Category Archives: ARCHIBUS

One of the key strengths of ARCHIBUS as an integrated facilities management tool is its flexibility. The product offers a nearly limitless level of personalizations and customizations, allowing users to perform the simple (e.g. adding a new piece of data to a building) to the complex (adding entire new components and subsystems).

ARCHBUS’ flexibility is a tool, and like any tool it must be used carefully. Changes to an ARCHIBUS implementation generally fall into two categories:

Personalization – This involves minor changes to the system that do not require modifications or additions to system code. Examples of personalizations are:

• Adding, changing, and removing fields in forms
• Implementing custom roles and role based access
• Restricting report results to a certain subset of data
• Creating dashboards

Customization – This involves more substantial changes to the system, generally involving system code and the implementation of custom workflow rules, processes, and complex tasks. Examples include:

• Adding and removing steps in pre-existing ARCHIBUS workflows
• Integrating legacy products into the system
• Performing complex external system integrations

Personalizations are clearly the eaiser of the two to perform, and pose the fewest problems with respect to the system’s maintainability – particularly with respect to upgrades. Customizations, however, can easily pose significant problems if not performed carefully. Since these enhancements can involve changes to system binary code, core view files, internal system configurations and other key items, it is important to design and implement them intelligently.

We offer the following three bits of advice when it comes to ARCHIBUS customizations:

1. Increase your requirements time in your project plan by 25% – 50%.

Requirements will take longer to develop because you will want to review your business processes. In many cases, clients find that changing their own processes to match ARCHIBUS workflows (instead of the other way around) will save time and money not only in the software development process, but in the business processes themselves. ARCHIBUS processes and workflows are built upon industry best practices, and it could do your organization good to take advantage of that collective knowledge base.

2. Increase your design time in your project paln by 25% – 50%

If, after a requirements iteration you determine that customizations will indeed be necessary, allocate a very healthy amount of time to design. A rule of thumb is for project managers and developers is to estimate the time necessary to complete the design, then increase that number by at least 25%. The reason for the increase is that developers must not only perform the standard system design required for any enterprise software system, but they must also design for the remaining bullet points in this article.

3. Keep ARCHIBUS components and custom components seperate

Here lies the onion of why ARCHIBUS customizations can be so risky: Short project timelines lead to insufficient design time, which means that developers must implement customizations as quickly as possible. The quickest (but by no means the best) way to implement many customizations is to modify ARCHIBUS system code and weave customizations directly into the internal fabric of the system. In the short term, this is great: the project doesn’t take very long and the customer’s needs are met… until a year or two later when the client wants to upgrade the software. Now comes the pain.

When a new version of ARCHIBUS is released, its source code obviously isn’t going to contain your specific customizations. It’s going to be up to your developers to literally go line by line through all the customizations they made, and integrate them line-by-line into the new version’s code. Essentially, you’re doing all your customizations over again!

With sufficient design time, however, your developers can organize customizations into self-contained components that can be developed, deployed, and tested seperately from ARCHIBUS. Under this scenario, the upgrade process is much less labor intensive and error prone. Even better, the extra requirements and design time spent up front will actually pay for themselves during your first upgrade, because the upgrade takes so much less time.

So there you have it. Avoid significant customizations when possible – but when you must have them, allow plenty of time for your team to design a solution that will decouple core ARCHIBUS functionality and customizations. If you’d like more specifics, feel free to contact ARCHIBUS senior developer Chris Newman at cnewman@cpointe-inc.com.

In its continuing work with IRS’ implementation of ARCHIBUS, Counterpointe Solutions is preparing to roll out a suite of customized ARCHIBUS building delegation functionality to roughly a half dozen IRS sites across the country.

This multi-site building delegation implementation includes the import of ten of thousands of equipment, work order and work request procedures, maintenance task, craftsperson, part/tool units, in addition to extensive customizations of ARCHIBUS to maintain those units and tie them together.

For more information about ARCHIBUS building delegations and how Counterpointe can help you acheive your goals, email us at transform@cpointe-inc.com.