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Department of Housing and Urban Development Keeps Its Own House in Order with ARCHIBUS Facilities Management Software ARCHIBUS helps HUD meet Stringent General Services Administration (GSA) Reporting Requirements for Data on Leases and Equipment | ||||||||||||||
January 7, 2008, Boston, Massachusetts — ARCHIBUS, Inc., the #1 developer worldwide of real estate, infrastructure and facilities management software, announces that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has deployed asset management applications from ARCHIBUS to manage over 1 million square feet of space and associated assets and leases. HUD relies on an ARCHIBUS-powered system called FIRMS (Facilities Integrated Resource Management System) to maintain defensible data on its space alterations projects, office equipment, and leased office space. With the accurate reports generated from this system, HUD easily meets many of the GSA’s stringent reporting requirements. Consolidated, Streamlined Information Nationwide FIRMS consists of several ARCHIBUS applications, including Space Management, Real Property & Lease Management, and Furniture & Equipment Management. The Web Overlay product is also used to extend FIRMS access to HUD field offices across the nation. Before FIRMS, this kind of information was kept on a scattered collection of paper-based and simple electronic spreadsheets, which had to be manually assimilated into a single database of record. In recent years, HUD’s churn rate has been high— about 60% — so it has used FIRMS to streamline all moves, adds, and changes. Meanwhile, the Real Property & Lease Management application is used to manage all of HUD’s approximately 120 leases. HUD must report detailed information on its space and real estate costs to GSA, the organization from which it rents its properties. On a monthly basis, HUD downloads electronic data files containing rent and expense data from GSA’s Rent on the Web website. After a quick import into FIRMS, HUD can review reports that break down rent costs and help analyze spending habits for each lease. These reports help HUD analyze its space requirements and rental costs. HUD also uses FIRMS to generate the rent summary data in the annual Exhibit 54 report, which GSA uses to refine its estimates of rental costs. Previously, HUD would spend a number of days or weeks collecting information and performing the calculations necessary to generate this summary data. With HUD’s lease data already in FIRMS, the system does the work and exports the results to an industry standard Microsoft Excel document in a matter of minutes. A FIRMS Grasp of Equipment Inventories Utilizing the Furniture & Equipment application, HUD tracks every piece of office equipment that is valued at over $1,000. The system tracks a piece of equipment’s entire lifecycle from cradle to grave — from the time of its purchase it to its disposal,” says Clarissa Stripling, Chief of the Property and Supply Branch at HUD. Bar code scanners are used to quickly create accurate inventories. “With FIRMS, we’ve increased the efficiency of the staff responsible for taking inventory,” says Dan Miller, a Project Manager at Pyramid Systems, Inc., an ARCHIBUS Business Partner working with HUD. “By implementing application features, such as pick-lists, property specialists work faster and the data collected has fewer errors.” The data these reports hold is valuable to many other areas of the organization. Agency personnel often prepare inventory reports at the request of the Department's Chief Financial Officer, for example. These reports show precisely what the agency has and the value of each piece. “These figures are reconciled with the General Ledger to ensure that every piece of equipment purchased by HUD is being tracked by FIRMS. We’ve created a three-way tie between procurement, accounting, and inventory,” adds Miller. In addition, HUD taps these inventory records to participate in a federal program that provides excess computers and equipment to needy schools. When HUD’s IT office determines that we have an excess of computer equipment, it can be donated to certified learning institutions. HUD can then generate a report from the Furniture & Equipment application to send to GSA, documenting annual donations. Nationwide Access Via the Web HUD is also cost-effectively extending information to other areas of the organization via a protected intranet. Currently about 150 people at over 100 different sites have access to the system, where they can enter changes to their inventory and space, considerably reducing HUD’s collective administrative burden. The agency has recently completed integrating its HR system with FIRMS and hopes to soon complete the implementation of two additional ARCHIBUS applications: Telecommunications & Cable Management and Building Operations Management. This is part of the agency’s long-range integration plan, of which FIRMS — and ARCHIBUS — are an essential part. About ARCHIBUS ARCHIBUS is the #1 global provider of real estate, infrastructure, and facilities management solutions and services with expenditures for ARCHIBUS-related products and services exceeding $1.7 Billion (USD). With ARCHIBUS, organizations of all sizes and their outsourcing partners can use a single, comprehensive, integrated solution to make informed strategic decisions that optimize return-on-investment, lower asset lifecycle costs, and increase enterprise-wide productivity and profitability. More than 4,000,000 ARCHIBUS users collectively manage over 5,000,000 properties, with organizations reporting facilities-related cost savings as high as 34%. With over 1,600 ARCHIBUS Business Partners, local and regional support worldwide is available in over 130 countries and in over two dozen languages. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, ARCHIBUS, Inc. has pioneered real estate, infrastructure and facilities management software technologies since 1982 - when it developed the world’s first integrated CAFM (computer-aided facilities management) system. For more information, visit www.archibus.com.
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