Can I add an object to a room later without having to rescan the entire room?
Yes. When you leave a room in the app, a message about unscanned objects will appear. Do not check the box next to the relevant object and leave the room.
How can I view the data for a specific inventoried object (e.g., a 180 cm desk from Vitra) so that I can see in which rooms this type of desk has been recorded?
Use the object search or search in the object list, match code list, or object type list.
When are the recorded objects displayed in the system?
The objects are available immediately after the data synchronization between the app and the FM portal. If you had already opened the list before the synchronization, you must refresh it once using the corresponding button at the bottom of the list.
What should I do if a barcode is missing from an object in the room? Can I delete it using the scanner and scan it again?
No. If a barcode is missing from an object, there could be two reasons. First, it may not have been inventoried yet; second, it’s possible that someone removed the label or it was lost in some other way. In both cases, the easiest solution is to re-enter the object and assign it a new inventory number. If the object is actually new, you’re done.
If the object previously had a different inventory number, the associated object is removed from that room by checking a box in the final report when leaving the room. At the end of the inventory, both objects appear under the same entry in the object registry, though one has no room association.
In this case, a decision must be made during the post-inventory processing regarding how to handle the old and new objects:
One option is to examine the old entry for specific data, transfer this data to the new object, and then delete the old object.
Transferring the new inventory number to the old object and deleting the new one is another option. In both cases, you must ensure that the mapping between the new and old objects is absolutely unique to avoid accidentally assigning incorrect data.
If a change has been made to an object, it is not automatically updated in the match code book. Is it possible to apply changes made to the match code book?
Yes. Matchcodes can be edited in the app. You can create or modify missing matchcodes on the go.
How can you ensure that no items are overlooked during an inventory?
There are a number of mechanisms that can be used to ensure that inventory staff forget as little as possible during the inventory.
The most important factor is thorough training and instruction for the team. Only when everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and how to proceed can the work be completed without any items being missed.
When entering the room, the team must first get an overview. Pay attention to the following points:
Are the workstations occupied, and are there people present in the room?
Are the cabinets locked, and could there possibly be anything of value inside them?
How many workstations are in the room, and roughly how many items should I expect?
Are there alcoves, corners hidden by cabinets, or confusing room layouts due to movable partitions?
What types of items are in the room at first glance?
In addition to these points, the system assists the employee in verifying their work. They perform the agreed-upon steps (attaching and scanning barcodes on new items, scanning items that already have barcodes) and then verify the number of scanned and unscanned items on the display of their mobile inventory device.
Before leaving the room and completing the room’s processing, the employee counts the objects in the room “by hand” and compares this number with the number of scanned objects in the app. If there is a discrepancy, they close out the room and start the room inspection again. If they encounter objects without barcodes during this process, they record them as usual. Following the rescan, they compare the number of counted and scanned items once again. The employee repeats this process until there is no longer any discrepancy.
How can I best prepare for the inventory? Can I optimize or speed up the process?
Inform your colleagues! A brief email stating the inventory period and explaining what will be done and why is very helpful to everyone conducting the inventory. Otherwise, a significant amount of time during the inventory will be spent on clarifications and explanations regarding the purpose of the process.
Ask your colleagues to keep rooms and items as accessible as possible and not to leave confidential documents lying around.
Arrange access times for critical areas well in advance and ask the relevant departments to assign a person to supervise and oversee the inventory team. Critical areas include, among others, Human Resources, Legal, the Works Council, and Management.
Organize the inventory of meeting and conference rooms. Ideally, schedule inventory time slots in blocks that can be completed efficiently. Reserve the relevant rooms for a short period. The eTASK.SmartReservation product can assist with this. Avoid conducting inventory in meeting rooms on the side to prevent having to interrupt the work midway if the room is needed.
Ensure free access to ancillary rooms such as cleaning rooms, storage areas, and any technical rooms that may be present. If necessary, arrange for an escort from property management or other authorized personnel.
How should inventory teams proceed when they need to inspect a room?
Team members should knock even if the doors are open, briefly state the reason for their visit, and then, if possible, refer to the informational email.
It is unavoidable that employees present will be disturbed. To minimize this disruption as much as possible, rooms should be processed workstation by workstation. Many employees use this time for a short break and leave the office.
Team members should ask those present to briefly clear their workspace—including the desk, chair, and rolling cabinet—to allow for work to be done. Crawling under desks where employees are sitting is not acceptable.
Recording – Working in a team or alone?
