The Best Way to Manage Drawings from Multiple Sources

It’s a challenge for Facility Managers to manage drawings and access those drawings from multiple departments across multiple facilities. Why? Because not everyone who handles drawings is careful about documenting changes or tagging the most recent version.

Not being careful creates version control issues. Fortunately, there are ways to prevent duplicates and control access across internal departments and external contractors.

Read on, Facility Manager friends!

How do facility managers manage drawings that are already digital?

When there’s no automated drawing management system in place, facility managers typically digitize drawings and place them in organized folders on a shared drive.

That sounds better than paper blueprints on shelves. 

It does. But it’s not better, really—bummer! The downfalls of this system are many, the biggest being a lack of accountability. Anyone can upload, download, use, modify, or even delete drawings using a folder system like Google Drive or DropBox. That creates accuracy issues since everyone will have a preferred way of filing drawing sets (by project name, building, floor, discipline, etc.). 

Digitized files saved on an isolated digital drive give employees too much access than a paper-based system that makes access a pain. Curbing access is better when it comes to duplication.

Duplicate files happen when employees can easily access as-built drawings and upload that drawing to different folders. In this situation, managers should implement no-save policies. The drawing should only be shared from the source, which should be the only instance of that drawing. Requiring a check-in check-out policy only works, however, when employees respect that policy. But managing accountability without automated tracking is hard.

Best intentions here often fail. 

Restricting access has proven, even in small facilities, problematic when there is more than one user. Plus, there’s no way to track drawing revisions. Sometimes it takes months or years to realize drawings are missing associated files (CAD) or lack a version everyone can view (PDF).

A shared drive with a folder “tree” doesn’t work for large engineering drawings with a long life cycle.  

What if the drawings aren’t digitized?

Paper engineering drawings present a new set of issues, the biggest being that paper is no longer an acceptable medium in the industry. If you’re still housing paper drawings, you’re getting left behind. Your peers have modernized, transforming deteriorating paper to digital. This is no longer a luxury in 2020. It is standard operations. 

So if you have paper drawings, plan to digitize them because you’re not cool anymore.

Until then, limit access to the archive room (someone must track drawings to maintain version control and markups) and make sure drawings are stored with the basic organization (i.e., disciplines, building, or project sets), preferably standardized across your entire drawing history. 

Consider the difference between your facility and a digitally-run facility when it comes to onsite work. 

In your paper-based facility, team members physically access the storage room to retrieve the hard copy and deliver that hard copy to the worksite. In many cases, the facility manager runs around gathering what the consultant needs. Then, if something’s missing or irrelevant, another trip to the archive is necessary. That’s a lot of running around. 

Conversely, a digital-based facility grants access to the required drawing from the Cloud’s online engineering drawing library. That drawing library stores the current master drawing with correct markups—archiving all previous versions. When the contractor uses the file, all internal staff still have access to the same drawing. Requests for changes made by the onsite contractor are sent to echo admin. The master is maintained. People notice how great your management skills are.

Most facility managers see the problems created by paper (like drawings that go missing or are returned but incorrectly filed). They decide to convert paper drawings to digital drawings. But sometimes, FMs opt to invest in a wide format scanner and hire students to do the scanning—and that’s a no-no on multiple levels. 

With an in-house scanner run by in-house staff, it’s easy to use the wrong scan settings, resulting in oversized files. Even if an in-house team uses the correct settings, they’re unlikely to properly understand the drawings throughout their history to categorize them accurately for file naming. And then, too many times, these new digital drawings are stored on a shared drive. 

What you’ve done is replicate the same problems you had with paper in digital format in an attempt to curb costs. But in the end, improper sorts, improper scans, and improper storage create a cost spiral. Sadness.

The point of going digital is to streamline searching for, sharing, and updating drawings. Improper scans, a lack of care when decided which documents supersede others, an improper nomenclature, and isolated servers create the same problems that existed with paper. 

The only advantage with digital done this way is that digital files aren’t affected by natural disasters and aging—provided there are backups. But, here again, improper backups add to the ball of wax, Stanley.

What’s the great big deal about oversized files, anyway?

Unnecessarily big files are always a problem because sharing, storing, and printing is cumbersome. This is especially true for engineering drawings because they’re already hi-res large files even at the barest requirements.

To give some perspective:

A client scanned drawings in-house in grayscale to achieve a high-quality image. However, they didn’t realize the scan created a photo image rather than a line drawing. The file size was more than 500x larger than necessary. 

The client couldn’t share it via email, it took a long time to load, and it took up a lot of space on the server, costing them more in storage use. When it came to printing the image, the whole page was shades of grey, not just the lines. That cost a lot in ink.

Okay, okay! So what’s the best way to manage drawings?

This is where things get straightforward, and stress begins to lift off Facility Manager foreheads across the country and around the world—so listen up!

There’s an easy answer to drawing management woes: pass the problem to drawing professionals. You can integrate automated drawing management software (DMS) into your system regardless if it’s paper-based or digital-based. The process is the same. It starts by sorting through your entire drawing history to discover the engineering drawings that stay (a small percentage of what you have now) and what drawings go (hundreds to thousands). You’re left with a tidy, accurate, modern set of drawings. And they’re all the right ones. 

Does that sound good to you?

Ask these starting point questions:

  • Are there multiple places to retrieve drawings?
  • How confident are you that 100% of your drawings are accurately identified?
  • Do you rely heavily on one person? 
  • Is there a bottleneck in the flow of sharing drawing information?
  • Are the drawings outdated?
  • Is time wasted locating and retrieving drawings?
  • Are drawing discussions overall a frustrating element of your existing process?

These problems won’t go away on their own. They only worsen since there are always new projects, and senior staff members with building knowledge will always retire. Managing the problem with a half-digital solution can create as many problems as exist with paper drawings.

Take active steps to address these issues and look at the benefits of a DMS. Before uploading drawings to a DMS, one set of accurate, optimized master drawings is defined. Master drawings can be easily found at the click of a button. 

Echo, by The Drawing Specialists, is an online digital library for large format engineering drawings that protects access and pulls up the right drawing for those with defined permissions in seconds (no matter where you are). 

Unlike traditional drawing management systems, echo is tailor-made for your facility and offers up-to-the-minute accuracy for your team. On-the-ball Facility Managers keep up with revised engineering drawings from various sources and manage many versions over a long life cycle like the pros they know they are.

Like, yeehaw, right? That sounds amazing.

It is. Read on.

echo app on mobile

How does the echo DMS work?

