In the growing Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) market, set to surpass $10.5 trillion soon, version control and accurate engineering drawings are key. These essential documents act as both building blueprints and legal records for AEC projects. As projects evolve, managing drawing revisions becomes crucial. The Drawing Specialists lead in this area, transforming version control practices to boost efficiency and success in the AEC industry.

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The Challenge of Drawing Version Control

In the absence of a robust drawing version control system, organizations may face several challenges:

• Miscommunication: Working on outdated drawings can result in costly construction errors, project delays, and safety hazards.
• Inefficiency: The time spent searching for the most recent versions can lead to significant productivity losses.
• Non-compliance: Failure to adhere to industry standards and regulations can lead to financial penalties and damage to reputation.

The Expert Approach

At The Drawing Specialists, we manage the complexities of engineering drawing lifecycles with expertise honed over two decades. Our tailor-made services use the most current version control tactics, ensuring your organisation reaps their full benefits. Here are a few benefits we offer our clients:

Transforming Challenges into Success

Drawing version control is not just a technical need; instead, it’s a strategic asset. With Drawing Specialists, project risks and inefficiency turn into secure and streamlined processes. We do more than manage drawings; we empower organizations to innovate and execute projects without logistics worries.

Additionally, the accuracy and integrity of engineering drawings can drive project success. Therefore, The Drawing Specialists are your partner for best practice in version control, precision and excellence. Contact us now to discover how we can help you master drawing version control, setting you up for future engineering success.

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When it comes to offering the best FM Drawing Management Software for Facility Managers globally, no alternative or competitor has us beat.

That’s because we are The Drawing Specialists. None of our FM Software competitors offer a comparable suite of services to DCM’s echo Drawing Management System. Other companies may appear to have similar software strategies but we have yet to find another company that is totally dedicated to providing a one-stop, all-in solution to facility drawing management.

Let’s break down exactly what makes echo the go-to FM Software choice for Facility Managers who want a hassle-free strategy to reclaim control of their facility drawings, and maintain and preserve their facility for the future. Here’s how DCM Inc. and echo compare to our FM Drawing Management Software competitors.

DCM echo vs. Archidata

Archidata’s software seems to be geared more towards management personnel and tech wizards than the people who actually use the drawings. It’s an extra and unnecessary step to solely have management using the system and printing documents for their employees to use. With echo, it’s easy for employees to locate their drawings themselves with a user-friendly interface. Its several levels of searching capabilities ensure that anyone can use echo no matter their level of computer expertise.

Echo uses a version control system to ensure that the drawing version a client looks up is the latest and most recently updated version. The most recent version of a drawing is always denoted by a green checkmark, so there’s no need for our clients to meticulously sort through folder hierarchies. They’ll never have to wonder if the drawing they are looking at is really the most recent version.

DCM echo vs. Meridian

Meridian mostly offers tools for project management personnel who are managing ongoing projects. It’s also limited to being solely a CAD-focused software solution. Echo offers versatility by containing a number of features for managing completed projects and their existing documentation. It’s also compatible with all file types.

DCM offers document services that can be performed faster and at a less costly rate than performing them in-house. Through echo, our Drawing Specialists can perform maintenance on our clients’ behalf. These services include having the Drawing Specialists redraw old or low-quality documents, creating CAD versions of non-CAD documents, and adding new documents or updating existing documents with their newer versions.

DCM echo vs. SmartUse

On the opposite end to Meridian, SmartUse doesn’t support AutoCAD files at all. In fact, many of the system’s features require documentation to be in PDF format to work. Like Archidata, its ‘computer heavy’ user interface has a steep learning curve and is mostly intended for use by management personnel. SmartUse also has limited search capabilities, only allowing searches by project, folder, and document keywords. Drawings brought into echo are described using 10 to 20 metadata points. With echo‘s advanced search wizard, any drawing in the system can be found in seconds.

SmartUse clients will need to have their own personnel on-site to enter the data themselves. In stark contrast, DCM Inc. is ready to do the work for our clients. We will scan, optimize, and upload hardcopy drawings into a digital format onto echo, and customize the system to meet the specific needs of our clients.

