In today’s world, it’s crucial for businesses to consider the importance of sustainability. As a society, we should always be thinking about how we can reduce our impact on the environment. This is especially true in the field of Drawing Management, where reducing paper waste is always a main concern.
Combatting Deforestation
We are proud to announce that the Drawing Specialists are leading the way in promoting sustainability in the Drawing Management industry. We believe that it’s important to always do our part in encouraging eco-friendly practices!
One of the ways we’re doing this is by planting a tree for every redraw project and every visit to our conference booth. We’ve also taken things a step further and are planting a tree every time someone logs into our Echo Drawing Management Software. These simple yet impactful actions help to combat deforestation and improve the environment, while also allowing us to give back to the planet in a tangible way.
Reduce your Environmental Impact
In addition to these efforts, we’re also committed to reducing our carbon footprint in other ways. For example, we’ve implemented measures to reduce waste and energy usage. We are constantly looking for new ways to reduce our environmental impact.
By choosing Echo for your next Drawing Management project, you’re not only making a statement about your values and commitment to the environment, but you’re also making a tangible difference in the world. And, with our advanced and user-friendly Echo Drawing Management Software, you can be confident that you’re getting the best possible solution for your organization.
In conclusion, promoting sustainability in the Drawing Management industry is crucial for the future of our planet. By taking action and making eco-friendly practices a priority, we can help to reduce our carbon footprint and create a more sustainable future for generations to come.
As the world increasingly focuses on reducing its carbon footprint and achieving net zero carbon emissions, the built environment has a critical role to play. Buildings are responsible for a significant portion of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. Therefore, finding ways to make these buildings more energy-efficient and sustainable is a key part of achieving net zero goals. One area where facilities managers can make a significant impact is in their approach to drawing management.
Drawing management is the process of organizing and maintaining architectural, electrical, and mechanical drawings for a building or complex. This includes creating, updating, and storing drawings, as well as ensuring they are accessible and accurate. In order to support net zero and sustainability goals, a comprehensive drawing management strategy should include the following elements:
1. Energy Efficiency Audits:
By conducting energy efficiency audits, facilities managers can identify areas where energy consumption can be reduced and make informed decisions about upgrades and retrofits. Accurate and up-to-date drawings are a critical component of these audits. They provide the information needed to understand the building’s systems and identify opportunities for improvement.
2. Sustainable Material Selection:
A comprehensive drawing management strategy can help facilities managers make informed decisions about the materials used in the building. This includes selecting sustainable and energy-efficient materials, such as insulation and HVAC systems. It can also mean tracking the lifecycle of these materials to ensure they are replaced as needed.
3. Building Information Modelling (BIM):
BIM is a digital representation of the building and its components. For example: electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems. By using BIM, facilities managers can better understand how these systems interact and identify opportunities for energy-efficient upgrades. BIM also makes it easier to collaborate with other stakeholders, including architects and engineers, to find ways to improve the building’s energy efficiency.
4. Green Building Certification:
Green building certification programs, such as LEED and BREEAM, provide a framework for assessing the sustainability of a building. A comprehensive drawing management strategy can help facilities managers achieve these certifications by providing the information and documentation needed to meet the certification requirements.
In conclusion, a comprehensive drawing management strategy is an essential part of achieving net zero and sustainability goals. By organizing and maintaining accurate and up-to-date drawings, facilities managers can make informed decisions about energy-efficient upgrades, sustainable material selection, and collaboration with other stakeholders. With the right approach, drawing management can play a critical role in achieving a more sustainable built environment and meeting the needs of a rapidly changing world.
Our customized Drawing Management Strategies make the transition into a paperless, eco-friendly facility even easier! Click here to speak with a Drawing Specialist about how DCM is right for your drawing needs.
In the world of facilities management (FM), having access to accurate and up-to-date information about a building’s physical components and systems is crucial. Maintaining its infrastructure and ensuring the safety of its occupants should always be top priority. For this reason, a Simplified Drawing Management Strategy can make all the difference.
A Simplified Drawing Management Strategy involves utilizing echo software and Baseline Master CAD Plans to manage and organize building information. This strategy can provide FM teams with a number of benefits, including an increase in productivity, improved collaboration, increased accuracy, and better decision making.
Efficiency:
Echo software provides a centralized platform for managing and organizing Baseline Master CAD Plans. This makes it easier for FM teams to access and update the drawings as needed, therefore increasing efficiency in the maintenance process.