The Drawing Specialist’s echo app is a standalone SaaS product. It is ready to customize out of the box to your unique drawing needs. Before your drawings can upload to echo, however, these are the preliminary steps we take to ensure your DMS delivers the results you’re after:

  • Sort through all drawings to determine the most current version and relevant markups.
  • Merge and update your data with hard copies and electronic images.
  • Scan masters and include 25+ points of relevant data for each drawing to make drawings easy to find through a wide variety of search criteria.
  • Determine what’s required to update your CAD Plans.

Those four bullet points represent weeks and months of work! It takes a lot of resources to digitize your drawings properly. It requires additional equipment and specific skill sets to understand drawing life cycles and complete these processes, ranging from a drawing handler to a CAD technician. 

The best way to manage drawings from multiple sources and departments across multiple facilities is to hire The Drawing Specialists to do everything for you. 

All drawings are processed at our facility and delivered back to you in the echo DMS. All Masters will be accessible from any device, and all irrelevant drawings will be archived. Aside from the added efficiency, the immediate gain is space—you’ve eliminated hard copies. Make your old storage room a foosball room. And put an espresso machine in there. And a couch.

The process goes something like this:

  • Kick-off meeting: Capture all your specifications and customizations with The Drawing Specialists applying years of experience to make recommendations.
  • Ship drawings to The Drawing Specialists: We’ll audit the drawings and produce a set of masters to populate echo, our lightning-fast, powerful Drawing Management System (DMS).
  • Set up training: We will train your team to use the custom echo system. With a clean, modular design, you’ll see how easy it is to hit the ground running.

The Drawing Specialists dive in and get dirty. When finished, we’ll know your drawings better than veteran employees. That means we’re fully up to speed to support you moving forward, whatever questions you may have. We’re known for our hands-on approach that starts in your back room. 

Our goal is to help you bring your drawing history up-to-date as fast as possible and make it easy to manage it with a powerful database and user interface (UI) that is simple and intuitive. You’ll go from chaos to cheers in no time.  

And we dance.

Don’t Lose Your Drawing History When Frank Retires

Do you have an employee in your department who’s been there for as long as anyone remembers? Someone who knows everyone and can tell you how everything works? 

These employees are the go-to guys and gals. You rely on them.

But one day down the road, those dependable anchors will punch their last time clock card and retire. You’ll throw whiz banger parties for them and wish them endless hours of relaxing enjoyment. You’ll also wish to the heavens you hadn’t relied on them so heavily and centralized so much knowledge in a single staff member. The wise old employees, you realize too late, are the glue of the department. And that’s problematic when the department is facilities management. 

Let’s take a look at Frank, an invaluable facility manager. 

Frank has kept engineering drawings orderly for 30 years and can find any drawing in under half an hour at the home base facility. Drawings kept at other locations are similarly organized according to Frank’s tried and true filing system, but retrieving them means driving to that facility. But when Frank gets there, he can pull up the needed drawing—in the third drawer of large-format filing cabinet #20519 in aisle H of the basement—in under half an hour. Frank knows the drive time hurts his retrieval score so he’s been scanning small stacks of drawings to DVD for the last five years on “Lucille,” Frank’s clunky, marginal-resolution large-format scanner (whenever he finds time). That DVD stack holds down Frank’s window sill—alphabetized. Frank’s backup DVDs (of course) line a banker’s box in Frank’s attic. This has worked for 30 years. 

Rather, this worked well for 10 years, started to show signs of inefficacy in the 10 years after that, and hasn’t worked very well at all for the last decade. But Frank is the man and you don’t want to rock the boat.

But you have to.

Frank doesn’t need to feel the sting of replacement. Frank is still invaluable because he can best facilitate the digitization of his orderly drawings while working with drawing specialists. Ask Frank what happens when he retires, gets sick, or goes on a fly fishing vacation in Montana? What happens when any of the facilities Frank manages catches fire or floods? And what about the growing concern that, no matter how “fast” Frank is at finding the needed files, other team members and subcontractors wait around on Frank? Tell Frank his retiring gift to the facilities he’s managed his entire career is to get things well set up for the employees to whom he will pass his torch. Empower Frank!

Let’s talk about the importance of centralizing drawing history not in one person but in a digital database (in the Cloud).

How often do facilities lose track of their drawing history? 

Often. 

Worst-case scenarios are too common. Most facilities don’t fall under Frank’s fastidious filing format. It is common for a decentralized repository of engineering drawings to have little or no organization. 

This happens when someone like Frank tells Molly or Dan how he categorizes engineering drawings (by state then by alphabetical facility then by building then by floor then by trade then by year), but neither Molly nor Dan share Frank’s passion for file management… so they half-listen. Molly and Dan use apps on their smartphones to run their lives, and their eyes glaze over under the dim basement lighting as Frank regales them with stories of Boolean beginnings. 

There is a disconnect between generations. 

And so, there must be a new, sustainable system put in place for tracking and storing important drawings. This new system must prevent damage, monitor use, and track versions and markups. It’s devastating when entire drawing sets, representing many years of work, go missing or become unusable.

Even when drawings are digital, it can be challenging to find the right drawings or versions of drawings. As people access, use, and markup drawings from a shared drive, they upload multiple copies of different versions of the same drawings to the drive. Isolated servers are a nightmare. And duplicates are a nightmare on those isolated servers, especially when they aren’t the right version.

Effective facility management depends heavily on an organized drawing management system—centralized in the Cloud and accessed (from anywhere) with permission-based logins.

What does a streamlined drawing management system (DMS) look like?

It looks digital. 

It looks much smaller than it did yesterday, too (because hundreds to thousands of redundant drawings are identified and archived). And it looks clickable, searchable, and shareable. Storage is centralized, tracked, and secure.

But before anything at all happens to begin the game-changing overhaul that will revolutionize how you manage your engineering drawings, you need an audit. Whether paper-based or digital, an audit will weed out old or irrelevant drawings and identify the master architectural, mechanical, and electrical plans. 

This is harder than it sounds—it’s mind-numbing work.

Not even Frank could pull off this task alone. It’s too daunting. Engineering drawings require specific skills and tools for scanning, maintenance, and storage. They require scanning with wide format scanners using proper specifications to ensure manageable sizes. Once scanned, standardized file naming is essential for easy access, search, and retrieval today and 30 years from now.

Applying standards is the easy part.

