This page provides a step by step guide for landowners using OTISS for estate management.

1. Register with OTISS for a ‘Landowner’ account.
2. Create sites that describe the layout of your estate.
3. Do a baseline furniture survey.
4. Carry out the recommended maintenance work.
5. Use OTISS day-to-day for recording of jobs to be done
6. Plan a rolling furniture inspection programme and annual maintenance.
7. Use the reports, maps and data to help manage your estate furniture.

1. Register for an OTISS account

Free 30 day period to evaluate the OTISS features and services.

• First you must register with OTISS as a ‘Landowner’ account. This creates your ‘estate’ within the OTISS database. This account will be the main administrative account for your organisation.
• If you have staff that also need to use OTISS, then each one should register with OTISS as a ‘Employee’ account.
• From the Landowner account, you can grant your staff access by typing in their login/email address and selecting which level of access they require: ‘administrator’, ‘manager’, ‘viewer’ or ‘surveyor’.
• You can also use OTISS to manage your Tree Safety Programme.

2. Split the estate into several sites

OTISS lets you divide the estate into several ‘sites‘. A ‘site’ could be a park, a field, a groups of fields, a property, a car park – whatever you want it to be.

• Sites are used as convenient ways to manage the estate. Reports and data queries can be based on sites. Surveys are carried out on a per-site basis.
• The OTISS site record includes; description, location/address (e.g. for access) and contact information (e.g. key holders).
• OTISS provides online maps to show the positions of the sites and furniture. Future versions of OTISS will allow you to upload detailed site plans.

3. Initial Furniture Survey

An initial baseline survey is carried out to establish the number, location and basic details of the furniture within the property. Once you have created your initial sites, you create an OTISS ‘survey’ for each one and appoint the user(s) who will carry out the surveys.

• You (and your staff) can use either the OTISS website and/or the Tree Survey (Android) application to plot the positions of the funriture on the online maps.
• Alternatively, if you have existing spreadsheets, databases, KMLs or shapefiles with relevant asset data, we may be able to load these into OTISS. Please contact us for more information on what can be done.
• Many of the furniture inspection fields can be customised for your estate, see the furniture survey/inspection data stored by OTISS for each item.
• When the survey is complete, a report can be created to view all the recommended actions.
• By setting the survey(s) to the ‘closed’ state, your effectively lock the inspections from further changes.

4. Maintenance of the furniture

The recommendations from the survey will form the basis of your maintenance plans.

• OTISS provides a standard Work Schedule report containing all the recommendations. Alternatively you can download the data into Excel to construct your own report.

5. Day-to-day – unplanned maintenance and inspections

Unplanned events, such as storms, vandalism, wear and tear or building works can impact the condition of the estate furniture.

• Staff can access OTISS from their mobile phones (Android), from office and home PCs. This makes it easy for them to report an issue defect or to flag an item as ‘need to investigate‘.
• In addition to the pre-planned inspection and maintenance programme, a survey should be setup each year to catch the ‘unplanned’ incidents. The staff assigned to this survey can create/update a items’s records at any time and the results are visible immediately to the estate manager.

6. Planned Survey/Inspection Cycles

OTISS enables the estate manager to plan future surveys on particular sites (e.g. annual, bi-annual, etc). Typically, an entire site would be surveyed, but OTISS allows each furinture item to have a recommended inspection cycle, so those items coming up for inspection could be identified.

The landowner appoints a member of staff or an independent agent to carry out the survey. Only when a survey’s status is marked as ‘active’, can the appointed user(s) access the appropriate information and carry out the survey. When the survey is complete, the manager protects the data from further changes by marking the survey as ‘closed’.

7. Maps, Spreadsheets and Reports

• OTISS maintains an audit trail of all surveys and  inspections. Dates, names (staff and contractors), locations, descriptions, results etc. are all recorded.
• The inventory and inspection data can be viewed and updated from any Web browser. The spreadsheet page allows you to search and sort your data using multiple criteria. For example:
  • “show me all items on a particular site that need work doing on them”,
  • “show me all furniture that are overdue for their next inspection”,
  • “list all the signs and order them by age”.
• Reports can be created containing coloured charts, graphs and tables. Summary and Details reports and Work Schedules can be generated at any time.
• All the inspection data can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet. This can be useful for further detailed analyse or customised reporting.