Real-time updates:
The use of echo software and Baseline Master CAD Plans allows for real-time updates to the building’s information and design. As a result, it is easier for FM teams to keep track of changes and make necessary updates to their maintenance strategies.
Improved collaboration:
Echo software provides a platform for FM teams to collaborate and share information. Consequently, this allows them to work together on maintenance tasks and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Increased accuracy:
Baseline Master CAD Plans provide a clear and accurate representation of the building’s physical components, thus improving accuracy in maintenance activities.
Better decision making:
With access to updated and accurate information about the building and its systems, FM teams can make better informed decisions about maintenance activities. Then, they can prioritize tasks based on their importance.
In conclusion, a Simplified Drawing Management Strategy utilizing echo software and Baseline Master CAD Plans can provide FM teams with a comprehensive and efficient way to manage maintenance activities, leading to improved efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making. As technology continues to advance and buildings become increasingly complex, a Simplified Drawing Management Strategy will become increasingly important for FM teams to keep pace with the changing demands of their industry.
Book a discovery call today to learn more about how DCM can support your facility’s unique needs.
Why should you be a minimalist and adopt minimalist drawing management? Let’s face it: people like stuff. I like stuff, you like stuff. Stuff is great! And doesn’t minimalism mean getting rid of all your stuff? Well, not exactly. As much as people love having stuff, not all of our stuff is useful to keep around. At a certain point, too much stuff just adds to our stress and clutter. There’s a reason for the phrase, “if you haven’t used it in a year, get rid of it.”
A minimalist lifestyle is one where you find freedom by reducing the amount of unnecessary clutter in your life. It doesn’t mean disavowing all of your material possessions, but simplifying your lifestyle by removing the messes that you may be holding on to out of sheer force of habit.
You can even optimize your facility by adopting minimalist practices. One of the best places to start is with your drawing management! Minimalism may be the right choice if you’re feeling overwhelmed with drawing clutter, if you’re looking for fewer distractions, or if you’re looking to cut back on spending.
We’re the Drawing Specialists, and we’re here to help you implement the ideal Drawing Management Strategy for your facility. That can start with adopting minimalism into your facility!
Here are 4 ways to adopt minimalist Drawing Management in your facility:
1. Recognize that Paper is a Problem
We get it. It’s hard to let go. But all that paper isn’t doing you or your facility any favours. First of all, storage space isn’t cheap! Depending on your storage situation, you could have high monthly fees like rent, printing costs, security, and regular maintenance. These are fees that could be avoided if only you didn’t have all this pesky paper on hand. Plus, paper drawings also hinder your team’s productivity!
Paper documents don’t come with a simple, painless way of maintaining version control. This can lead to team members or contractors accidentally working off of outdated plans! Even if they don’t end up using outdated plans, it may take countless hours to find the latest version of the drawing your team needs. This is time that would be more effectively spent elsewhere, like doing the jobs you actually hired your team members for!
Paper drawings just aren’t efficient, and the stress they cause can take a toll on your team’s morale and productivity. It’s time to go the minimalist route.
2. Declutter by Losing the Paper and Going Digital
So, you’ve decided to get rid of your paper mess and go for a minimalist approach. Great! But where exactly do you start?
Well, the Drawing Specialists are here to help! With our hands-ondrawing service, we do the dirty work so you don’t have to. We will audit all of your hard copy drawings for you, ensuring you don’t have duplicates and obsolete ones on hand, and then upload them into echo, our drawing management software.
Your team will thank you for taking the minimalist approach and removing the stress of dealing with piles of paper documents from their lives. Plus, now that they can find drawings in seconds, your team will have freed up the time to work on the tasks you actually need them to do, instead of searching for drawings for hours.
3. Bring Out Your Drawings’ Potential by Implementing baseline
What could be better than having version-controlled, digital drawings that your team can find in seconds? Well, what if we could take the minimalist approach even further by providing your team with omni-disciplinary, layered Operational Master Drawings. These would allow your team members to view any disciplinary aspect of your facility, all in one drawing.
Our baseline Master CAD Plan service offers exactly that! By implementing baseline, you will have gone from having a messy drawing room full of paper clutter, to having a handful of digital, omni-disciplinary drawings that cover every aspect of your facility and can be found in seconds.
You will experience smaller and faster drawing management with the streamlined minimalism offer by baseline.