The real challenge is managing the drawing history according to industry best practices and compliance regulations in a short timeframe over the long term. Emergencies can’t wait on Frank. Defined user roles and permissions gate access to specific files and lock out access when a file is in use to prevent duplication. Preventing duplication and working off one master drawing is what it’s all about. Multiple users must be prevented from making multiple versions of that file. Tracking which drawing is the master and who has it is almost impossible in a manual system. It’s automatic in a DMS.

No more confusion over different versions of a drawing. No more delays or unwise decisions based on inaccurate information. 

cad conversion services explained

How do Facility Managers effectively control drawing history?

Imagine knocking down a wall where there’s supposed to be a water pipe and finding nothing. Or worse, knocking down a wall where there was supposed to be no water pipes, but there were two. And now there’s a flood.

Accurate drawing identification is step one. Then, team members need instant access to the master, but that access must be gated to ensure drawings register chronological changes and don’t go missing. Instead of manually monitoring who has what file, you can use an automated drawing management system (DMS) like echo. Echo is a modern engineering drawing management app created by DCM The Drawing Specialists.

Echo is an online drawing library that allows team members to find the exact drawing they need from wherever they are for wherever the problem is happening for whomever is there onsite ready to solve that problem. Onsite access to engineering drawings stored in the Cloud gives answers in minutes remotely. No phone calls. No faxes. No driving blueprints hundreds of miles to the emergency site. Echo manages this entire process, requiring only internet connectivity and a smart device. Admins grant access to sub-contractors for a specified time frame and echo tracks what drawing went where, for how long, by whom, and why.

Automating your facilities’ drawing management removes the burden from a single employee. A modern control center adds speed to retrievability, accuracy to trackability, and savings to operability. Deciding to go digital is the best decision you can make to prevent wasted time searching for drawings and unlock instant team access to proactively gauge possible problems, plan ahead, and pull up drawings on the spot.

Give your team the lightning-fast tools they need to manage your drawing history when a senior member retires. Empower them with a DMS that curbs disasters with fast action. And set up your facility for the future with a Cloud-based, remotely accessed, digital engineering drawing library. 

DCM’s on-call experts have over 15 years of experience assisting facility and project managers with sorting, organizing, fixing, digitizing, and properly storing entire drawing histories, creating easy access in a few clicks that’s real-time updateable—and highly secure. 

If you have a Frank (or two) in your organization, it’s time to safeguard your drawing history before they go. Get in touch with us today to learn how!

Have you read our latest eBook?

2D vs 3D vs Baseline, what’s the difference?

Best Practices for Drawing Version Control

The booming online retail and eCommerce industries are slated to reach $4.9 trillion in 2021. The vast majority of the businesses attached to these industries rely heavily on manufacturing and physical warehouse facilities. Without these brick-and-mortar warehouses to store massive amounts of inventory, global eCommerce would collapse.  

Outside of retail, healthcare, education, athletics (stadiums), and hospitality are key industries that require a high level of facilities management—dedicating wings or, in some cases, entire floors to storing engineering drawings. Considering the size and prevalence of these industries, and the number of renovations, electrical upgrades, heating/cooling, and plumbing modifications they undergo annually, it’s critical to properly maintain these facilities.  

That boils down to updated, accurate facility blueprints and plans.

Facility managers know how important building plans are for proper maintenance. The problem is, facilities regularly undergo improvements, additions, removals, and rerouting of utilities. Without an engineering drawing management solution, it’s an endless manual filing process and facility managers struggle to find a way to manage this process efficiently and cost-effectively.

There’s also a human factor, not always evident, that can throw a wrench in streamlined engineering drawing management. Facility managers tend to be territorial about who has ownership of what drawings. And each owner has their own style for markups. This has obvious repercussions throughout the facility, the most perilous of which is that different players may not be working from the master version. 

As the years pass, renovations and additions accumulate and, without proper version control, staff ends up maintaining the facility with incomplete information. Best case scenario, this creates confusion. Worse case, it leads to safety, insurance, and compliance issues—which come with penalties and expensive fines. 

The answer? 

Control drawings in an accessible environment and organize them efficiently, making it fast and easy to search, find, and share the up-to-date, accurate version. 

How do you get your facility there? 

Here’s a look at best practices for drawing version control.

Assemble Your Drawing Plans

Sounds easy, but this is dirty work. Gather all drawings in one spot in order to begin the sorting process. This is where you’ll flag out of date drawings, duplicates, and irrelevant engineering drawings. The bonus to this time-consuming work is that you’ll often end up with only a fraction of your original drawings, which means you free up space and save money on storage resources. This is especially important if you’re managing multiple facilities in different locations.

Take for example one university that had seven campuses located hundreds of kilometres apart. Facilities management had a dedicated building, but the drawings for individual campuses were stored at each of the seven sites. Access to paper building plans required driving to individual campus locations—a waste of time and money. Drawings should be centralized.

Bring drawings together

  • Collect all drawings and set up a drawing room
  • Go through all the drawings and categorize them according to an agreed-upon naming system.
  • Establish a sign-in/out procedure. 
  • Anyone who accesses the drawings must detail any changes or modifications made to the drawings. This is especially important if there’s collaboration with offsite participants.

The same process applies to digital CAD drawings, with the exception that you’re organizing digital files (CDs, DVDs, USBs, flash drives, external hard drives—even floppies!) instead of paper plans. 

Audit the Drawing Plans

Once you have all the drawings organized, determine the go-to base building drawings according to revision status, e.g. construction, as-built, record.

Review any major projects that have happened over the years that challenge the integrity of the primary disciplines: Architectural, Mechanical, Electrical, and Structural. Determines which drawings are current and correct and which should be archived. This is no small task! A dedicated team will be required to sort, compare versions, and verify relevancy. This takes hundreds of hours depending on the scale of the facility, the number of years the drawings have been accumulating, and the state of the disorganization. 

Share drawing information with the appropriate team members and establish an audit trail that defines the relationship between drawings, secures the data, and complies with regulations.

Create Keymaps

Create a master set with keymaps to show where major projects have changed the integrity of the base drawings. If you’re managing multiple buildings, you should have the same number of keymap sets. Then create a standard markup procedure to keep the master set up to date with revisions and on-site findings.

Maintain a File Naming Protocol

Maintain your file naming protocol across the board. Establish a system for naming plans or files consistently using the appropriate revision control standards if necessary. If regulatory compliance isn’t an issue, it’s a good idea to use descriptive but unique names, especially when referring to different buildings or facilities. If you don’t have a drawing management solution in place, you’ll have to do this manually, so have clear guidelines on nomenclature (file naming) to avoid confusion.

nomenclature
file naming frustration

This would be a good time to implement CAD management software to establish an efficient way to monitor and manage future changes to building plans.

