From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Areas

What is facilities management? - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Facilities Management: Areas

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What is facilities management?

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- [Voiceover] We're now in the first chapter of our AutoCAD Facilities Management 101 areas course. What we're going to look at is a little introduction to FM. FM is short for Facilities Management, and is obviously the abbreviated version of it. Doesn't mean frequency modulation, FM, that you listen to on the radio. Now, what we're looking at here is the 01_FM_Intro.dwg file. As I mentioned in the introductory videos, you can download that from your lynda.com exercise files, and follow along with the video accordingly. Now, what we've got is the ground floor of an insurance company building. It's an old residential building that the insurance company have purchased for their headquarters. If we zoom into the top left part of the building, just roll up on the wheel of the mouse and pan a little bit. You can see there, as we zoom in, that we've got a bathroom here with some sinks, some basins, and there's a shower there, toilet there, and there's a little sort of changing room in here. Now, the whole idea of having this residential building converted to an insurance company building is this office here, with its nice little fireplace, is going to be used by one of the principals of the company. When he has new clients coming in to get insurance for their big businesses and so on, they have a nice comfortable sort of residential feel to the office. Now, the whole idea of facilities management of this office is we can work out the areas of each room and specify a use of each room. When you calculate those areas, you then calculate what space is usable, what space you can't use, such as cupboards, you can't use those as office space, for example. The whole idea is that you're managing the space, you're looking at the rooms and the areas. That's what facilities management is all about. If I just double-click on the wheel and zoom extents again, the whole idea of looking at this building and its areas is that I can develop this drawing, calculate all of the areas in the drawing and then drop them into something like an AutoCAD table and put that on my drawing sheets. That way, I can then go to the clients, the insurance company, and say, "Right, each room is this area, and you're using this percentage of the area as usable space, and this percentage of the area as non-usable space." It then gives the company an idea of how much usable space they've got, and how effectively they can use those areas when they're working with their nice residential building that's been converted into their insurance company headquarters.

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