4. Equip Your Team with Minimalist Tools for Success
With your baseline Master CAD Drawings successfully in echo, and your paper drawing mess decluttered, all that’s left is to equip your team with these minimalist tools to aid their productivity.
With baseline drawings, you will have compressed years of your facility’s history into one set of master plans with all the disciplinary details needed to maintain your facility. Your team will be able to find all the critical data hidden between the walls in seconds, whether its architectural, mechanical, or electrical data. Plus, you will be armed with built-in processes to keep your drawings updated into the future and beyond!
Get Your Drawing Mess Under Control
Don’t hesitate with getting your drawing mess under control. Now is the time to start implementing minimalist drawing management and getting rid of unnecessary, stress-inducing clutter. Our team of certified Drawing Specialists has years of experience, and is ready to help set you up with a custom-tailored Drawing Management Strategy.
Book a discovery call today to learn more about how DCM can support your facility’s unique needs.
“This year I’ll figure out how to clean up my drawing room,” says the busy FM. Every year it’s on their list, but every year it gets bumped down each time some other project comes up. Well, a new year means a fresh start for resolutions that ended up being swept under the rug last year. And that goes for personal and professional resolutions. This is your year to get this project rolling!
It’s daunting when all your facility’s drawings and blueprints are stored in a chaotic mess of a basement or archives room. You want a fresh start, but where do you even start?
Well, we’re the Drawing Specialists, as named by your peers, and we’re here to help you get your drawing mess in order.
Here are 5 tips to clean up your drawing room in 2023:
Tip 1: Use Your Blueprint Space Efficiently
Are you making the best use of your storage space? You can bring some order to your drawing room chaos by making sure your drawings aren’t just stored haphazardly in boxes and on shelves. Use a category system to ensure drawings are stored in places that make sense to you and your team members. Your team will be able to more easily find them when they’re needed. You could save more time in the future by taking the time to sort through and categorize everything once.
Tip 2: Store Your Hard Copy Drawings Upright
One big mistake we’ve seen is seeing piles and piles of documents stored stacked on top of each other. This system may seem like a good way to use space on the surface, but stacks of paper aren’t efficient. They end up creating a stressful mess to sort through whenever you need something at the bottom of the pile.
Instead, you should be storing your documents upright. Going a step further, use labels on the ends or corners of each drawing that make it easy to tell what you’re looking at with a glance. With a system like this in place, you can pull drawings off a shelf like you would books at a library.
Tip 3: Control Your Paper Clutter with a Filing System
Drawing rooms often have tons of obsolete or redundant copies of drawings. This makes it hard to tell which version of a drawing is the most recent and updated. You may think you’ve found the most recent version of a drawing. But, whoops! It turns out the drawing you actually needed was buried in the next pile over. One of your team members put it back in the wrong spot! Working off an obsolete drawing by accident could end up wasting a lot of time and money. Talk about frustrating!
You need a strong filing system in place to ensure your paper clutter is kept manageable and organized. One simple way to ensure your team is always working from the most recent drawing is to use stickers in the corners of each drawing. A small green sticker can denote that a drawing is the most recent version. Then, a red sticker can be placed over it when a newer drawing is made.
Tip 4: Take the Plunge and Go Digital
So far, we’ve talked about ways to clean up your drawing room’s paper mess. But the best way of dealing with paper chaos is to eliminate paper altogether!
In fact, workers expect digital conveniences at their fingertips. To put it in perspective, it’s jarring for a worker to have their digital family photos automatically organized by facial recognition on their phone, but then go to work to use a dusty, 60-year-old filing cabinet to manage drawings and documents.
Storing your drawings digitally boosts productivity and ensures your drawings are safe from workplace disasters like floods or fires.
But how exactly should you go about applying digital transformation to your hard copy drawings? That brings us to…
Tip 5: Call in the Blueprint Experts
You could call a run-of-the-mill scanning house to technically get the job done. At least you’ll have a hard drive with all your drawings on it, and your paper mess will be successfully turned into a digital mess. That’s a step in the right direction, right?
Or you could call the Drawing Specialists to equip your facility with a single source of truth that helps your team members find any drawing of any discipline needed in seconds. We offer a range of services to custom-tailor the ideal Drawing Management Strategy for your facility.