We recommend carrying out the work in teams of two people each. This way, one person can operate the scanner and apply barcodes, while the second person operates the app and enters the necessary data.
Is it possible to assign an object to no specific room?
You can create one or more fictitious rooms in the FM Portal that can be used later if an item is not to be assigned to a specific room. This may be the case, for example, if a company frequently receives deliveries but does not have a designated receiving area, though it does have an employee who manages incoming goods and knows exactly where the goods are located. Inventory management then ensures that the goods are recorded and can be ordered internally.
Creating Matchcodes: What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t?
In general, matchcodes must be defined before the inventory begins. Without a matchcode book, the inventory cannot start. The matchcode book should be as complete as possible, but the preparatory work should not aim to capture every existing object type. The effort required for this is disproportionate to the result. It should be possible to process 75–90% of the items using the matchcodes recorded in advance. Before the inventory can begin, the required item types must be created. Missing matchcodes will be created by the teams during the course of the inventory. Since matchcodes can be created on the go, the teams do not need to be provided with blank matchcodes to use for previously unknown items. If possible, a photo of the object should be taken. To facilitate the later assignment of photos, the time at which the photo was taken and the matchcode was recorded should be noted.
Prevent bloated matchcode lists by grouping similar objects—such as those that differ only in color—into a single matchcode. Distinguishing such characteristics often leads to making the matchcode book larger than it really needs to be.
Do not create a new match code for each “old” object, even if there may only be one of it. Instead, provide the inventory teams with a match code for “old” chairs / tables / cabinets. Most often, these are precisely the items that have escaped the scrap heap and are still serving well in a janitor’s closet, the maintenance office, or a utility room.
Group modular shelves of the same type together, even if they have different sizes. A shelf that can be disassembled and reassembled in any size cannot be accurately recorded from the outset, since the very possibility of disassembly means it can be mixed with other, similar shelves, resulting in one shelf having three labels while two others have none.
During an ongoing initial inventory, update the matchcode book daily as soon as the teams have submitted their data. Set aside time to add and correctly sort the match codes entered later, record the match code data, and upload photos. Check whether both teams happened to record the same object as a new match code. In such a case, the bulk edit feature can help you assign one team’s objects to the other team’s match code. The effort required for this is minimal.
Make sure the teams do not bring any manually entered matchcodes with them to the event. These would only be available to one team and would create more work later during the assignment process.
Organize your matchcodes. You can simply enter the matchcode as a sequential number. However, it makes sense to enhance the matchcode by cleverly assigning a few abbreviations. The matchcode book will ultimately be sorted by this, and it will be much easier in later work if all chairs can be found in the same place in the matchcode book.
The room barcode—confusion guaranteed?
To enable teams to identify which room objects are located in, the room’s barcode must be scanned before the room is added to the system. In 90% of cases, there is no dispute about where a barcode for the room should be placed. Classic locations here include the door sign, the door frame on the hinge side, or the door frame on the outside of the room.
As with all barcode labels, the rule here is that a barcode should ideally not be placed within the normal reach of hands to prevent premature fading caused by employee contact.
The remaining 10% of rooms, however, present a challenge—on the one hand to the creativity of the person applying the labels, and on the other to the inventory team’s ability to concentrate. For example, if you have a room that can only be reached through another office, the situation still seems straightforward. The door from the hallway to the first room gets that room’s barcode, and the door between the first and second offices gets the second room’s barcode.
In the event that a third room follows the second and this room is again connected to the hallway, the labeling becomes more difficult, but you can attach a barcode for the middle room to both doors. If a second “middle” room is added to this scenario, this becomes impossible. Now you would have to attach a barcode for each room to the connecting door between the middle rooms. No one would understand that anymore. Of course, this is a special case, but even these must be resolved clearly and, above all, simply.
Help your teams in this case by providing them with a floor plan of the floors they will be visiting. In such unclear cases, stick a barcode on the plan, outside the floor plan, next to the room. Also, make sure that any existing room numbers are visible on the plan.
Note: Rooms without a barcode can be searched for in the app using the room code or room name.
Where can I find the version numbers for my eTASK.Inventur app and my eTASK.FM portal?
Open the menu and tap Settings. A new window will open on the right side. Tap Options there. The version numbers are displayed here.
How many licenses do I still have available?
Under Control Panel - Portal Options - Hardware - Mobile Device Management - App Activations on Devices, you can see how many licenses are already activated. Under Control Panel - Portal Options - Plugins/Licenses - License Keys, you can see how many licenses are available to you in total.