Consult with a Specialist

Apply these best practices for drawing version control: centralize drawings, audit the drawings, make keymaps, and establish a naming protocol. This will result in much fewer documents for clarity, productivity—and confidence. 

But you don’t have to take this daunting organizational mountain on yourself. Consult with a drawing management specialist to handle your drawing management needs from the backroom to audit to online drawing library. 

The Drawing Specialists install a robust system that’s effective in the long term. We put on gloves and masks and gather all your documents—from multiple facilities—where we carefully sort, purge, classify, digitize, fix, tag, and upload your drawings to a secure, fast, searchable online app that gates access to drawings and delivers what you need in a few clicks. 

Ask The Drawings Specialists for an in-depth review of your specific situation. We’ll advise how to control your drawing version history while saving time, energy, and your budget. 

An automated system is much more efficient and cost-effective than a manual system. The only dilemma now is deciding how quickly you want to end the headaches of a disorganized facility. The Drawing Specialist’s drawing management system ensures drawing version control, enhances collaboration, and gets you ready for 2021.

Trust The Drawing Specialists! We are a leading provider of digital-based engineering drawings. We’re real people who care about your facility. Contact us today!

echo vs Google Drive

Google Drive manages folders and syncs those folders across devices, making them shareable. Then there’s echo by DCM. Echo manages engineering drawings, preventing disorganized chaos with intuitive user controls, a powerful visual browser, a modular (by site, by floor, by discipline) search wizard, and a central command hub that supercharges what a Facility Manager can do. Oh, and it also syncs across devices making them shareable. 


echo vs Google Drive: a rocket to firecracker comparison

No doubt about it, Google offers a powerful suite of business tools under its flagship product, GSuite. For a tidy $25/month/user, Google Drive gives companies a spot in the Cloud to store corporate documents in standard folders and sync those files across work desktops, home laptops, and smartphones. Google’s got the “everyday task” market in the bag; it gives companies a way to organize documents, photos, spreadsheets, and slide decks in a secure, searchable way. 

That’s all lovely and well, but there are a few major problems with Google Drive that make it a bad choice for your engineering drawings:

  • Lacklustre search functionality
  • Limited visual display
  • Something we call modification freedom

What’s modification freedom? It’s the way Google lets end-users play with folder hierarchies (how folders are structured). 

That’s where things get messy.

It’s about preventing mess

The lifecycle of an engineering drawing spans decades. Keeping track of the right version over many years from many sources depends on preventing duplicates. Up-to-the-second real-time access only works if you pull the right version of a drawing and manage user access to it. 

Google Drive would let Jim store drawings the way he liked (by facility) before he retired as Facility Manager in 2012. But Jim didn’t organize drawings the same way Betty did in 2018 (by discipline). And Betty doesn’t organize drawings the same way Kumar will in 2025 (alphabetically). 

That kind of freewheeling user-preference permission causes the same sort of chaos that paper blueprints did in damp basements in 1967—which is exactly what Google Drive facilitates without any red flags. In fact, Google Drive builds duplicate functionality into the right-click menu that encourages multiple versions (then invites you to scroll down forever through version history to figure things out). 

So even if your team agrees on a file folder structure within Google Drive, and nails down a best practices policy, and even if every single team member sticks to that structure… how do you know for sure that the drawing you need is the right one? 

Google Drive stores and shares files. That’s it. It’s not a program that cares if someone duplicates a file then stores that copy two hierarchies down. And it has no idea if the drawing named Final_Version_2017_b is the working drawing that helps turn off the broken water main in the southwest zone of building #4 at the Idaho plant. Maybe the right drawing was actually Final_v2_2018 that didn’t even make it into Google Drive because Helen is a hoarder and she put that drawing on her desktop in a folder called “Make myself invaluable.”

You’re no further ahead with Google Drive than you were in that damp drawing room overloaded with musty-smelling blueprints.

Thankfully, there’s echo, by DCM

Echo is an engineering drawing library that won’t let you create chaos and brings up the right document every single time. 

Why is echo way better than Google Drive, exactly?

Because of the way echo restricts and permits control to guarantee accuracy.

Because of how echo displays your drawing in a dashboard. 

Because of how echo helps you find what you need—fast.

Echo Drawing Management Software Live on iphone

Better control over your drawings and better visual display

The view options in Google Drive are “list” and “grid.” That’s it. It’s easy to preview a file, but that preview is isolated. It doesn’t appear as part of a control hub. Preview with Google Drive is simply a zoom command. There’s also the problem with opening a drawing in Google Drive. Depending on the format of the drawing, clicking on it will jump you to an outside app. That means you may need to open a PDF viewer, or image software like Photoshop or Illustrator, or CAD programs like AutoCAD. Your drawings will live in multiple places. Multiple places mean multiple opportunities for hassle and, worse, for errors.

Echo, on the other hand, controls the information you see in one spot within a user-friendly visual browser. Your drawings appear as large thumbnails in rows allowing you to swipe left or right to visually browse your most popular drawings, recent drawings, and drawings in the categories you set up.

Buttons and options that border the drawing let you do any number of things, like request a CAD file or add a revision or share a drawing. From one mobile responsive intuitive interface, you can easily send an electrician a schematic of the 2019 renovation of the third floor of Building D in Michigan while you’re, say, out on a date (while your date chats about your reservation with the maître d’). Secret send! … and done.

“The online echo system that holds our drawings is easily searchable and readily usable by all the facilities staff in the Board. The support we continue to receive is excellent and we would highly recommend echo and support to other school Boards.”

—Lewis Morgulis from Durham Catholic District School Board

User permissions and the green checkmark—to keep things organized.

Echo is a gatekeeper. It stops chaos and supercharges accuracy. It grants different access permissions to different users. It restricts access to one user at a time. It makes sure real-time updates are saved and not overwritten by two people looking at the same drawing. Echo prevents duplicates, flags problems, and identifies the right drawing with a satisfying green checkmark.

That green checkmark gives you peace of mind. Simple but powerful, when you see the green checkmark on your drawing, you know you’re looking at the most up-to-date accurate version available. In fact, echo flags old drawings that are outdated. Google Drive doesn’t do that. And since your facility runs on the accuracy of your drawings, Google Drive doesn’t make the grade.

