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.
No one knows when an emergency will take place. From a technical issue to a building fire, these scenarios can compromise business operations and the safety of everyone. This is where the importance of auditing buildings comes in.
As a facility manager, engineer, or architect, the health and safety of everyone around is crucial for success. Are you someone who manages a building? Then you need to conduct safety audits to assess practices as well as determine how to make your environment more efficient and safer.
Safety audits help reduce the risk of accidents by establishing security procedures. Understanding the importance of these standards and the basis of life safety compliance is essential for ongoing success.
Why Auditing Buildings is Necessary
Building managers should ensure their facility complies with the necessary safety measures. When it comes to analyzing your building to create a holistic safety solution, audits are crucial. But, they’re not usually considered this way.
If the term ‘audit’ entreatsa variety of clipboards, interrogations, as well as inspections, you’re expecting the worst or had terrible experiences.
Safety audits are the key to determining the current situation of your safety performance and where it should be. Safety audits shouldn’t be a policing process. So, consider them a positive learning avenue to improving your team’s safety.
Building audits examine the safety and integrity of your industrial or commercial buildings and premises. They also identify and solve building safety-related risks, enabling you to ensure appropriate working conditions.
However, it doesn’t end there.
Auditing buildings unravel more than what is going wrong. It identifies risks in the building, including the levels of those risks.
Setting up an audit system also protects workers from issues ranging from accidents and illnesses. It motivates workers and makes them understand that their well-being is secure.
A severe health and safety incident could result in disapproving publicity that impedes progress. Thus, a well-conducted safety audit can protect an organization’s assets.
Auditing buildings identify weaknesses and strengths in safety procedures and processes. It also assesses if an organization and its safety program follow safety standards.
Through building audits, companies can ensure adequate resources devoted to safety as well as make recommendations for improvements.
How to Conduct a Proper Life Safety Audit?
Consider the following steps when performing a building safety audit:
1. Choose Your Audit Team
Choosing a team of experts to access the building environment is the first step toward performing a safety audit. Some companies may assign internal employees to perform the audit or hire a consultant to assemblean objective outlook. Irrespective of who you want to use, it’s crucial for workers to assess each other’s settings to prevent biased results.
After assembling your audit team, find out if they understand the standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This will give them the understandingto identify safe practices and building hazards.
2. Get Ready for the Audit
Developing a checklist and reviewing the company’s safety protocols may benefit the audit team. The checklist recognizesareas requiring more significant inspection. Knowing how the building’s current performancemeasures against the organization’s expectations is necessary. Safety audit preparations could also involve assigning tasks to particular team members.
3. Visit the Building
Another step toward performing a building safety audit is visiting the building you want to evaluate. While taking a walk-through, it’s best to consider the following factors:
Equipment placement: Review where they place equipment to find out if it’s accessible and appropriately stored.
Lighting: Check the room lighting to see if it’s visible for people to view their surroundings. You can test the intensity of HID lamps in a room or check if there are good light bulbs.
Signage: Check for signs that warn people of hazardous materials and offer close directions on the operation of machinery. Some employees may already have the necessary training. But, placing signs around buildings could exemplify a company’s safety culture or reinforce safety protocols.
4. Observation is Key
Observing experts while working could help you discover if they’re upholding company safety standards. Watch how they’re handling and maintaining machinery. For instance, if employees are working with a forklift, ensure they don’t take walkways and be careful when loading and transferring equipment. Check if employees wear gloves, goggles, helmets, as well as protective gear.
Try taking samples to test for hazardous materials before you go. Also, check equipment, countertops surfaces, and storage spaces’ temperatures.
5. Interview Workers
You can interview the supervisor of the building you’re auditing for record purposes. Find out how they’re replenishing materials and their training process for new employees. Discover how managers allow the use of specific equipment as well as their communication processes for direction and decision making. You can make the following findings:
What’s the duration for the training of new personnel?
How often do you conduct staff meetings to discuss safety protocols?
How often do you carry out walk-throughs?
Do your workers have to meet specific standards before operating heavy machinery?
Do you have records of those that run the equipment at certain times?