Can I add an object to a room later without having to rescan the entire room?
Yes. When you leave a room in the app, a message about unscanned objects will appear. Do not check the box next to the relevant object and leave the room.
How can I view the data for an inventoried object (e.g., 180 cm desk by Vitra) individually so that I can see in which rooms this type of desk has been recorded?
Use the object search or search in the object list, match code list, or object type list.
When are the recorded objects displayed in the system?
The objects are available immediately after the data synchronization between the app and the FM portal. If you had already opened the list before the synchronization, you must refresh it once using the corresponding button at the bottom of the list.
What should I do if a barcode is missing from an object in the room? Can I delete it using the scanner and scan it again?
No. If a barcode is missing from an object, there could be two reasons. First, it may not have been inventoried yet; second, it’s possible that someone removed the label or it was lost in some other way. In both cases, the easiest solution is to re-enter the object and assign it a new inventory number. If the object is actually new, you’re done.
If the object previously had a different inventory number, the associated object is removed from that room by checking a box in the final report when leaving the room. At the end of the inventory, both objects appear under the same entry in the object registry, though one has no room association.
In this case, a decision must be made during the post-inventory processing regarding how to handle the old and new objects:
One option is to examine the old entry for specific data, transfer this data to the new object, and then delete the old object.
Transferring the new inventory number to the old object and deleting the new one is another option. In both cases, you must ensure that the mapping between the new and old objects is absolutely unique to avoid accidentally assigning incorrect data.
If a change has been made to an object, it is not automatically updated in the match code book. Is it possible to apply changes made to the match code book?
Yes. Matchcodes can be edited in the app. You can create or modify missing matchcodes on the go.
How can you ensure that no items are overlooked during an inventory?
There are a number of mechanisms that can be used to ensure that inventory staff forget as little as possible during the inventory.
The most important factor is thorough training and instruction for the team. Only when everyone knows exactly what is expected of them and how to proceed can the work be completed without any items being missed.
When entering the room, the team must first get an overview. Pay attention to the following points:
Are the workstations occupied, and are there people present in the room?
Are the cabinets locked, and could there possibly be anything of value inside them?
How many workstations are in the room, and roughly how many items should I expect?
Are there alcoves, corners hidden by cabinets, or confusing room layouts due to movable partitions?
What types of items are in the room at first glance?
In addition to these points, the system assists the employee in verifying their work. They perform the agreed-upon steps (attaching and scanning barcodes on new items, scanning items that already have barcodes) and then verify the number of scanned and unscanned items on the display of their mobile inventory device.
Before leaving the room and completing the room’s processing, the employee counts the objects in the room “by hand” and compares this number with the number of scanned objects in the app. If there is a discrepancy, they close out the room and start the room inspection again. If they encounter objects without barcodes during this process, they record them as usual. Following the rescan, they compare the number of counted and scanned items once again. The employee repeats this process until there is no longer any discrepancy.
How can I best prepare for the inventory? Can I optimize or speed up the process?
Inform your colleagues! A brief email stating the inventory period and explaining what will be done and why is very helpful to everyone conducting the inventory. Otherwise, a significant amount of time during the inventory will be spent on clarifications and explanations regarding the purpose of the process.
Ask your colleagues to keep rooms and items as accessible as possible and not to leave confidential documents lying around.
Arrange access times for critical areas well in advance and ask the relevant departments to assign a person to supervise and monitor the inventory team. Critical areas include, among others, Human Resources, Legal, the Works Council, and Executive Management.
Organize the inventory of meeting and conference rooms. Ideally, schedule the inventory periods in blocks that can be completed efficiently. Reserve the relevant rooms for a short period of time. The eTASK.SmartReservation product can assist with this. Avoid taking inventory of meeting rooms on the side to prevent having to interrupt the work in the middle of the process if the room is needed.
Ensure free access to ancillary rooms such as cleaning rooms, storage areas, and any technical rooms that may be present. If necessary, arrange for an escort from property management or other authorized personnel.
How should inventory teams proceed when they need to inspect a room?
Team members should knock even if the doors are open, briefly state the reason for their visit, and then, if possible, refer to the informational email.
It is unavoidable that employees present will be disturbed. To minimize this disruption as much as possible, rooms should be processed workstation by workstation. Many employees use this time for a short break and leave the office.