Search Wizard—site-level and modular 

The power of echo lies in its friendly user interface, its safeguards, and the way it helps you find what you’re looking for. Just like Google, you can search by keyword. But if that doesn’t work (because if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you probably don’t have the right keyword), you can tap into echo’s advanced search wizard functionality. 

Start by selecting the site—echo is location-based and handles multiple sites like buttah. Select your site in a single click. (In Google Drive, navigating to another site would mean clicking into a separate parent folder and drilling down through the folder hierarchies again—bummer.)

Then scroll through custom modules. Drill down by floor. Do you think the drawing you need is for the basement? Click basement. Now select the appropriate discipline. Do you need an architectural drawing or a mechanical drawing? Mechanical. Okay, click that. Is the drawing related to HVAC, plumbing, piping, or safety systems? HVAC it is. All relevant HVAC drawings for the basement of that building appear. 

There it is! Click to view that drawing—because that’s when the magic happens. 

Powerful dashboard—custom views for engineering drawings

Unlike Google Drive that provides a preview button (that greys everything else out), echo displays your drawing in a screen-sized preview with tools available around your drawing. What kind of tools

  • Verify it’s the right drawing with the green checkmark.
  • Review drawing data (available formats and revision history)
  • Request a CAD file
  • Zoom in to high-resolution detail
  • Add a comment
  • Star the drawing as a favourite
  • Download the drawing
  • Share the drawing
  • Create a report

Live support (from friendly folks)

Echo comes with amazing support and guidance. We aren’t a multi-billion dollar conglomerate like Google. Nope. We’re a North American firm built entirely around engineering drawing management. We’ve processed millions of drawings over the last XX years, which is long enough to know where the shortfalls exist in the world of drawing management. We filled one of those gaps with an online app that quickly became the most important tool in Facility Manager’s toolkits across North America, Europe, and now Australia.

Best in the business! I have been in FM management for 25 years and DCM gets it from a practical operational perspective because they listen to their clients.

 —Timothy Mackey from BGIS

Shameless plug

As leaders in the Drawing Management industry, DCM created echo engineering drawing management software to put all the things you need to do at your fingertips and prevent chaotic duplicates and unnecessary versions. You use echo to make sure you can’t do the things an ordinary storage drive lets you do. You use echo when you have hundreds or thousands—or millions—of large-format engineering drawings that call for a level of user-functionality that doesn’t exist in Google Drive. 

With echo, everything is visual, organized, secure, and searchable—from anywhere at any time on any device. 

You’re investing in tailor-made, drawing-specific functionality over and above a basic cookie-cutter file manager. You’re investing in accuracy delivered when you need it. 

Combine this functionality with DCM’s hands-on support and you have the most optimized digital library available today that gives you swipeable search-and-share functionality—and a backup crew when you need them.

DCM leads the way in all major industries including: healthcare, education, engineering, manufacturing, utilities, recreational, government, insurance and more. And our powerful cloud-based echo drawing library makes managing digital drawings faster and easier. Access the information you need the moment you need it.

4 Ways to Digitally Enable Facilities Managers Working Remotely

Summary

You’re a Facility Manager and you need access to drawings to do your job. But right now, those assets are locked away on-site at the facility. We can help! DCM serves Canada, the United States, and countries around the world with  industry-leading drawing conversion services in all major industries. Convert drawings in almost any format to AutoCAD quickly and cost-effectively. Want even more control and optimized efficiency? Our powerful cloud-based drawing management software makes managing your new high-quality digital drawings fast and easy. We’re here to help your remote team when they’re working miles apart, across the country, across national boundaries, or around the world.


The work world changed overnight on March 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 strain of the coronavirus a pandemic. Offices locked their doors and working remotely became imperative. Millions of people are now out of work and trillions of dollars are being thrown at the corporate machine to control damage and curb collapse.

For some companies, this sudden change away from the centre wasn’t a big transition. They had already adopted a partially- or fully-remote business process and were unexpectedly prepared to hit the ground running. But most of North America wasn’t set up that way. Most companies operated in-person, on-location, in analog. 

In the coming months, businesses are going to become more reliant than ever on their digital strategy. Without wanting to sound too alarmist, in many cases, it will be the deciding factor in whether they make it through the tough times ahead. —Forbes

company stance on remote working
would workers prefer to work remotely

Remote work has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last decade. Before COVID-19, roughly 5% of Canadians worked from home already. Almost 5 million Americans worked from home half the week (Global Workplace Analytics). And 70% of the world worked from home one day a week. At the end of 2019, the number of remote workers was projected to grow to as much as 66% by 2030 (Zapier). 

These numbers all pointed to a fast trend away from the office. But no one anticipated the kind of acceleration that would happen because of a virus. And not every company was ready.

state of remote work
66% workers will work from home by 2030

Solutions for facilities managers

With physical locations suddenly closed, that left many facilities managers scrambling. Without access to drawings, operations ground to a halt. Operations grinding to a halt is bad for business. 

But DCM can help. It’s time to get the gears turning again!

There is an affordable way for facilities managers to survive this crisis—and come out of it even more productive and profitable than before. The answer is a digital document management strategy designed by DCM. 

Below you’ll find a detailed list of services and tools that you need to keep up and running. Read on!

4 tools Facilities Managers need to work remotely—successfully:

1. A workspace

2. Document conversion (redraw) 

3. A Document Management System (DMS) 

4. Support

 

WORKSPACE

Let’s talk about the basics: working from home means you need a secure internet connection protected by a VPN and a firewall. You need a home computer, tablet, or at least a cell phone. Then you need to download tools that keep your employees talking and working through the same problems they had before the office shut down. Take a look at Monday, TeamWork, Asana, Slack, Google Hangouts, and Zoom for task management, file sharing, chat, and video conferencing. These apps are easy to download and use. And right now, many of these collaboration apps have provided their premium level for free. Get those tools in place and you’re back up. Yay!

work from home laptop on the couch

Then what?

Well, just because you’re up again, doesn’t mean you’re up and running. How do you run your business from a distance? By digitizing the drawings you need to work with.   

GET A FREE DRAWING CONVERSION!*

Contact us to see if you qualify for a free conversion. Attach your source files or samples, scans, PDF, JPEG, TIFF files in just about any format (good or poor quality drawings) by email (or upload to FTP). Send hard copies, prints, and scans by courier.