6. Evaluate the data
After observing the building and gathering data, you can evaluate your findings and conclude the facility’s adherence to safety measures. Confide in your team by sharing your concerns. Maybe they are already aware of the same thing and reaffirming your beliefs. Proceed by collaborating to suggest how to make the building safer for everyone.
Collaborate with the Drawing Specialists for Effective Auditing
Are you a facility manager, architect, or engineer? Do you manage many older buildings across a large complex or a city? Then you need to check whether your drawing systems and production methods are outdated.
If you’re auditing buildings to ensure they comply with life safety, you don’t need extensive paper drawings. Our paperless drawing solutions can help you streamline processes.
We are known as the Drawing Specialists. And there’s a reason why they call us so. We audit, organize, and maintain drawings. Let our professionals at DCM handle all your business drawings.
Trust us with your drawings and access a digital system that enables easy organization. By implementing an optimized and automated drawing system, you can bid farewell to the countless problems associated with outdated paper drawings. Contact us today!
There’s no doubt about it – one of the most important components of every city is its infrastructure. The roads and sidewalks, the potholes and cracks, the structure of bridges, and any other number of factors. What a lot of people don’t stop to think about is how it could be causing these problems. Improper management of blueprints and outdated Engineering Drawings can make errors stand out, which can become costly to your business. Therefore, it is important to have best practices in place; one secure central location and an organized single source of truth as a document repository for your team(s). The right tools can help facility managers save time and money, and do their jobs more efficiently. In this article, we will talk about how much money cities waste each year because of outdated engineering drawings.
How Do Outdated Drawings Cause Problems?
Cities are facing a growing problem with unorganized and outdated engineering drawings. As the number of city employees shrinks, so does the number of people who know the history of the building.
This leaves cities in a bind. They have to decide between paying more and more money for contractors, new plans created or leaving old problems unresolved. The latter option means that some neighborhoods will continue to suffer from poor water quality, unsafe roads, and other issues that could have been avoided with a drawing preservation storage, FM technology and efficient operations to retrieve both hard and digital versions of their most accurate operational drawings.
Most cities have engineers who create drawings of every aspect of their infrastructure — streets, water mains, sewers, etc. These are usually stored in an electronic format on computers, and drives in silo’d departments throughout the city. They’re also printed out on paper and kept in desk drawers, piled in offices, or as we’ve seen levelling out a fridge in head office. Yikes!
Issues That Occur When City Employees Use Outdated Engineering Drawings
Cities and states waste money on outdated engineering drawings. The main issue is that as engineers work on projects, they use different versions of the same drawing. This leads to confusion and mistakes in construction.
If an engineer needs something that is not readily available at their local hardware store, they may need to order it from another state or country. This takes time and costs money for fuel and shipping fees. In addition, there are issues with city employees using outdated drawings because it can cause them to spend more money than necessary on materials or equipment.
What’s the Cost of Using Outdated Engineering Drawings?
When it comes to engineering drawings, the cost of using outdated ones can be quite high. The reason is that they are not only inefficient, but they can also lead to costly mistakes that risk the health and safety of the community and building. Some of the most common ways in which outdated engineering drawings can end up costing your company money include:
Inaccurate Quotes: When your team is using old plans, they will not be able to give accurate quotes for any work that needs to be done. This will cause delays in the project and make it more difficult for your team to receive payment on time.
Accidents: If you are working with outdated drawings, there is a much higher chance that accidents will occur during the construction process, which could lead to injuries and accidents for some workers on site. This can cause you to have to pay out more money in medical bills and compensation claims from families of deceased workers if you do not utilize FM technology and efficient operations in your facilities department.
Time Wasted: If your team has unorganized and outdated engineering drawings, it can lead to them spending more time decoding symbols and interpreting outdated language than actually being able to gain the needed information from them, like they should be able to do with up-to-date documents and organized plans.
There are a lot of different variables to take into account when estimating construction costs. However, there’s no doubt that using outdated drawings will cause problems throughout the project. Whether more money is wasted on extra materials, more time is wasted on extra labour hours, or more time is wasted making mistakes due to an inability to read drawings, there is a clear cost associated with using old documents. And did we mention the enhanced sustainability going green will have on the future generations and the future of FM’s work?
