Level of detail

The IBM® Maximo® Real Estate and Facilities Strategic Facility Planning setup gives users a flexible range of data detail or simplification to suit the needs of an organization. There are trade-offs to consider when you consider a simpler approach versus collecting detailed data.

Although day to day space management is often at a detailed level, planning data typically must be aggregated at a higher level to simplify the planning process or to match up with the needs of organizational planning. Detailed data comes at the expense of more data entry and complexity. High-level data is simpler to manage and to use for planning, but generalized data can result in oversimplification and cause inaccuracies or result in overlooking important considerations.

Forecasting accuracy and uncertainty can be a good predictor of the accuracy and detail that is needed in planning data. Forecasting has some level of inaccuracy. For example, if forecasts can have a +/- 5% accuracy, there is not much value in using more detail to get an overall precision of 1%.

To help determine the level of detail you require, consider the following factors:

Locations

Identify and exclude buildings that are not in the scope of planning. For example, some companies exclude parking buildings, guard shacks, and recreational facilities during strategic facility planning setup to simplify analysis.

Organizations

Determine which planners and business unit contacts are responsible for business forecasts and business unit decisions and identify the processes these planners and business unit contacts use to determine appropriate organization level planning. Strategic facility planning for an organization can occur at any rolled up level in the organization hierarchy and is not required to be planned at the lowest level that is used in space allocations or the organization of the assigned person. For example, a 10 level deep organization hierarchy can be planned at level three, four, or five to get the granularity needed for planning and avoid what can be too much detail at lower levels.

Space Classes

Establish the planning granularity that is needed for space classes. For example, planning lab space at a consolidated level (level one) might be sufficient for planning detail when planning at lower levels that identify lab subclasses (level two) might have marginal value. Office space can be planned at level one with an overall density goal and estimating standard; however, the result would lack the ability to estimate space that is based on office standards, functional roles, or mobility factors. For some companies level one might be ideal, and for other companies level one can cause data inaccuracies and result in poor decisions.