FOM: Features

Professional

FOM is not a general purpose calendar. FOM was specifically designed for the management of scientific instrumentation and resources, and has unique features that are difficult to implement on catch-all scheduling solutions.
FOM was designed and programmed by real facility managers who specialize in electron microscopy. When you talk with us, there will be fewer misunderstandings and technical language barriers, compared to support offered by software companies or instrument vendors.
FOM is written in Java and uses the Microsoft SQL engine, so it is web-scale, and highly modularized to make it run quickly while still being easy to expand and customize to meet your facility's specific, unique needs.
FOM has no artificial limits on the number of resources, users, reservations, consumables, holidays, etc, for any of our license levels. There is never a good technical reason to charge more for more database rows. We do not charge based on the size or revenue of your facility, and our pricing is nondiscriminatory, transparent, and public.

FOM was designed in 2002 and has since been helping the management of more than 150 universities and national laboratories in the United States alone.
At Nanyang Technological University, one single FOM server is used to manage shared resources in 58 schools and 102 core facilities all over the campus.
FOM keeps accurate accounts of activity and instrument usage, including easily auditable logs of actual usage time versus reserved time. Reports can be downloaded fully automatically with a single click by any managers with the permission to, and custom reports can have any format and report on any data in the system.
FOM has a clear and concise user role structure: System admin, Facility admin, Instrument manager, Supervisor, and User. Every user role has its own privileges.
FOM database can be automatically backed up regularly, automatically, and seamlessly with the integrated internal backup module.

FOM has many different and special settings for schedules and fee structures, which are able to cover edge cases that would otherwise cause headaches. For each instrument, more than 50 parameters and settings are offered and thoroughly documented.
FOM can be configured to administer both service-oriented core laboratories and calendar-based instrumentation centers.
FOM provides fairly complicated yet very intuitive and flexible rules to validate users' financial accounts, and works seamlessly with HRMS software such as PeopleSoft and Workday.
Managers have complete control of usage records usable without technical database skills. Administrative actions like manual insertion of service records, modification of user records, or batch imports of many usage records from other databases are all possible through intuitive user interfaces and customizations.

Any and all parts of the FOM system can be customized, including its user interfaces, business processes, and even our hardware modules. Customizations take an average of 4-5 business days to complete, and are priced hourly by design and programming time.
Typical customizations include institutional Single Sign On integration, financial account number validation, special billing and reporting formats, and special procedures.
FOM can be configured for both service-oriented core laboratories and calendar-based instrumentation centers, with unique options for each of the workflows.
Customization can be done at system level, facility level, and individual instrument level.
Four different license types available, based on what features you need. Click here to see the four license types.