FM Drawing Management Brought to You by The Drawing Specialists

Not only is echo tailor-made for facility drawing management, but the ongoing services DCM provides to our clients surpasses anything our FM Drawing Management Software competitors have to offer. No other company offers the same level and breadth of support that DCM does.

We are The Drawing Specialists, and we are committed to making sure our clients have a simple-to-use, elegant-in-design solution to all their facility drawing management needs. Book a discovery call to learn more about echo and how we can support your facility’s unique needs.

DCM Inc.’s echo and MMM Group’s SeawoodFM represent two forms of facility management software targeting the healthcare industry in Canada. Although both are intended to improve staff’s access to up-to-date technical drawings and other documents, the approach taken by the two companies differ in several important ways. We’re going to break down the key differences between echo and SeawoodFM.

A Comparison of DCM Inc’s echo vs SeawoodFM

About echo and SeawoodFM

SeawoodFM provides a set of as-built CAD drawings containing the facility’s up-to-date Architectural, Electrical and Mechanical information.

This is similar to DCM’s baseline drawing service. However, baseline drawings are only one of the features and services provided by DCM Inc., and echo.

Echo captures and catalogues all current and historical facility information in an easy-to-use software front-end accessible through the web browser on any device. 

With DCM’s hands-on service, the Drawing Specialists take all of a facility’s existing drawings and audit them to remove duplicates. They then file the drawings into a version control system. Afterwards, all of a document’s superseded versions are stored as secondary versions to the up-to-date file.

echo Catalogues Drawings Across All Formats

Echo catalogues all forms of drawings, including Architectural, Electrical, Mechanical, Structural, Fire Safety, Equipment and Site Plan drawings.

Drawings can be accessed by staff through a comprehensive filing and searching system, along with any associated manuals, reports or other technical documentation required to support those drawings. The search wizard in echo helps users find any drawing they need in seconds! With SeawoodFM, this is not possible. This is because new drawings are required to utilize the system.

At DCM, baseline drawings can also be created upon request, and added to echo. This service creates layered multi-disciplinary drawings in echo, which allows users to view different aspects of the area a drawing covers without having to switch back and forth between different drawings.

Drawing Limitations with SeawoodFM

Drawing disciplines that are accepted by SeawoodFM are limited to architectural, electrical and mechanical drawings. This leaves a big gap in many other drawing disciplines that exist.

On the other hand, echo stores drawings of any discipline including:

• Architectural
• Electrical
• Mechanical
• Structural
• Civil
• Topographical
• Other drawing formats

Whatever format your drawing is, if you need a drawing stored in echo, it can be done.

Pricing

The average company wastes an astounding amount of money on storage. Adam Muggleton, a renowned building and project management consultant, estimated that paper storage can cost the average company $241,307 annually.

Going paperless seems the next obvious step. It’s then that companies discover the costs of cloud storage programs, as well as the limitations of certain ones. SeawoodFM, can run upwards of $350,000.

Echo cloud file management is both affordable and scalable. You use only the resources you need. Your staff will also be equipped with live customer support when they need it.

Imagine a secure software that is tailor-made for your engineering drawings. You will always find the latest drawing you need in seconds. Imagine having that peace of mind, should there be an emergency at your facility.

DCM’s clients are often shocked to see how much money they save when they implement echo.

More than just CAD files

All types of file formats can be entered into echo. Our hand-on service will also take care of scanning all your hard copy drawings into echo as well. SeawoodFM only uses CAD files, which limits the user, as well as future users, who may prefer to use a different file formats for their drawings. 

Have The Drawing Specialists’ Support

echo by DCM Inc., is the best drawing management software choice for for healthcare facilities, and facilities of any kind. You won’t be limited by CAD formats, and you’ll have tailored customer support from our Drawing Specialists, anytime you need it.

When there’s an emergency at your facility and you’re in need of a drawing, time is often of the essence. With echo, you will easily be able to find your drawings in seconds!

