ALL ABOARD THE VIRTUAL BUS

07 October 2008

New from Integrated fm is the ‘Virtual Bus’, a highly innovative, intranet-enabled feature within FM Locator’s Relocator module, designed to make it easier and quicker to manage people moves, where no furniture is involved, without the need for specialist CAD input.

Highly configurable, it is based on a simple and intuitive concept that enables the user to ‘drag and drop’ people to be moved from an image of the floor plate onto a virtual bus. When the destination floor plate image is opened the bus occupants are ‘disembarked’. The system then automatically populates the unoccupied desks, generating a colour coded move plan at the same time.

At this stage, the client can review the proposed distribution and make changes before approving the final layout. Once approved, the move plan is finalised and customised with any additional information, such as health and safety information, for use by furniture suppliers, IT sub-contractors etc. Crate labels are also printed with all relevant information, ready for distribution to staff.

The Virtual Bus feature also makes it very easy to select people to be moved and includes a search facility for searching by fast name, last name, department, division etc. The selected list can then be fine-tuned further to arrive at an optimised solution. Unlike real buses, there is no limit to the numbers of people that can be accommodated.

A key feature of the Virtual Bus is that no CAD skills are required – it can even work with a scanned image of the floor plan if required.