How Can echo Help?
Updating blueprints can seem like a difficult, time-consuming task. However, physical blueprints can get lost and other issues can arise that make it difficult for Facility Planning Managers to do their jobs efficiently. With that in mind, there are plenty of ways by adopting DCM’s four synergistic drawing management solutions including echo Search can make updating your engineering drawings as simple and efficient as possible.
The cost of using outdated engineering drawings is higher than most would think. Cities across the US are wasting millions of dollars on defunct engineering drawings and take-off lists. We’ve seen the effects that these budget leaks have had on cities such as Los Angeles and Cedar Rapids, IA. We can help you save money by preventing this problem.
One way that echo Search can encourage a more fluid workflow for your planning team by giving you access to feed data from your latest .dwg (e.g., live material even on drawings older than a few minutes), so you don’t have to worry about wasted time and effort trying to track down the latest version of a drawing or the correct format. Did your team forget where they saved the design file? No problem. With echo Search you can search through millions of files with ease in one single source of truth no matter how many sites you are managing. Narrowing down the search no matter what and who is looking for the most up-to-date version. With an easily accessible web-based storage system, echo Search can allow your team to quickly find previous versions, check in and out, markup the latest changes and submit for approval. This can help managers save a lot of time wasted looking through cabinets.
Cities waste time and money through outdated engineering drawings and unorganized blueprints. Visit DCM Inc. to find your drawings in seconds. The Drawing Specialists an help you save time and money by creating the drawings and blueprints you need to avoid costly errors and by adopting these four synergistic drawing management solutions will provide your team with one secure central location and an organized single source of truth as a document repository.
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.
Did you know that you can eliminate your engineering drawings friction, increase productivity, and generate a 440% ROI using one simple solution?
Engineering drawings are the lifeblood of facility management. They guide the initial construction stage, instruct architects, and provide immense downstream value for maintenance, planning, and operations. With the rise of BIM and an ever-increasing regulatory appetite, managing and preserving your drawings is a critical component of facility health, productivity, and safety. So, what happens when those engineering drawings — which are meant to generate value — start to corrode your productivity?
It’s a very real problem. Document and drawing frictions account for a daily productivity loss of 21% at most organizations, and the simple task of referencing a drawing can quickly become a headache-induced nightmare within a few short years of post-construction facility management. Here’s a look at the average lifecycle of an engineering drawing, and how much chaos, stress, and pain a few simple buckets or USB sticks of drawings can cause.
The Beginning of Engineering Drawings
Every engineering drawing starts with an idea. The grand concept for a new facility is dreamed up, and engineers are contracted to submit a preliminary design with a few concepts. Depending on the delivery model, this process could be entirely in-house (rare) or via a D/B/B, where an initial architect is contracted to design the first burst of drawings. Once the architect has those initial conceptual drawings finished, they start to work with a variety of engineers (e.g., civil, mechanical, plumbing, structural, etc.) to create additional drawings and technical specifications for the bid phase.
From here, engineering drawings go through a variety of phases. They’re revised and reviewed multiple times before they enter into the critical construction phase, where various mark-ups and revisions take place. Finally, As-Con and As-Built drawings are made to compensate for any construction-driven changes in the original designs.
Already, you have a wealth of drawings at your disposal. From the initial drawings to the final As-Cons, you need to find a place for all of these documents. After all, you’ll be using these documents throughout the lifecycle of the facility. In fact, the more retrofits you finish, the more crucial these documents become — as they’re the link to the history of the facility. So what do you do with the animating force of your entire facility? You stuff it in a box, of course!
The Engineering Drawings Handover Stage
Once the facility has been completed, all of those irreplaceable engineering drawings and documents are stuffed away into the catacombs of mechanical rooms or basements. Somewhere inside of troves of filing cabinets or hordes of big, dusty cardboard boxes sit the lifeblood of your entire facility. Your problems have already started.
