Blog

The blog contains an assortment of useful posts. Some explain the ideas behind using a database to document specs. Others are detailed explanations of specific FF&EZ functions.

Blog Posts
A short history of the FF&EZ software system for architects, interior designers and FF&E specifiers.
For FF&E specifications, "home-grown" ingenuity has produced methods that often use some combination of word-processing and spreadsheets to collect and tabulate the FF&E data in a design project. However, databases offer far more power. This entry discusses the pros and cons of all three approaches.
FF&EZ’s Import and Clone commands can let you create an extraordinarily powerful, multi-level system of templates for use in your projects—even projects that are highly creative and unique designs. By making it easy to start interior design projects using your pre-built components—from mere "skeleton" specs to fully populated rooms and project sections—the software can save an enormous amount of time while ensuring that your project includes all needed design components. Here we will take a look at how those functions can do this.
FF&EZ's long pedigree in the hospitality industry has naturally led to it having a feature set that supports building types in which some or all parts are repetitive. This overview describes how a restaurant or retail company might use FF&EZ-Design or FF&EZ-Design/Purchasing for such things as documenting an existing or proposed facility as part of a business proposal or expansion plan.
The Clone and Import commands are two of the most powerful commands in FF&EZ. You can use them to populate a project with contents that range from specification templates to entire standard rooms to entire projects. Here we'll discuss how they work.
A common approach to preliminary budgeting uses a spreadsheet grid of FF&E items, room types and budgets to create a "ballpark" FF&E budget for a proposed building. This post discusses how you can accomplish the same objective with FF&EZ, but retain the ability to compare actual costs to the original budet.
FF&EZ includes a Pricing Tool that can be used to mark up, adjust and protect the sell prices of groups of specifications in a project. When pricing FF&E for sales, some designers or salespersons may set prices using a specific markup for certain types of products. Other people may simply set prices automatically with a project-wide markup (also entered on the project screen) while others may only set prices manually for each specification, adjusting them for psychological "attractiveness." No matter what approach you use, you will find that the pricing tool can make the task of managing prices much easier, including setting "psychological pricing."