Plus for a fraction of the time and cost of converting in-house, DCM delivers accurate digital files that are ready for immediate use. Book a discovery call today, to get your drawing management strategy started.

One of the most useful automation tools in business, computer-aided facilities management (CAFM), reduces the need for humans to interact with electronic systems in a facility or complex. This saves employees time and creates a more efficient workplace.

CAFM, a type of facility management software, goes beyond management and maintenance systems. It works in conjunction with computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), enterprise asset management software (EAM), as well as integrated workplace management systems (IWMS).

Are you swimming in an alphabet soup of acronyms now? Let’s try to simplify matters by defining what each of the computer systems named above does and then consider what a CAFM does and doesn’t do.

• CMMS: Lets you schedule and track asset maintenance.
• EAM: Lets you track and monitor asset conditions throughout the lifecycle. Used in long-term planning to determine profitability by the asset.
• IWMS: Lets you track and manage personnel and other human access to the facility.
• CAFM: Lets you manage the facility and its systems.

CAFM optimizes organizational facility functions by combining aspects of architecture, business administration, behavioral science, and engineering.

More About CAFM

CAFMs help you manage and automate most aspects of day-to-day operations. From the dashboard of a computer-aided facilities management software, you can schedule every activity an electronic system in the facility handles. If you’re unfamiliar with this type of software, think of the smart thermostat that many utility companies have begun installing or recommending that homeowners install. If you’ve used one of these thermostats, you know that you install an app on your smartphone that lets you create schedules to turn the thermostat on or off, or to increase or decrease the temperature. That’s one part of what CAFM does for a large facility like a hotel, spa, or resort.

Unlike the thermostat, though, the CAFM manages every aspect of the building’s operations. You can control the boiler temperatures, the hot water heater settings, the locking mechanisms on the main entries, program and monitor the room keys, manage the temperatures of the meeting rooms and ballroom, and much more.

Beyond Switches and Programming

The CAFM does more than automate lights and turn on the air conditioning when it hits 76F outside. It manages information on the facility. By leveraging computer-aided design (CAD) functions, your organization can manage building elements, visual information, as well as alphanumeric data processing.

It contains some of the same business intelligence tools found in other process management software packages. Using a CAFM lets you collect information automatically on your building’s day-to-day operations. Rather than having an employee check the ballroom temperature every hour, your CAFM can record the temperature at 15-minute intervals. Compiling and conducting analysis on this type of information lets you generate reports that help you make better data-driven decisions.

echo Helps You Organize Your Drawings, Schematics and Blueprints

Every hotel, spa, and resort uses drawings, schematics and blueprints. They use internal interior maps of room locations and maps of the grounds themselves.

The graphics they have to manage also include drawings and photos of the hotel or resort complex. They may need to store advertisements, frequently printed signage, menu designs, etc. Storing all of these items in printed formats takes up too much space.

Perhaps you scan each piece to digitize it. That works well to reduce the documents to a point that you can store them digitally. Storing them on DVD can make it tough to locate something when you need it. The file sizes may require so much space that you need a multitude of DVDs. Storing them to a single hard drive condenses your search, but still may not make it simple to find what you need.

You can integrate those scanned items into your CAFM using DCM’s echo: our engineering drawing management software. Not only can you store your digitized drawings and schematics, but you can use them in echo. For example, with CAD in the CAFM, you can host interactive floor plans that let your potential guests walk through the hotel, spa, or resort before they visit.

Benefits of a Modernized Drawing Library

Solutions like echo have been proven to boost productivity and morale. You do more than organize your drawings. You equip your employees with a secure, easy-to-use solution that makes their jobs easier.

DCM’s echo can be used on any device, so employees can pull up the schematic they need on an iPhone or iPad. You can set access protocols for categories or sets of drawings in a flash. This lets you share drawings and blueprints with a contractor quickly.

Digitizing and collecting your drawings in echo provides you with digital historical documentation of your complex. Your establishment will likely undergo more than one renovation over time. Creating a digital library provides you with an easily searchable database. You can provide a contractor with access to drawings of each renovation plus the original plans. This way, they can see the original design and how renovations altered it.