In fact, we will do the dirty work with our hands-on drawing service and audit all of your hard copy drawings for you, saving you all the time and money of doing it in-house! We don’t just do the tasks above; we take it ten steps further by using the secret sauce we’ve developed after handling millions of drawings over our nearly two decades in the Drawing Management business.
The Drawing Specialists Will Help Clean Up Your Drawing Room
At DCM, we have the perfect team to help you with the process of cleaning up your drawing room and turning your paper mess into a simple-to-use, cloud-based digital archive. You can rest easy knowing you have our certified Drawing Specialists and years of experience creating custom-tailored Drawing Management Strategies for our clients on your side. We are confident that our team can provide you with the perfect solution to conquer your drawing room chaos. Book a discovery call today to learn more about how DCM can support your facility’s unique needs.
If You Think, “Dang, This Drawing Management Strategy is Expensive,” You’re Not Wrong!
Yeah, we could provide cheaper services. But cutting corners on your drawing management strategy just means losing out on your hard-earned cash in the long term. Your employees don’t need to be spending hours sorting through drawings in messy archives rooms. Why not have them, you know, do what you actually hired them for?
DCM Inc. costs more because we are the Drawing Specialists, (that is what your peers named us). Nobody else knows facility drawing management quite like we do. None of our alternatives or perceived competitors offer a comparable suite of services to our Simplified Drawing Management Strategy.
Our services cost more because we add clarity to your facility drawing situation by setting you up with a single source of truth. We work tirelessly to equip your employees with the means to find any drawing of any discipline needed in seconds.
Our software as a service costs more because it’s only one part of the custom-tailored strategy we offer Facilities Managers instead of a run-of-the-mill scanning house. We both know your facility’s health and wellbeing is worth it.
Yes, we could have taken some shortcuts and cut corners. We could hand you a hard drive full of scans and call it a day. We could sell you empty software. But if we did that, we couldn’t call ourselves the Drawing Specialists.
We Offer a Range of Services to Custom-Tailor the Ideal Drawing Management Strategy for Your Facility
Get Organized with phase 1: hands-on drawing service.
We do the dirty work and audit all your hard copy and/or digital engineering drawings.
Get Modernized with phase 2: echo Drawing Management Software.
You’ll be able to find any drawing you need in seconds using our cloud-based drawing management software.
Get Optimized with phase 3: baseline Master CAD Plan service.
With omni-disciplinary layered Operational Master Drawings, you can see view any disciplinary aspect of your facility in one drawing.
Standardizing happens in phase 4: maintain.
Accessible consulting services that ensure your drawings assets remain up-to-date to protect your investment.
Plus, with our partnership with One Tree Planted, we’ll plant a tree for every new user added to echo. We’re not just helping your facility go paperless. We want to go a step further by aiding reforestation around the globe!
Only the Drawing Specialists work closely as we do with you to create an ideal, customized drawing management strategy that suits your facility’s unique needs. Our services cost this much because we offer our clients the highest quality strategy for their drawing management needs available on the market.
Book a discovery call today to learn more about how a drawing management strategy can work for you.
The 2022 Awards of Excellence were held on Thursday, November 10th at the Pie Eyed Monk in Lindsay, Ontario. It was both humbling and inspiring to be in the presence of local businesses and service providers who have all made great strides in supporting our local economy.
At DCM Inc, we depend on our local team to run the production floor; scrub and filter data; write code; sell, market, and support our product; and own client success from software onboarding to training to retention. We have doubled in size this year after winning numerous global contracts! You can expect to see DCM Inc. grow as we settle into a bigger space in the City of Kawartha Lakes to facilitate our up-scaling and company growth.
We are the only company in the world to produce both a hands-on and SaaS strategy for drawing management that provides a multi-layer view of a facility’s floor-plan with stacked electrical, plumbing, and duct work schematics. We call these omni-disciplinary digital drawings our baselineMaster CAD Plans. This transparent view gives Facility Managers what they need to plan future renovations (by knowing what’s behind the walls!) and control disaster in emergencies (by finding shut off valves) all behind a single source of truth.
We are also the only company in the world to backup this powerful engineering drawing management technology with a full-suite of drawing management services. We turn hundreds of thousands of outdated building plans into accurate digital files that run facilities better and safer. We speed up drawing retrieval down to seconds, saving facilities thousands of hours in time and millions of dollars in preventable damage. Our team is local, and grew by 100% from 2021 to 2022. And now we’re expecting to double our team again in the next fiscal year! Thank you, LDCC, for recognizing DCM Inc. for Innovation Excellence. We look forward to showing even more innovation in the near future!