2. GET (PROPERLY) DIGITAL

Paper drawings and old digital drawings on degrading CDs have been a problem to productivity for a while. And now, a digital solution makes more sense than ever—because you can’t work without drawings. And you’re tired of searching for lost drawings. Get all your drawings into a digital format so they’re accessible and shareable. Digital doesn’t have to be AutoCAD, but it can be. Start by scanning paper to PDF.

3. REDRAW (CONVERT TO CAD)

DCM’s redraw service converts drawings to AutoCAD when you need to make edits (planning, gathering scaled measurements) to working document. Our powerful technology converts files in almost any format into a workable, digital CAD format. We’ve been helping facilities just like yours streamline their drawing situation for over 15 years and we do it in a way that delivers the highest quality at the most affordable price

Our process takes the hassle off your shoulders. It starts with a no-obligation chat with one of our amazing Account Managers. We estimate the time and conversion cost—as fast as 1-3 business days to get things rolling. From there, you send us your files (or we can come and get them!), we convert them, clean them up, add things like attributing, custom colours, and layers, then send them through our innovative 8-point quality control. The last step is to deliver your digital drawings.

Where we deliver those digital drawings is up to you.

A cloud drive works! But our Drawing Management Software, echo, works way better.

4. Echo DMS (Drawing Management Software)

Once your assets are digital, you are functional. You’ve organized and repaired the scattered, unstructured chaos. But now you have hundreds or even thousands of digital drawings to manage. Better than before, but not as streamlined as you could be. 

That’s why we built echo, our DMS digital library that makes finding the drawing you need almost effortless. We feed your company’s drawings into a shared software system so remote workers can continue from where they left off. Login authentication keeps drawings secure for your team in the shared cloud environment. Your digital drawings are searchable, shareable, and instantly updateable. Retrieve drawings as you need them, know they are the right version, and send them to the person waiting for them in seconds. Then create reports for even better management.

echo is tailor-made for your business. You need software that keeps up with engineering drawings coming in from many sources with revisions. You need a way to manage many versions over a long life-cycle. You need up-to-the-minute accuracy for your team.

If you’re a facility manager, the best way for you to bring your facility out of the chaos and into the future is by transforming your old process into a digital workflow and letting all of the bonuses that come with that transformation turn your stress into profits.

  • cost savings 
  • time savings
  • disaster prevention (fire, flood, or theft)
  • no more lost files
  • physical storage space reduction
  • improved customer satisfaction 
  • boost in employee morale
  • reduced errors.   
  • industry compliance 
  • drawing security (password protection and tracking)
stay home

5. Support (technical + friendly)

Once you have your DCM drawing management toolkit (digital drawings and software to manage them) you’re charging forward again—hooray!  

But you’re not used to working at home, are you? And that might mean you’re struggling with a different kind of stress. We care about that too!  Our account managers are here for you. Whether you have questions about drawing conversion, want a walk-through quickstart of our echo software, or you need some positive encouragement, please reach out. Isolation has a way of… well, making us all feel isolated. And communication helps combat that. Communication is also key for business continuity. DCM’s team of drawing professionals is dedicated to client success. We back our technological services with impeccable customer service—you’re never alone!

We’re here to keep your facility functioning at its best. Help your remote team when they’re working miles apart, in different provinces or states, across national boundaries, or around the world.

Whether you want paper drawings redrawn to digital, or an online drawing library to keep track of everything, DCM is your one-stop shop. We simplify your workload with a seamless and convenient process that ends in high-quality drawings at value pricing. We deliver hands-on perfection that’s hands-down the best on the market. That’s why we’re known as The Drawing Specialists. 

Contact us today to find out how we can help you right away. It starts with a conversation and a no-obligation quote.

DCM leads the way in all major industries including: healthcare, education, engineering, manufacturing, utilities, recreational, government, insurance and more. And our powerful cloud-based echo drawing library makes managing digital drawings faster and easier. Access the information you need the moment you need it.

Leave a Legacy

Modernize. Grow. Take the lead.

Leave a legacy.

In your twenties, you looked at your career as an open possibility toward greater things. You were idealistic and eagre. In your thirties, you moved upward and sometimes onward, trying out various roles for various companies. In your forties, you settled in and made some good strides. Maybe you directed some crucial projects or mentored the new wave of twentysomethings entering the workforce. You did a good job—or even a great job—of things, and you were proud of your accomplishments. 

But right around the 50-mark, you started asking yourself if it was enough? Did you do what you set out to do all those years ago? Did you make a difference? Had you self-actualized? When you go, will people notice that your contributions mattered?

Making an impact takes courage

Month over month, quarter after quarter, you pushed the needle up. You delivered positive results for your company. But doing a great job, though praise-worthy, isn’t something that will stand out years from now as a memorable thing. Because your results are individual. Your drive to succeed is of personal benefit. 

Legacy is bigger than one person. And it lasts beyond one person’s time.

Want to leave a legacy?

Be kind to your people. Treat your team well and invest in them. Empower them. When you enable your team to succeed, you create a rippling positive change; those who model your behaviour contribute to a virtuous cycle.

By caring about those around you, you create positive change for others so that others carry that torch into the future.

The most visible way to care about others is to fix a significant problem on their behalf. But fixing major problems takes courage. Many times, that problem is a process that doesn’t work. Slow processes create bottlenecks throughout your organization. And bottlenecks create cascades of stress throughout divisions. 

Streamlining workflows not only increases productivity, but it also reaches multiple levels of a workforce. It impacts many people. But streamlining workflows isn’t easy—transformative fixes seldom are. And yet, the fixes that matter most are the ones that create employee happiness. They decrease stress, save time, boost efficiency, and increase revenues.

Being the one who unclogs a jam of magnitude creates impact

Leaving a legacy means being the one who turns a giant flashing amber pause button into a stable green play button. But the decision to set things in motion for the better often gets pushed off. The simple reason is that the beginning is the hardest part. The noise of current-day urgent demands takes focus away from the future. But legacies happen when “how it can be” finds a place in the daily grind.

beginning is the hard part

The enormity of legacy

If you’re a facility manager and retirement is something you’ve started thinking about, your legacy can be to transform how your company manages its drawings.

Volume is usually the biggest initial stumbling block. You feel that there’s simply too much to tackle. But changing how you manage drawings doesn’t have to be a system you design from scratch. It doesn’t have to be one person handling thousands of pounds of paper. It doesn’t mean one person alone needs to find what’s missing. Because documents go missing over many years, hiding amid thousands of yards of square footage, on disconnected CPUs and dusty, locked-away CDs and DVDs. It comes off as too daunting to be worthwhile!

