There are several factors that should be considered when creating a site. This will help you understand how to organize physical locations and spaces where assets are stored.
Location
A location in Cheqroom is a physical place where equipment can be stored, managed, or used. This could be a room, building, department, or specific area within your organization. Locations help track where equipment is situated and manage inventory across different physical spaces.
Key Considerations
- Assets can be moved between locations
- Reservations and Check outs are filtered to a single location by default
- This can be overridden with the correct permissions
- Workspace admin have access to all locations in a workspace
- Reports are compiled across locations within a workspace
Custom Fields
Custom fields can be used to help with organization of items at a more granular level than locations. Shelf position or closet number is a good use case for custom fields.
- Custom fields can be used for filtering reservations and check outs
- Reservations workflows do not use custom fields natively. Custom fields are good for visibility, not guardrails
Decision Workflow:
Example Scenarios
Example 1: A University
A University uses Cheqroom to manage AV equipment for their digital media classes as well as expensive lab equipment for their biology majors. The AV equipment room and the lab supply room are in different buildings on the same campus. A student can be enrolled in both a biology lab and a digital media class at the same time. The University also has a satellite campus 3 hours away that offers a digital media class. The University Dean want visibility into equipment usage at both the main and satellite campus, but the two campuses never share equipment.
Recommendation
Create two workspaces, with multiple locations for the different departments
Workspace 1: Main Campus
- Location 1: AV Equipment
- Location 2: Biology Lab Equipment
Workspace 2: Satellite Campus
- Location 1: AV equipment
Reservations and Check-out are organized by location which helps keep the bio and AV equipment separate. But, students at the main campus can reserve both AV and Biology equipment if needed in separate reservations. The Dean can switch between workspaces to view reports across the two campuses. Equipment does not travel between campuses, and students cannot take classes at both campuses at the same time, so having separate workspace is useful for cleanliness.
Example 2: A Company
Company has 15 offices around the globe. 5 in US and Canada, 5 in the EU, and 5 in APAC. Equipment is shipped between the US and Canadian offices, but never between the EU and APAC offices. The EU offices use a different SSO protocol that the US based offices for GDPR reasons. Two of the US offices are in LA and right down the street from one another. Occasionally, event staff need to book a camera from LA office 1 and signage from LA office 2 for the same event on the same reservation.
Recommendation
Create three workspace, with 5 locations each.
Workspace 1: Company US and Canada
- Location 1: LA Office 1
- Location 2: LA Office 2
- Location 3: Montreal Office
- Location 4: NYC Office
- Location 4: Toronto Office
Workspace 2: Company EU
- Location 1: London
Workspace 3: Company APAC
This way, assets can be shared between regional offices that share equipment. Because the offices are staffed by different team members, having different locations within the workspace helps inventory management. Creating a single reservation with assets from multiple location is possible with overrides for the occasional event scenario mentioned above.