As Halloween creeps ever closer, stories about all sorts of ghosts and ghouls are on our minds. What terrors lurk in the dark recesses of old buildings? Canada is no stranger to these stories either, and is home to some pretty famous haunted Canadian facilities.
Here are three Canadian ghost stories to celebrate this spooky occasion!
1. St. Francis Xavier University
St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia is recognised as one of Canada’s best. Students in the university’s Gilmora Hall might have a story or two to tell you about a local ghost known as the Blue Nun.
Gilmora Hall was once a ladies’ college run by nuns. Legend has it that one of the nuns once fell in love with a priest, and they began a secret love affair. Overcome by her guilt, one day the nun threw herself off of the building’s balcony.
It is said her spirit now haunts her former residence of Gilmora Hall. But do not fear! Students and staff alike have concluded that the Blue Nun is a protective spirit! However, her counterpart, the Red Priest, is known to terrify and wreak havoc on students. It is best to stay out of his way whenever possible!
2. The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel
The Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta is one of Canada’s greatest places to stay. However, it is also said to be home to some pretty iconic spirits. Many have heard of their most famous, the Ghost Bride.
Legend says that on her wedding day, the Ghost Bride met her unfortunate demise. She is said to have fallen to her death down one of the hotel’s marble staircases. Since then, staff and guests have reported seeing her pacing the stairs or dancing in the ballroom, pining for that “first dance” she will never have with her husband. She is so well-known, in fact, that the Ghost Bride is even featured on her own commemorative stamp and coin!
3. The Hockey Hall of Fame
Hockey is the Canadian national pastime, and what most countries around the globe know us for! So it may be surprising to learn that the Hockey Hall of Fame, a beloved museum dedicated to the sport, was also the site of a devastating tragedy.
In the early 1990s, the site was a branch of the Bank of Montreal where a young lady known as Dorothea Mae Elliott worked as a teller. Legend tells that one day Dorothea, distraught over a love affair gone wrong, took her own life inside the building. Now, people who work in the building have reported seeing her ghost near the office or vaults. She is also known to turn lights on and off, and to open, close, and even lock doors!
Don’t Let Your Facility Be Haunted by Paper Drawings
Canadian architecture is fascinating for so many reasons, stories of ghosts and hauntings being only one! If you’re feeling brave, take a trip to one of these beautiful, historical locations. Even if you don’t have any ghostly encounters, you will not regret taking in the sights and enjoying what this country has to offer!
While you’re at it, don’t let your facility be haunted by the ghosts of ancient and decrepit paper drawings! Let the Drawing Specialists be your Ghostbusters and vacuum up your dreadful drawings into echo, our Drawing Management Software. Book a discovery call today to learn more!
Museums are fascinating places. They are shrines to art, knowledge, culture and more! So, It’s only fitting that the museums themselves are some of the most breathtaking structures the world offers. At DCM, we create a simplified facility drawing management strategy for organizing your engineering drawings, but even we are sometimes astounded by the architecture we see! Here are five museums with amazing architecture! They are so unique that we can’t help but wonder what the blueprints must look like.
1. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba was established in 2008. It held its opening ceremonies on September 19th, 2014. It was designed by architect Antoine Predock of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Predock had won an architectural competition amongst entries from 63 firms in 21 countries.
The Museum for Human Rights was the first project of this scale in Canada to have all teams involved using computer-modelled design and construction. It was designed with sustainability in mind. Its creators and maintenance staff have emphasized the importance of minimizing the museum’s environmental impact. One such sustainability measure is that the museum harvests rainwater for its air-conditioning and toilet-flushing systems. The museum also boasts that more than 50% of its construction waste was recycled or salvaged.
The building symbolizes humanity’s connection to Mother Earth with four stone “roots” at its base. The limestone mountain and “icy peak” are enveloped by what looks like the wings of a dove, encasing the building in a glowing beacon of hope. This is meant to reflect the hope its creators feel for the future of human rights education. They feel that stories of human rights should be accessible to all, and that they inspire the activists and revolutionaries of tomorrow! The Museum is located in the heartland of the Metis people. It is meant to bring people of all walks of life together in the pursuit of education and unity.
