Design & Purchasing Software for Architects, Designers and FF&E Specifiers

FF&EZ is a tool for architects, interior designers and FF&E salespersons who wish to plan, organize and present design specifications for FF&E (furniture, fixtures & equipment).

You can use FF&EZ for everything from simple sales quotes to new construction projects, producing multiple documents in the most efficient way possible using a computer—without experiencing any of the drawbacks of word-processors and spreadsheets or dealing with the technical overhead of CAD-based approaches.

FF&EZ comes in two basic versions: Design and Design/Purchasing. The Design system can produce project or sales order documentation from budgeting through presentations, sales quotes and ordering lists, while Design/Purchasing adds the conversion of ordering lists into actual purchase orders, then tracks and invoices them. For companies with existing purchasing / accounting systems that want to import ordering data generated by FF&EZ, there is also the Design + Order Export option.

FF&EZ is used by firms in the United States, Canada, Europe and Africa to document FF&E projects on four continents. Project sizes range from small sales projects to new international hotels.

FF&EZ's power comes from a database framework in which the familiar parts of FF&E design and presentation work:

• Vendors
• Projects
• Project Areas
• Rooms and room types (within areas)
• Objects (finished FF&E)
• Component specifications

The parts of your design are created once and then linked together by picking them from the resulting lists, all controlled in the FF&E Worksheet. This means that, unlike spreadsheets where descriptive information must be copied (and later corrected) wherever it occurs, in FF&EZ you simply make a correction on the list that is the source of the information (such as a color or cost on a specification) and this change flows through the project.

FF&EZ's database is designed to handle the largest design projects, while special functions and shortcut features allow it to be used for simple quotes and sales orders. This gives you a tool that lets you start small if you need to, but with the ability to grow into projects of any size without having to switch between different software programs, especially if you later need to order replacements.

Although some approaches may calculate simple totals, they may require you to calculate total project quantities for each item across all room types. FF&EZ tracks all three quantities that can affect project totals:

• Quantity of objects in a room
• Quantity of related products used in an object (e.g., fabric needed for a chair)
• The room count (or mix) in repetitive building types like hotels

As you keep using FF&EZ, a major long-term advantage of the system becomes evident: Its ability to use pre-built (prototype) items and re-use data from previous work: With FF&EZ, you can:

• Clone (copy) entire projects to create new ones
• Clone rooms, objects and specifications within a project to create design variations without needless duplication or re-entry of the same data
• Import entire rooms, objects and specifications from other projects, including prototypes and templates you set up (you can build entire project skeletons in minutes, even for very unique designs).

The Design module organizes your FF&E data into familiar projects, areas and rooms, making it easy to manage and present in multiple formats and levels of detail. Click the image to see an overview and video introduction.

To the capabilities of the Design module, the Design/Purchasing version adds the ability to generate numbered purchase orders and track their status. Click the image to see an overview and video introduction.

Describes the combination of FF&EZ-Design with the Orders Export plug-in, used to export vendor-oriented ordering data from a design project. Click the image to see an overview of this additional cost option.