Property Investment Planning - Real Estates is the largest fixed overhead for many organisations, yet is often the least closely managed. Even central and local government departments are now required to produce a plan that covers their portfolio, how it is currently being used and what they will need to invest in coming years.
ActivePlan's toolset allows building owners to gather disparate pools of information and view them as a single dataset to help produce an ongoing Property Investment Plan. Where funds are tight, this provides management with a strategic dashboard to fund the key projects and to respond quickly to changing circumstances, perhaps dispose of property with minimum impact on the personnel.

The database design of activeplan means that every detail of every property in a country or a continent can be accessed, starting with a map of the UK, drilling down to properties within a city, into a floor and down to an individual's desk.
activesurvey is an IT supported service, technology and process, that helps create and manage a property database creating a single coordinated view and presenting the information on the entire estate in a variety of ways to best suit individual's requirements - a detailed plan of the M&E, asbestos or H&S risk for an engineer, a coloured up departmental plan with furniture for a space planner or an estate-wide report of the letable space for the finance or the estates department.
Any surveying programme is a substantial investment so we have designed ActiveSurvey to minimize administration costs and maximize the value a surveyor can deliver when they are making the visit.

We start by reviewing any existing information as a desktop study, creating dynamic links where it is accurate and well maintained or enhancing/restructuring it where appropriate to facilitate intelligent links. Special tools allow administrators to take CAD drawings or scanned floor plans and convert them to intelligence spaces and objects within the SQL database, after which the task on ongoing maintenance and reporting is very simple and cost effective.
Having identified what additional information is required, ActiveSurvey assists with the planning and management of any audits and surveys, generating a package of information to each surveyor, including and intelligent floor plan against which to record results, in a format that ensures the information they capture is properly structured to feed back into the master database. This includes libraries of descriptions to make their findings consistent, a library of spaces that might be otherwise named differently (e.g. boiler house/plant room) and a library of work items that can be drawn upon to produce an instruction for remedial work.

Organising which surveyor is visiting which locations and providing local management with notification to expect a visit is a potentially time-consuming task so activesuryey has a range of features to manage this whole process, as well as taking the surveyor's suggestion for remedial work and providing the programme manager with the means to:

1) Grade the locations by priority/risk
2) Relate them to the available budget
3) Review associated programmes to avoid unnecessary spend
4) Select which ones should be undertaken immediately
5) Issue work orders to contractors
6) Generate progress reports to inform the client and management teams

In many buildings, room types and functional areas are fitted out in similar manner, so the person planning the survey can access a library of standard specifications and automatically generate room data sheets against which the surveyor can record his findings and produce a "gap analysis". While onsite, the surveyor is able to generate a gap analysis and recommend any necessary remedial actions, provide a budget cost and publish the completed survey to the Property Information Channel, the extranet or intranet server.

Features
Add intelligence to the source CAD and scanned drawings - Zoning tool that allows users to bring up a file in AutoCAD, identify a zone and save it to the activeplan database, where it will be registered, synchronised and issued a zone ID. This means that when the surveyor goes out to site and records his results against each zone, the integrity of the synchronisation back to the master file is assured. Importantly, it will also work with non-CAD data i.e. scanned (raster) images. If you need help with this data preparation, we can provide a service at a mutually agreed rate once we review the data and understand the scale and complexity of the task.

Issue - Create a file that can be issued to the surveyors and consolidated into the master database at the end of the survey so the risk to National Trust corporate is reduced.
Management and viewing - The browser-based application that allows named users (security) from the network, or from approved contractors and 3rd parties, to view floor plans and associated asbestos databases.

Management reports - as to which sites are scheduled, when and by whom and their progress
Budget control - the means for the surveyor to assign a budget to the remedial work required (if this is possible) and grading how urgent the task is
Global reporting - report across the whole portfolio of sites as if they were one, accessible by any authorised user by means of a web browser.

The property survey and works program can then be viewed in the master survey headlines panel

The property client has access to the full property surveys and associated data such as photographs, plans and programs of works.