From Scan to Plan, making your move to space data management easy.

Do you have space within your facility that needs managing? If you struggle to keep your data up to date, have conflicting ownership of spaces, don’t know how well your space is utilised or just don’t know where to start, our five step guide will help you to get started.

Small Medium Enterprises want to focus on their business, and niggles about space can be a distraction. Maybe you don’t have capacity for a resource to manage your workspace. Maybe you are growing, or attendance in the office is changing. This often leads to conflicts when teams run out of space. On the flip side, wasted space hits the bottom line, and poorly maintained space hits staff wellbeing.

MASS are focussed on making the benefits of managing a common data environment as easy as possible.

Step 1 Survey your space

Traditionally, this has been done with a tape measure and manual drawings. Some institutions still do it this way, despite the availability of affordable technology to make this easier, quicker and more accurate. Imagine measuring a large room with a tape measure, on your own, it is cumbersome and can be inaccurate.

Hand held measuring devices, such as a Laser Distance Measurers improve the accuracy and speed by enabling you to place it on one wall and measure the distance to another. But you’ll still need to do something manual with the results, such as creating drawings in a software package like AutoCAD.

The easiest way that we have found is with a 2D scanner. The primary one we work with is a 360 degree laser and image scanner, driven by a mobile device. You simply place the device in a room, hit a button on an app, and the measurements are collected alongside images. The output is an initial floorplan with images that you can walk-through the facility. We survey around 400 m2 per hour, e.g. in a space that is partitioned into around 10 offices. The survey device costs under £3,000.

If you want to go to the top end of possibilities, a 3D scanner will collect similar space information and enable a 3D visualisation of your facility. As you might expect, these devices are tens of thousands of pounds and the software needs a specialist to get the best from them.

2 Create floorplans from your survey

Now let’s consider what you would do with these next.

If you have taken physical measurements, using a tape measure or laser device, you’ll likely to have a written record of the measurements and maybe sketched a drawing of the shape of spaces. Whilst you might find this useful for a one-off exercise of calculating how much available space you have, it is probably not much use beyond that, and it does not adapt to changes. Over time, buildings change, partitions move, team sizes change, and how space is used can change e.g. partitions, open plan, meeting, hot desking.

The next logical step is create drawings of the floorplans in a software package such as AutoCAD. These packages enable you to draw plans from scratch, including different layers to represent different components.

MASS have been experimenting with different technology devices, and have found a survey tool which collects the 2D data and associated images really easily. Once we have finished collecting these, we send them to the device provider and they create CAD software compatible floorplans, for around £50. We have scanned during the day, submitted these at the end of the day and had them back overnight. The output is a drawing file which you can edit, and a visual clickable walk-through of the facility.

3 Migrate your floorplans to a management system

You need drawings maintained in a software solution in order to manage your space in an ongoing way. But how do you extract information from the drawings? How do you determine how much space you have, and what types of space?

The most common way to do this is by creating a plugin or attaching the drawings to a Facilities Management system, making a floorplan the system can understand and using this to extract the reports required.

MASS have been experimenting again, and we’ve found that the 2D scanner files in step 2 are loadable directly in AutoCAD, and a Facilities Management solution called Gravity Workplace Enterprise has a plugin. Within the AutoCAD environment, this means that it is possible to ‘polyline’ the office spaces on the drawing, and add data to the spaces such as room names, types, owners. When you publish the results into Gravity, this creates building, floor and room assets containing that data.

The Gravity AutoCAD plugin enables two way information – if you make a change in either environment, it will populate the other. This might sound like you need specialist AutoCAD skills, but our office staff have tried this without any training, and it is very easy to pick up with a little bit of instruction, taking under an hour per 400m2.

4 Manage your data

With your data populated in a facilities management system such as Gravity, it is easy to run reports on how much space you have, by space type. This can be updated if spaces change by updating the drawings and repeating the process above.

If you want to change any of the data associated with the defined spaces, this will auto-populate back to the drawing.

Gravity enables you to distinguish and report on spaces by building, floor, room, type, size and owner. This provides the ability to quickly report on how much space you have, of which type and how much space is utilised.

With all of this data in place, you can build a workspace strategy – how to use your space, when to make changes, how to manage office attendance, and much more.

Space data is the lynchpin of a facilities management system, and can be used to build further functionality such as on-demand maintenance, planned maintenance, asset management, building data, energy management, workplace experience for users such as desk and room bookings, supply chains.

5 From scan to plan – as a project

In this blog we have talked about how to scan your facility, create floorplans, migrate these to a management system and manage your data. If this still sounds too much and you cannot commit resources away from your core business, MASS can do this for you. All you need to do is gives us physical access to your space and we will return you a facilities management system populated with your data, within just a few days. How easy is that? We’ll even give you free software licensing for your first year to manage your space.

If you’re not ready to take on someone to manage the data, or want help to develop a workspace strategy, MASS can do this for you too.

MASS have produced a video to demonstrate this as a seamless process in action.

Or visit our youtube channel to watch it here.