Storing engineering drawings (as well as their associated documents) is anything but cheap. It costs around $25,000 to fill a filing cabinet with documents, and another +$2,000 to maintain that filing cabinet annually. So, even if you exclude the costs of paper, space, and failed opportunity (what else could you be doing with that space?), the cost structure associated with storing paper documents like engineering drawings is staggering.
But those costs are just a small drop in the ocean of headaches you’re about to deal with. Even if you store your documents on network drives or private cloud servers, there’s a good chance you don’t index, organize, and classify these documents appropriately. And that’s a big problem. Next time Joe from engineering dives into the damp, dark basement to find that oh-so-critical drawing, he’s going to have to scatter documents across the floor in frustration as he opens box-after-box of pasty white chaos.
Trying to find the right information on crusty old USB drives isn’t much better, especially if engineers have to open up every file and check them one-by-one. In fact, that may be more time-consuming. But hey, you saved on the price of paper and storage. So it’s not all bad.
Here’s the scary part: you haven’t even started to feel the pain yet. Don’t worry. It’s coming.
The “Golden Years” (1 – 5)
At this point, everything is going great. You have those engineering drawings tucked away in the cobwebs of your facility, and you’re unlikely to experience any major facility disruptions — so long as your project execution was a success. During this period, engineering drawings barely see the light of day. You may need to reference architectural drawings to check space requirements for equipment or business units, but the vast majority of your engineering drawings — including masters — will stay tucked away.
But, you may start to catch glimpses of the colossal problem boiling in that dim, spider-webbed basement. Finding the right documents is a nightmare. Even those minor revisions become a painstaking search-and-rescue. Sixty-five percent of employees find it difficult to search and retrieve the right documents, and 83% of them accidentally start working off of the wrong document. If your engineering drawings are on paper, you may also start to notice costs associated with storing these paper documents — although many of these costs are intangible and difficult to calculate.
According to AIIM, the cost associated with storing a single paper file or drawing is $20. If that file gets misfiled, it will cost you around $120 to rectify. And if it gets lost, you’ll spend over $200 replacing it. To be clear, lost engineering drawings aren’t uncommon. Over 7% of ALL paper documents get lost, so this is an issue your engineers will almost certainly face. However, they may not face this issue yet. In fact, years 1 – 5 are often the “Golden Years” in terms of engineer drawing frictions. You probably won’t run into any serious issues. But the good times won’t last.
The “Servicing Years” (5 – 10)
Once you reach years five through ten, you’ll likely have to deal with facility repairs and planned maintenance. In some cases, you may also deal with retrofits and upgrades, improvements, and minor repairs. Suddenly, those engineering drawings are a critical component of your facility management strategy. At this point, the state of your drawings depends on when your facility was built. You may be dealing with a hoarder’s trove of scratched-up CDs, unlabeled USB sticks, and buckets of loosely-labelled engineer drawings. Or, you may be diving through digital files stored in abstractly-named folders with oh-so-helpful file names like “A1201a.dxf.”
Most often, paper files are the first line of defense against the hordes of employees tracking down drawings. Since CAD files are niche and somewhat knowledge-driven, paper drawings are often easier to find, consume, and leverage to make facility changes. This is an awkward time for your engineering drawings. They’re being dragged too-and-from various departments, and some employees are likely protecting them with their lives in an effort to decrease their back-and-forth commute to find that same document next time they need to reference it for a project.
Suddenly, that once-pristine basement is scattered across various business units. Worse yet, no one is quite sure what they have. Again, most employees will end up working off of the wrong version of a drawing, and that’s after they’ve spent 2.5 hours a day looking for that information. It’s not entirely their fault. Forty-two percent of documents are labelled incorrectly. According to IDC, document-related frictions cost companies over 20% of their total productivity each year, and you’ll start to see just how accurate that figure is at this stage.
Your drawings will be scattered across your facility ecosystem, and the more projects you execute, the more out-of-control this spread of documents grows. Eventually, the task of simply finding an engineering drawing becomes a nightmare. Employees spend hours looking for the right document, and, when they’re unable to find it, they have to spend another hour lurking through private clouds and USB sticks to find the right file.
