM is the general term for the management of the space and assets contained within buildings and structures. Assets can be floor areas, room areas, vertical penetrations such as lift shafts and stairwells. Your assets can also be employees.

Today, there is a shift from the old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet and Rolodex method of chaos-based FM to an integrated computer-based database and CAD system such as AutoCAD®. These integrated systems are known as Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM).

There are, however, many terminologies for FM. For example, Autodesk has two, Strategic Asset Management (SAM for short) and Building Asset Management (BAM for short). Now SAM and BAM may sound like two characters from Dr. Seuss, but they are extremely important when it comes to working in FM.

SAM provides a working methodology for an organisation to calculate occupied and vacant space and then produce financial reporting around that data. BAM, on the other hand, provides an organisation with the ability to manage its buildings (sometimes known as property assets). BAM would be utilised when you need to know how many rooms you have on a floor of a building and how many desks and chairs are in those rooms. This is sometimes known as asset tracking.

When it comes to FM, there are numerous abbreviations, terminologies, and methodologies and a lot of them depend on which FM software you are using. Still, it all comes down to one thing: you want to link your facility drawings to a database. This allows you to update your facilities information “on the fly” in a graphical AutoCAD environment. This ensures that the updates are performed “live” and eliminates reliance on paper-based methods where human error can creep in.

Paper-based methods are prone to error. Paper is easily lost and such a method can be extremely time-consuming. I am sure you FM’ers out there have lost a paper move order at some time in your FM career, causing you to lose the new office details for your CEO for his/her office move. This makes you appear incompetent and does nothing to endear you to your CEO.

Using a computer-based FM system, on the other hand, enables you to look up the information again, maybe on a laptop, even in some cases on a PDA, thus solving any problem of lost information. It may even gain you kudos from the CEO as he/she will see that you are on top of your FM data and using it effectively. Believe me, in FM, kudos with upper management is what you need. Looking like Laurel and Hardy on a bad day does not help you up the FM career ladder!

Linking it all together
OK, so you have AutoCAD already. You have drawn up all of your buildings and floors in AutoCAD and have used a consistent layering standard for all of the drawings. Consistency is the name of the game here. It may even be in your best interest to create some CAD standards and working practices. Good FM is bred through consistency.

Now we need to link the data in the drawings to our database. You can do this using Microsoft tools such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but is far easier (and more economical) in the long-term to invest in a suitable FM system. Now you can invest in a Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) system, a Computer Integrated Facilities Management (CIFM) system, or even a Totally Integrated Facilities Management (TIFM) system! Don’t be confused by all of the acronyms out there. All you are aiming to do is link your graphical inventory (AutoCAD) to your relational database, a function performed by most FM systems.

Acronyms aside, what information in our drawing can we use to link to the records in our database? First, the best way is to imagine your database as a giant Excel spreadsheet with lots of tables linked together, hence the term relational database. For example, Building A will have Floor 4 with Room 2. These items are used for space management (managing your spaces in a building) but each item will go in a table (for table, read spreadsheet) so that Building A is in the Buildings table, Floor 4 is in the Floors table, and Room 2 is in the Rooms table. All you are doing is building a space hierarchy that provides the links to join them together.

Figure 1. A typical space hierarchy shown as tables in a relational database.

These links are usually based around a unique identifier for each building, floor, and room i.e., building name, floor number (or floor code), and room number. In a relational database, these pieces of unique information are normally known as primary keys. It is a mammoth task to do this manually, so you purchase an FM system to do all of this for you and make you more productive. The FM system you purchase will use a language called structured query language (SQL). There are many derivations of SQL, but three of the most common ones are Oracle SQL, Microsoft Sequel (MS-SQL), and Sybase’s Adaptive Server Anywhere. There are probably many more as well, but let’s just stick with these for now.

A quick history lesson, then. Relational databases were invented by E. F.Codd, who worked for IBM in the early 1970s, so SQL has been around a long time! All SQL and relational databases do is take your strings of data and put them in to rows (known as records) and columns (known as fields). You can now understand the comparison to an Excel spreadsheet.

Figure 2. A typical Microsoft Access table from an FM relational database.

Entity handles and Xdata
If you know AutoCAD, you know that if you draw a closed polyline, it has an area that can be measured in square units (such as square metres) and a perimeter (that can be measured in metres). Imagine if you drew a closed polyline around each room on each floor in a building. If you measured all of those room areas manually and added them all together, you would end up with a good estimate of the room area of each floor. You could also put a closed polyline around the inside wall line of each floor to get a total floor area.

In FM terms, the polyline around the internal floor area is known as your Gross Internal Area (GIA). You could also put polylines around your staircases and lift shafts. These are known as Vertical Penetration Areas (VPA), but they are also classed as non-occupiable areas as you cannot put employees in them. Polylines can be put around your Service Areas (SA) such as boiler rooms and cleaners cupboards as well. These areas could also be manually added together. Assign an amount per square metre or square foot (i.e., $25 per square foot or however much your landlord is charging you) and you can now calculate how much each “space” is costing you. You can also start calculating exactly how effective your space management is by calculating how much Rentable Area (RA) you actually have. Just follow this equation using the abbreviations from the above paragraph:

RA = GIA-VPA-SA

If you are feeling really motivated, you could also manually calculate that as a percentage!

What we have just seen is how it used to be done before FM relational databases really kicked in. Manual calculations using a highlighter and a calculator are now a thing of the past. The FM system that you have purchased now does all that for you and more.

AutoCAD is, in fact, a “graphical” database. Everything in an AutoCAD drawing is unique. This includes your closed polylines mentioned above. All AutoCAD objects have what is known as an entity handle. This is a unique identifier for each object or, in database terms, its primary key. If you use the LIST command on any object in AutoCAD, the AutoCAD Text Window appears and lists the variables and attributes of that object, including its entity handle (listed as Handle in the Text Window). The entity handle is made up of a text string that can be up to 16 Hex digits. Every object that exists inside the DWG file will have a unique handle. There will never be duplicate handles within the same drawing file, just as there will never be duplicate primary keys in a relational database.

Figure 3. The AutoCAD Text Window with an entity handle of a room polyline highlighted.

The next step is to link your graphical inventory to your space inventory in the database and this (in true Disney fashion) is where the magic happens. Your FM system will do this for you! In your FM system, there will normally be a third-party application that resides in AutoCAD, allowing the extended entity data (Xdata) associated with the entity handle (handle, for short) to link to the associated record in the relational database. All of this unique information is there in the AutoCAD DWG file, ready to be linked and used by your FM system.

Figure 4. This diagram shows the relationship between entity handles and Xdata in the AutoCAD DWG file.

We have now covered how to link AutoCAD data to our database and vice-versa. This concludes part one of this series. In part two (June AUGI HotNews), we will look at FMDesktop, the FM system recently acquired by Autodesk.

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Submitted by Shaun Bryant, Director of STJ2 Consultants Limited, which provides AutoCAD and FM training and consultancy services. Shaun is currently Vice-Chairman of the Autodesk UK/Ireland Authorized Training Centre Advisory Board (ATCAB). He can be reached at shaun.bryant@stj2.com.