2. The Miho Museum
The Miho Museum in Kyoto, Japan opened in 1997. It houses Mihoko Koyama’s collection of Asian and Western antiques ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s. It is not only a museum, but the headquarters of Koyama’s newly founded religious group, Shinji Shumeikai. Their purpose is to advance heath, happiness, and harmony for all by spreading the teachings of Japanese spiritual leader Mokichi Okada.
Mihoko Koyama is described as a “Seeker of Beauty” and this is reflected in the museum’s location and architecture. It is located amid the magnificent mountain range of Shigaraki in the Shiga Prefecture and has been described as a “real world Shangri-La”. It was designed by I.M. Pei, also known for designing the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.
Pei was heavily inspired by the story The Peach Blossom Spring by Tao Yuanming. The Peach Blossom Spring is a fable about the discovery of an ethereal utopia where people live in harmony with nature, unaware of the outside world. A trip to this museum is meant to feel like exploring the idyllic village from this story.
3. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture is located in Washington, D.C. It was established in 2003 and opened its doors officially in 2016 with a ceremony led by Barack Obama. It is home to over 40,000 objects, although only about 3,500 are displayed at a given time. The museum was designed by the Freelon Group, Adjaye Associates, and the Davis Brody Bond. They had won a design competition among hundreds of architects and firms.
The Smithsonian website describes the motivation behind the design, saying, “the outer layer of the building, the Corona, draws on imagery from both African and American History, reaching toward the sky in an expression of faith, hope and resiliency. The three-tiered shape is inspired by the Yoruban Caryatid, a traditional wooden column that features a crown or corona at its top. The pattern of the exterior panels evokes the look of ornate 19th-century ironwork created by enslaved craftsmen in New Orleans and allows daylight to enter through dappled openings.”
This museum is a place to view the American story through an African American lens and to gain a new perspective. It promotes empathy between cultures, and the importance of not just cohabitating with one another but understanding each other on a deeper level. This concept will always be of great importance in America, and also in society as a whole!
4. The Louis Vuitton Foundation
The Louis Vuitton Foundation is a French art museum and cultural center located in Paris, France. It opened in 2014. It was designed by architect Frank Gehry to serve as a hub for creativity, emotion and contemplation. Its mission is to serve the public by making arts and culture from all over the world accessible to all, and to unite contemporary and historical art for an unforgettable museum experience.
The Foundation’s collection is mainly comprised of four categories: Contemplative, Pop, Expressionist, and Music & Sound. It features the works of a variety of artists, from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst.
The building flaunts a deconstructivist style, meaning to give the impression of fragmentation with an absence of harmony, continuity or symmetry. The Foundation’s “iceberg” blocks are meant to invoke the image of ship sails blowing in the wind. It features 11 different exhibition galleries with both permanent and temporary displays.
5. The Museum for Architectural Drawing
We at DCM firmly believe that architectural drawings are art. So, what better way to close this list than with a museum that exemplifies that? The Museum for Architectural Drawings in Berlin, Germany was founded by Sergei Tchoban in 2009. It opened for business in 2013. Its mission is to showcase the beauty of hand-drawn architectural drawings, and to foster the skills of talented young architects.
The Museum does this by displaying the countless priceless drawings collected by Tchoban and The Tchoban Foundation over the course of ten years. It also includes drawings Tchoban himself has drafted in his career of over 40 years. He considers the museum to be a project close to his heart and says it had been his dream for quite some time before its conception.
It was Tchoban’s hope that the collection could help him to reawaken an interest in hand-drawn architectural illustrations in an era more fixated on 3D, photorealistic renderings. The building was designed to look like a casually stacked pile of books. Its surface has been etched with architectural illustrations. This museum may just be the world’s best organized collection of engineering drawings!
Don’t Let Your Drawings Be Artifacts of the Past
If your engineering drawing collection is a little less than museum quality, The Drawing Specialists can help! Book a discovery call today to learn how we can help set you up with a simplified facility drawing management strategy for your facility’s unique needs, and find an accurate drawing in seconds!
At DCM Inc. we are also known as The Drawing Specialists. That’s why we’ve put together these drawing management tips to help make your facility the most efficient and effective it can be! Here are five drawing management tips to make facility management a breeze:
1. Convert Paper Drawings to Digital
Nothing is more inefficient than paper! That’s why companies of all sizes worldwide have major initiatives to go paperless. The problems with paper are even worse for industries that work with large amounts of technical drawings and architectural blueprints. Physical drawings storied in a drawings room can take countless hours of productivity to search through. They are also vulnerable to damage and wear!