The “Refresher Years” (10 – 15)
At this point, regular maintenance is required to keep the facility in tip-top shape. And regular maintenance means more drawings to reference. All of those document pain points you felt over the past few years are going to begin accelerating. As team members desperately search down drawings — many of which are stuffed in various drawers across the facility — the timetable for project execution becomes primarily hinged to document discovery. At this stage, the average document is photocopied around 19 times. We won’t dive into the risk associated with this issue, but it’s substantial. Over 11% of all security incidents involve printer-related breaches.
Out of the crevasses of these documents woes, champions will rise. Every team will spawn a “go-to” person who understands a significant chunk of the facility’s architecture. These people are either in possession of copies of drawings, or they understand how to navigate CAD files. Any time you have knowledge experts pop up, you’re in a position of risk. These people will retire, quit, and move on. When they do, their team will struggle to adapt to the change, often resulting in significant downtime and productivity losses.
The “Optimizing Years” (15 – 25)
By year 25, you almost certainly have started facility upgrades and retrofit projects. The use cases for engineer drawings are growing at a staggering rate. The convergence of new projects, maintenance requirements, and facility restoration projects puts stress on your document infrastructure. Maintenance, Ops, Planning, and Development are all scouting for critical drawings, and they are often looking for the same drawing for completely different reasons.
You may start to notice document hoarding practices and anti-collaborative atmospheres centered around protecting critical drawings. Departments will be hesitant to let go of any drawings, especially if they need to reference them in an ongoing manner. At the same time, labels and categorization start to rapidly deteriorate — rendering documents obsolete or inaccurate when they’re needed most. We often see facility managers being to invest at this stage. But it’s a difficult stage to find value from any digitization effort. Most of your documents are scattered, mislabeled, and misused. So, trying to go in and categorize them at this point requires significant liquidity, time, and energy.
Any attempts to “de-silo” these drawings will almost certainly be met with pushback. Many employees are protecting, downplaying, or downright hiding documents to keep them in their departments. Due to photocopying and engineering throughput, the number of documents is simultaneously increasing. So, you have a dual-sided issue. It’s hard to find critical documents, and there are too many documents. Versioning issues become prevalent, widespread, and revenue-damaging throughout these years.
The “Start-Over” Years (25+)
Once we hit the 25-plus year mark of operations, the state of drawings and documents in the facility is in a state of utter chaos. New upgrades to the facility are back in the “Golden Years” stage of operations, while other various facility structures exist at nearly every stage. A tangible disconnect exists between all units. Some people are looking for those original masters to facilitate maintenance needs, while others are struggling to find newly-created drawings for retrofit areas.
Obviously, you will have turnover during these 25 years. So there will be very few people left who understand the full lifecycle of your facility. The few that do will be precious resources to employees looking to scavenge for knowledge. Here’s where things get tricky: you have a few key employees who hold an immense amount of power. They can make-or-break entire projects. Unfortunately for them, the number of people that need their information is at an all-time high.
The drawings themselves are a mess. They’re everywhere. Versioning is virtually non-existent, and paper and digital files are piling up across your business. Make no mistake: these aren’t hiding in the basement anymore. They’re all over the place. And they threaten to stall each and every project. You had high hopes for your engineering drawings. Those drawings were the heroes of your facility during construction and the Golden Years. Now, they’re… to put it simply… a pain in your behind. And they seem to be growing stronger and more pain-prone every day.
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
The lifecycle of engineering drawings in today’s construction ecosystem is sad. What started out as your guiding light becomes your biggest pain-point. Break the trend. Are you ready to abandon the cost-sapping, energy-draining, resource-obliterating cycle of engineering drawing management? The leading Drawing Management Company can help. Echo Drawing Management System is an engineering drawing management platform that helps you instantly find the right version of critical engineering documents from nearly any device. We help you find, manage, and share drawings throughout their entire lifecycle. Abandon those dusty boxes and baby-blue filing cabinets. Embrace the future of engineering drawings.
Not convinced?
Get this: document management solutions have an ROI of 404%. You won’t only save time, energy, and employee relationships; you’ll save money.