Team members should ask those present to briefly clear their workspace—including the desk, chair, and rolling cabinet—to allow for work to be done. Crawling under desks where employees are sitting is not acceptable.
Recording – Working in a team or alone?
We recommend carrying out the work in teams of two people each. This way, one person can operate the scanner and apply barcodes, while the second person operates the app and enters the necessary data.
Is it possible to assign an object to no specific room?
You can create one or more fictitious rooms in the FM Portal that can be used later if an item is not to be assigned to a specific room. This may be the case, for example, if a company frequently receives deliveries but does not have a designated receiving area, though it does have an employee who manages incoming goods and knows exactly where the goods are located. Inventory management then ensures that the goods are recorded and can be ordered internally.
Creating Matchcodes: What Makes Sense and What Doesn’t?
In general, matchcodes must be defined before the inventory begins. Without a matchcode book, the inventory cannot start. The matchcode book should be as complete as possible, but the preparatory work should not aim to capture every existing object type. The effort required for this is disproportionate to the result. It should be possible to process 75–90% of the items using the matchcodes recorded in advance. Before the inventory can begin, the required item types must be created. Missing matchcodes will be created by the teams during the course of the inventory. Since matchcodes can be created on the go, the teams do not need to be provided with blank matchcodes to use for previously unknown items. If possible, a photo of the object should be taken. To facilitate the later assignment of photos, the time at which the photo was taken and the matchcode was recorded should be noted.
Prevent bloated matchcode lists by grouping similar objects—such as those that differ only in color—into a single matchcode. Distinguishing such characteristics often leads to making the matchcode book larger than it really needs to be.
Do not create a new match code for each “old” object, even if there may only be one of it. Instead, provide the inventory teams with a match code for “old” chairs / tables / cabinets. Most often, these are precisely the items that have escaped the scrap heap and are still serving well in a janitor’s closet, the maintenance office, or a utility room.
Group modular shelves of the same type together, even if they have different sizes. A shelf that can be disassembled and reassembled in any size cannot be accurately recorded from the outset, since the very possibility of disassembly means it can be mixed with other, similar shelves, resulting in one shelf having three labels while two others have none.
During an ongoing initial inventory, update the match code book daily as soon as the teams have submitted their data. Set aside time to transfer and correctly sort the match codes entered later, record the match code data, and upload photos. Check whether both teams happened to record the same object as a new match code. In such a case, the bulk edit feature can help you assign one team’s objects to the other team’s match code. The effort required for this is minimal.
Make sure the teams do not bring any manually recorded matchcodes with them on the day. These would only be available to one team and would create more work later during the assignment process.
Organize your matchcodes. You can simply enter the matchcode as a sequential number. However, it makes sense to enhance the matchcode by cleverly assigning a few abbreviations. The matchcode book will ultimately be sorted by this, and it will be much easier in later work if all chairs can be found in the same place in the matchcode book.
The room barcode—confusion guaranteed?
To enable teams to identify which room objects are located in, the room’s barcode must be scanned before the room is added to the system. In 90% of cases, there is no dispute about where a barcode for the room should be placed. Classic locations here include the door sign, the door frame on the hinge side, or the door frame on the outside of the room.
As with all barcode labels, the rule here is that a barcode should ideally not be placed within the normal reach of hands to prevent premature fading caused by employee contact.
The remaining 10% of rooms, however, present a challenge—on the one hand to the creativity of the person applying the labels, and on the other to the inventory team’s ability to concentrate. For example, if you have a room that can only be reached through another office, the situation still seems straightforward. The door from the hallway to the first room gets that room’s barcode, and the door between the first and second offices gets the second room’s barcode.
In the event that a third room follows the second and this room is again connected to the hallway, the labeling becomes more difficult, but you can attach a barcode for the middle room to both doors. If a second “middle” room is added to this scenario, this becomes impossible. Now you would have to attach a barcode for each room to the connecting door between the middle rooms. No one would understand that anymore. Of course, this is a special case, but even these must be resolved clearly and, above all, simply.
Help your teams in this case by providing them with a floor plan of the floors they will be visiting. In such unclear cases, stick a barcode on the plan, outside the floor plan, next to the room. Also, make sure that any existing room numbers are visible on the plan.
Note: Rooms without a barcode can be searched for in the app using the room code or room name.
Where can I find the version numbers for my eTASK.Inventur app and my eTASK.FM portal?
Open the menu and tap Settings. A new window will open on the right side. Tap Options there. The version numbers are displayed here.