Let the Drawing Specialists roll up our sleeves and do the dirty work for you!
Backups – Digital versions of your drawings are easy to store, backup, and keep safe. There’s no need to worry about losing drawings to water damage or other potential hazards.
Ease of Access – Searching through a paper jungle for a particular drawing can take countless hours. With echo, all your digital drawing assets are at your employees’ fingertips in seconds!
It’s Easy – With our redrawservice, it’s quick and affordable to convert your paper drawings of any size to AutoCAD, PDF, or any other digital format you require.
It’s Eco-Friendly – Once converted, recycle your old paper drawings and never deal with paper drawings again! Plus, we’re partnered with One Tree Planted to aid reforestation by planting a tree for every new echo user added to your echo software.
2. Check-in and Check-out for Change Control Record Management
Change control record management is important. This includes version numbers for each revision of an important document or drawing. However, there is more to change control than just adding a version number to each revision. A check-in and check-out function is essential to ensuring employees don’t unknowingly erase the work of another employee.
For example, let’s say Adam and Jane are two employees at the same company. Adam opens a document and spends two days with it open on his computer while making edits. On the second day, Jane also opens the same document to make edits. She is unaware that Adam is working on it too. Adam saves his changes first, making version 2 of the document. An hour later, Jane saves her changes and makes version 3, erasing Adam’s changes because her version was based on revisions she made to the original version 1 of the file. Adam’s two days of editing were lost!
A check-in and check-out feature prevents situations such as this from happening. Fortunately, echo is fitted with such a system. When a user is editing a document, a status indicator shows that the document is ‘checked out’ with a time stamp, username, and check out comment from the user. The same details are recorded when the document is checked back in. This feature ensures that document details are never unintentionally erased or overwritten by two users working on the document at the same time.
3. Use Metadata Points for Easy Searchability
If going paperless is the first step towards finding the drawings you need quickly and efficiently, the next step is to ensure all your new digitized drawings are effectively organized so you can find the one you need in seconds!
We use 10 to 20 metadata points to describe each drawing brought into echo. Some commonly used data points include: a unique ID, document discipline, building name, project name, project number, document status, creation date, and engineer/architect.
Once implemented, any drawing can be found in seconds using echo‘s advanced search wizard. You will never have to spend hours of productivity digging through a physical drawing mess again!
4. Hands-On Ensures Drawing Conversion Quality
No drawing conversion is 100% accurate when run through automated processes alone. Yet, this is where many of our competitors sign-off.
One measure of quality for drawing conversion is lossless and lossy conversions. Wikipedia defines a lossy data conversion method as one where converting data between one storage format and another displays data in a form that is “close enough” to be useful but may differ in some ways from the original.
A lossless conversion has zero loss of information, essentially being a perfect copy of the original. This is important for technical drawings and blueprints, where the finer details of a drawing can be significant.
Software alone cannot perform a trustworthy, complete drawing conversion. Without skilled human review and insight applied throughout the conversion process, automated software won’t be able to ensure a lossless conversion of your company’s data.
That’s where DCM Inc. comes in. Our redraw service uses our proprietary 8-point quality control process to ensure that each one of your drawings is fine-tuned. Drafting principles, CAD standards and your specifications are all taken into account. One of our Drawing Specialists will personally review the drawing to ensure it is complete and ready for immediate use without any compromises.
5. Create a Master CAD Plan
At most organizations, drawings are usually only created for specific projects: original construction, renovations, expansions, etc. Over a number of years, various versions of numerous drawings are created and revised as needed. This results in current and relevant information being difficult to locate and confirm.
Creating a baseline Master CAD Plan is the best way to compile all relevant and current information into a single CAD drawing. With baseline, all of the years of changes to your facility are layered into one operational drawing that shows where the plumbing, electrical, and other critical grids are behind the wall. These master CAD drawings are fully customizable to your specifications. Facility Leaders will shave down their team’s time looking for drawings to 15 seconds with our baseline Master CAD plans service.
Trust the Leading Drawing Management Company to Meet Your Facility’s Needs
We are the Drawing Specialists, and Facility Managers around the globe are trusting us to support them with our acclaimed Drawing Management Strategy. Our team would be happy to discuss how we could best serve your facility’s needs. Book a discovery call today for more information about echo from DCM Inc.