But it isn’t daunting. And it is worthwhile.

Transforming drawing management processes within a company is as easy as deciding to hire someone else to do it. Someone with decades of experience handling that very thing—from the beginning right through to the end. 

That someone is DCM. And we’re actually a great team of someones.

The beginning requires a hands-on accumulation of all assets. Our team of specialists tackles paper chaos and digital disorganization every day. This part is dirty work. But once all assets are centralized, digitization begins. That is a multi-step process that ends with all drawings in the right format in the right place, managed by a drawing library that’s searchable. 

The hard part—the one that garners praise at the end—is deciding to embark on this process by hiring drawing conversion professionals. It’s realizing that hiring a drawing management company to manage your drawings will pay back dividends immediately and for years to come, saving your company hundreds of thousands of dollars after you’re gone. What you leave behind is a cloud-based system that makes finding and sharing your facility’s engineering drawings a clickable affair that takes mere moments. 

That’s something everyone in an organization notices. That’s something that gets talked about by the water cooler years later—“Remember when we used to have to go to that dark room in the basement and sort through hundreds of rolls of blueprints?” 

employees who benefit from leaving a legacy

Your legacy is your gift to current and future team members. That gift is efficiency, ease-of-use, retrievability, and shareability of digitized documents. It’s lower stress, higher productivity, better decision-making, and more time to devote to future profit-generating goals.

The legacy you leave behind is one of modernization. So take charge! Make the call. Put your name on transformation and help your organization move into the future. 

Inspire your team, then pass the torch.

GET A FREE DRAWING CONVERSION!*

Contact us to see if you qualify for a free conversion. Attach your source files or samples, scans, PDF, JPEG, TIFF files in just about any format (good or poor quality drawings) by email (or upload to FTP). Send hard copies, prints, and scans by courier.

Benefits of Outsourcing to DCM

Five Reasons You Should Definitely Be Our CAD Buddy Today!

Here at DCM, we’re more than a little proud of how good we make our clients look. Our business relies on your trust that by outsourcing the conversion of drawings to AutoCAD, your business will thrive.

We’ll shout it from the rooftops: outsourcing rocks, and here’s why:

WE SAVE YOU VALUABLE TIME

Blueprints, and jpegs, and PDFs, oh my!

We know it can get a little overwhelming (not to mention time-consuming) getting all your plans converted to AutoCAD. Who wants to sift through those old, musty papers? Or dig out those CDs? Who wants to decipher that scribbly writing?

WE DO!

AutoCAD conversion doesn’t have to be painful. While you do what you do best, we’re here to do the rest: DCM’s Redraw Service saves you time (and gross visits to the basement storage area), and in the end what’s that?

It’s money.

Time is money.

Our Drawing Specialists deliver accurate digital files, ready for immediate use, for a fraction of the time and cost of doing them in-house.

You design. We redraw. You save. Win!

 

WE SAVE YOU ACTUAL CASH MONEY

We hear you… what’s the real cost of outsourcing?

Let’s cut straight to the chase: we know it’s a little intimidating outsourcing this stuff, but our team of real, live, amazingly talented humans are ready to answer any and all questions about the process to alleviate that loss of control feelings.

The reality is that you’ll save 75% or more by hiring DCM’s dream team to use our hands-on approach, creating master drawings that are easily stored and accessed, and will never smell like the back of your grandma Edith’s closet.

And we offer 60% off on multi-buys, too, so the more we work for you, the more you save. It’s pretty stellar, we know. 

WE BOOST YOUR EFFICIENCY

Sure, your staff can manage, and slowly convert plans, but it’s not their specialty. And while they do that, they’re neglecting their huge to-do lists. And here’s the thing: you can’t simply hire the caliber of drawing specialists DCM offers, with this kind of experience, which means you’ll have inefficiencies within your ranks – that’s not ok!

We’re here for you, project-by-project, minimizing time spent hiring, training, acclimating, and providing costly benefits to new employees. You’re able to laser focus your staff’s core skills, building a stronger team internally, as we support you from the back room bleachers. (Gooooo, team!)

WE HELP ALLEVIATE RISK WITH OUR DRAWING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Imagine the real value of your drawings, and how quickly that can all *poof* be gone. All those filing cabinets full of plans are a liability you cannot really afford. Water damage, fire, age… there is nothing that can protect your assets quite like digital files. You’ll no longer rely on Fred’s 30 years of tenure with the biz – instead, you’ll depend on slick new files accessible anywhere, any time. 

 

WE MAKE YOU LOOK GOOOOOOD

There’s little sexier than your amazing drawings turned digital. (No? Just us?)

Well, we promise you’ll be thrilled with the results. Let us help you make your clients oooh and aaah over editable, modifiable drawings from anywhere!

We support your design team, giving you the flexibility and access you need – with echo, you’re able to view, modify, and share plans on the fly, so there’s virtually no downtime!

What is the best way to prepare for a valuable employee’s retirement?

I know you’re wishing that “Bob” would take back his intention to retire and keep on working alongside you until his last breath. We know it’s hard to let go after decades of experience; it’s obvious there are things that just cannot be taught!

Bob deserves to kick back and breathe in retirement. Living the good life with a newspaper in his hand on an idle Monday morning. 

Sign up for the Drawing Specialists Blog

But before I give you the industry secrets, I must give you some facts.   

Approximately 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day? We both know they hold key management positions with tribal knowledge and secrets that they’ve built up over decades.

Also, it’s good to note a higher cycle of turnover is a new reality in the 21 century! 90% of millennials expect to stay in a position for less than three years. Yes, three years. Millennials move around a lot, and just when things are flowing smoothly, they get bored. Thank you, social media.  

How will your company manage the turnover of key positions every few years as opposed to every decade or two?

Here are seven ways to excel at extracting and storing valuable information from turnover to turnover.

Don’t Undervalue Older Staff

Long-time workers have built in routine knowledge about how to work efficiently, and they know their way around facilities like second nature. They understand what has worked in the past, what hasn’t worked, and the why’s of everything. 

Value your older workers by having open conversations with them about their history in the company and their plans moving forward. Applaud them on the knowledge of historic renovations, the discoveries they’ve made and all the pieces of the puzzles they have help solve.

Manage Cross-Generation Learning

Your aging employees need to know that it’s a part of their job to train the younger generation coming in. At the same time, younger workers need to know they are required to learn from their more experienced peers during this critical transition.

