Equipment Booking System

Overview

The Equipment Booking System (EBS) is software which enables scientists to book laboratory and office equipment. Equipment is listed manually or as a dictionary extract from SAP and is categorised based on technology or speciality. Operators can book equipment in a number of ways. Manual booking requires all the parameters of date, time, location and equipment to be defined and entered. Auto booking requires a flexible timeframe, a location and a category to be entered and the system will find free equipment in that time frame. Scheduled maintenance events can be added for multiple pieces of equipment. Once a piece of equipment is booked it is not available for selection again in that timeframe. Bookings are automatically sent to the creator’s Outlook calendar to serve as reminders for the booking. Each action is reported in the audit trail. Utilisation for capacity planning and equipment lifecycle planning can be viewed using a variety of categories.

Features

  • Bookings and availability are displayed on a calendar reminiscent of those used by Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar to minimise training time
  • Ability to schedule maintenance for particular pieces of equipment and automatically notify any affected users.
  • ICS Calendar updates are sent automatically from the system,  allowing users to set their own reminders and notifications from Outlook or other email/calendar systems including GMail/Google Calendar & Exchange.
  • Active Directory integrated login and authentication