What Is the Firm Library in Acelab's Materials Hub?
The Firm Library is a digital, cloud-based library to store and organize your firm’s product standards. As a central location for the firm’s collective historical knowledge, it can be accessed, shared, and improved by the entire firm anytime and anywhere. Even better, materials and products can be organized by project type and include all relevant supporting information, images, inspirations, product reps, CAD details, cut sheets, project tags, and commentary about the actual experience with the product and vendors.
The firm library is the starting point to streamline the workflow for materials planning and selection for each new project, ensuring standardization and continuous improvement of the firm's material knowledge of new product innovations.
How Can the Firm Library Help You?
Easily find and update product standards
Standardize successful product selections across project teams
Increase the firm's innovation by adding new learnings about materials in a central, easily accessible location
Increase the productivity of remote teams that may not have immediate access to firm experts
Retain knowledge even when a collaborator leaves the firm
How Does the Firm Library Work?
The Firm Library is a special kind of Project in Acelab's Material Hub. Therefore, it essentially works like other projects.
It can be accessed from its own button in the left-side menu
ORFrom the Projects page, as it is displayed alongside other projects.
Like other projects, all products saved to the Firm Library are stored in Schedules, organized by category.
All of the Schedules functionalities (Views, Filters, Sort, Hide, etc) work in the Firm Library as they work in other projects.
How is the Firm Library Different From Other Projects?
The Firm Library already appears on your Project Page and left-side menu automatically. You do not have to create it, but you will need to set it up.
All team members who join your company in Acelab will have access to the Firm Library. Access to each project is handled separately.
The goal of the Firm Library is different than the goal of a project. While projects store products in consideration or selected for a particular project, the Firm Library will store materials the firm has considered/used before and want to retain knowledge about (either to reuse it, or to avoid it).
How to Get Started
There are two ways to get your Firm Library set up:
1) Materials Hub Concierge
If your firm is eligeble to join the Materials Hub Concierge program, a dedicated Acelab team will support your onboarding and implementation, including setting up the firm library for you. Eligibility to join Product Concierge is based on a set of criteria your firm must meet.
👉 To learn more and check your firm's eligibility, click here.
2) Self-Implementation
If your firm does not quality for Materials Hub Concierge, don't worry! You will certainly be able to take advantage of the Materials Hub. We will provide you the resources and guidance needed for you to implement your library at your own pace.
👉 To get started on the Self-Implementation process, follow the steps here.