You can help facilitate cross-generational learning by noting that there is much to be learned from different perspectives, generations and work styles. Before training starts, communicate your expectations, which will minimize feelings of discrimination that older workers may feel as they begin to transition to retirement.

Avoid Knowledge Silos

Your long-time employees have formed relationships across the company, giving them a deeper understanding of how their job impacts someone else’s work in another area. Without a broader appreciation for other departmental roles, less experienced employees may cause delays in performance.

To avoid knowledge silos, encourage collaboration and accessibility through echo Drawing Management System to streamline, document, the process moving forward. Capture the information in a format that is transferable.

Cross-Train Employees

Cross-training is another remedy when long-time employees leave. By giving a new hire a three-month post in another department allows them hands-on experience in areas of the company unfamiliar to their job title.

Cross-training will prevent information silos gifting all new employees’ full access to the knowledge available.

Start the Knowledge Transfer Now

Knowledge transfers take time. Do not wait until two weeks before your older workers last day to start the process. Yikes.

The best thing you could do for your business during this critical time is to have your retiring worker share in this process. Have them be a part of the process of getting your facility drawings organized and into an echo Drawing Management System. By working together with a Drawing Specialist along with your older staff, we can capture the knowledge in their head. This allows for the future of your buildings to be organized, moving forward.

Another option is creating Baseline drawings. Baseline helps your older staff’s knowledge and history out of their heads and on one master drawing: securing your future today for tomorrow.

ics

Bringing in the human element to the conversation when dealing with your older staff’s retirement helps them feel appreciated. Remember, you are touching on this person’s livelihood, identity, and legacy. Please proceed with kindness and respect – we are all human. 

You Are Not Alone

Now that we know 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day and Millennial’s are cutting careers short, you can know with confidence you are not alone. It’s true, Facilities across the globe are managing the turnover of key positions every few years as opposed to every decade or two. But don’t worry! It’s figureoutable. DCM has affordable solutions to assist you with managing turnovers like a pro. 

Our goal is to improve your drawing management so profoundly; you can’t imagine going back to the old way. Which means, the timing is perfect since your old way is retiring!

Book a call with a Drawing Specialist for your free no-obligation plan for 2020.

Client Spotlight Q&A With Facility Manager Richard Driscoll

Manager of Facility Services: Richard Driscoll

It’s World FM (Facility Manager) week and to celebrate we are giving a few DCM Inc. clients the spotlight! Grab a coffee and learn more about Manager of Facility Services Richard Driscoll from Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board. He may have you daydreaming about a marathon.

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Tell us a bit about yourself?

I am an avid runner who has completed over 30 half marathons and 2 full marathons.  I enjoy golfing, camping, and hiking.

I have been married for 35 years and have 3 children all girls.  The 2 older girls are now teachers and the 3rd child is a social worker.

I have worked in Management for the last 22 years starting in the automotive industry, was the Manger of Facilities for Casino Rama before coming to the school board.

I worked at the Sudbury Catholic school board for 5 years and most recently have been working as the Facility Manager at the Peterborough Victoria Northhumberland Clarington Catholic District School board.

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When it comes to self-improvement, do you prefer to read books, listen to podcasts or take a course?

I have taken a number of self improvement courses over my career.

What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from home?

I had the opportunity to go to Jakarta, Indonesia.

Describe the biggest challenge you’ve faced when trying to reduce operational costs?

The cooperation and understanding from others for the reduction. 

Tell me how you organize, plan, and prioritize your work.

I use my calendar for scheduling all my work and use one note to keep notes of items happening through out the day.  The priority of the work is Health & Safety, Legislative requirements, Board requirements, School requirements.  All prepared through a 5-year capital plan.

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We finish the interview, and you step outside the office and find a lottery ticket that ends up winning $10 million. What would you do?

I would pay off my daughter’s student loans, buy them each a house and I would retire with an around the world cruise.

Thank you, Richard, for sharing your story and for letting us feature you in our client spotlight! If you’d like to be featured contact your account manager today! #We❤ToSupportFacilityManagers

For more client Testimonials click here.  

In the world of drawing management, keeping organized is key. There’s a lot you can do to put your organization at the front of document storage, retrieval, and updates. DCM is your drawing specialist. Let us help you Clean up your paper mess. 

Client Spotlight Q&A With Facility Manager Gordon Bartlett

Facility Manager: Gordon Bartlett

It’s World FM (Facility Manager) week and to celebrate we are giving a few DCM Inc. clients the spotlight! Grab a coffee and learn more about Facility Manager Gordon Bartlett from Peterborough Regional Health Centre.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

A seasoned FM professional with over 30 years related experience industrial, commercial and healthcare. Gordon is an avid musician (guitarist) with some professional experience in the 80’s. Married 30 years with 3 sons, all enrolled in post-secondary education. He’s recently moved into “cottage country” with plans to rekindle a long time love for fishing.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

It’s not always a competition.

To get ahead you have to cooperate.

What is your favorite quote?

“That’s all turnips” Vladimir to Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – after emptying his pockets looking for a carrot, there are none, and he points at the pile of turnips he has removed and says this…accept what we have because there is nothing better. Part of a much larger dialogue.

How would your co-workers describe you?

Intelligent, experienced. Sometimes, a bit of a goof.

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When people come to you for help, what do they usually want help with?

I fix things. Mechanical things can always be repaired. Though they think that they are just looking to expedite repairs or installations, other managers in the organization look to me for improvements to operations and processes

Gordon Bartlett, Manager Facilities, Facility Manager, Peterborough Regional Health Centre, DCM Review, DCM Client, DCM Inc. Testimony, facility manager Ontario, facility manager Review, facility manager Q&A, What does a facility manager do? Tools to support a facility managers job, facility manager week, May is facility manager week, What is FM - Definition of Facility Management, IFMA week, #WorldFMDay, #thankanFM, #IFMAWorldFMDay, FM Gratitude, facility manager gratitude, Drawing management Client, echo client,

We finish the interview, and you step outside the office and find a lottery ticket that ends up winning $10 million. What would you do?

In our office, this is often referred to as the “lottery bus.” I would take care of my family financially and then travel. 

Thank you, Gordon, for sharing your story and for letting us feature you in our client spotlight! If you’d like to be featured contact your account manager today! #We❤ToSupportFacilityManagers

For more client Testimonials click here.  

In the world of drawing management, keeping organized is key. There’s a lot you can do to put your organization at the front of document storage, retrieval, and updates. DCM is your drawing specialist. Let us help you Clean up your paper mess.