Going “Green”

Because you no longer need to print out drawings with echo, you’ll naturally save paper. Along with saving paper costs, this also allows your business to become more environmentally friendly.

Your employees can access the documents they need for every job on the fly on their phones and tablets. Your café and restaurants can access the room designs for various functions, quickly checking how many tables they need to set up and in what configuration. You’ll eliminate the need for them to ask a more experienced employee how to configure the ballroom for a wedding reception by providing direct access to the documents, so they’ll know the eight-up goes by the bandstand and the two-up line the perimeter of the back wall. They’ll know at a glance that they need an aisle of three feet between two rows of four-ups.

Many businesses still rely on mustard-stained paper copies of room layouts and conference schematics. You can modernize your hotel, resort, or spa office with the echo. You’ll also make finding the right drawing, graphic, or schematic as easy as making a Google search.

Instead of needing to have your experienced staff verbally pass along their knowledge to each individual employee, knowledge can be seamlessly passed along in echo. You can provide access to this knowledge when you onboard employees. This way, they’ll begin their job with the knowledge of experts. This also ensures you don’t lose expert knowledge when a person retires or moves to a new job.

Contact DCM For Your Drawing Management Strategy

With your drawings and your employee knowledge stored in the cloud and completely secure and searchable in seconds by your employees, your facility will operate more efficiently using CAFM. Contact us today to learn how you can implement echo in your facility.

Are your facility drawings optimized to work for you? When it comes to your facility drawing storage solutions, most organizations should consider:

• Space availability
• Users’ safety 
• Convenience of operations
• The final product
• Different operational aspects of achieving the right production results

We already know that a facility’s paper drawings follow a certain journey. But is it possible to eliminate frictions that lower productivity in order to improve your drawings’ accessibility and increase their ROI?

One approach you can take is to digitize your facility drawings. 

Digitizing your drawings will make accessing them faster and more accurate, and ultimately get you the best ROI. How does digitizing your blueprint files get you the highest return on investment? Let’s explore that now!

1. Ease of Access and Distribution of Facility Drawings

The easiest way to digitize your facility drawings is by scanning them. You send your documents to a scanning service, like DCM’s hands-on service, and create a digital file system where any facility professional can access them whenever needed.

While scanning is a great start, you’ll need to move your facility drawings to a digital platform like echo to make them accessible universally in a matter of seconds. This improved accessibility allows any facility professional — architects, engineers, facility managers — to access the drawings simultaneously on any device. As a result, they can view the blueprints and make annotations without any need for paper.

Users can review annotations quickly, making the flow of information more efficient. This easy access and distribution of your drawings saves on transportation and paper costs.

The accessibility of digitized drawings also helps:

• Prevent the loss of or damage to drawings
• Allow easy access to previous versions of the facility’s drawings
• Easily monitor and adjust outdated drawings

2. Ability to Identify Potential for Expansion, Additions, and Renovation

Because echo Search makes it easy to share your facility’s drawings with relevant people, it’s easy to identify places for potential expansion, additions, and renovation.

A digital facility drawing remains unaltered, and in case of changes, the file system stores all the previous versions. This makes future facility management easier. This tidy drawing file management comes in handy when:

• Dealing with potential breakdowns
• Making plans for expansions
• Planning to make future maintenance easy
• Dealing with emergencies

All these allow easy organization.

3. Prevent Health and Safety Issues

Today, more facility management professionals consider environmental services, occupational health and safety, and air quality solutions for their facilities. You want your blueprints to help prevent minor issues from turning into big ones that could cost a lot to fix later.

Digital facility drawings enable easier monitoring of systems such as:

• Fire sprinkler systems
• Alarm systems
• Emergency lighting
• Emergency preparedness plans

Our baseline Master CAD Plans take this a step further by setting you up with a single digital drawing that shows multiple architectural disciplines. This optimizes your team’s productivity, especially when it comes to maintaining your facility’s health and safety.

4. Ability to Refer to Old or Future Blueprints for Facilities 

Sometimes it’s necessary for facility managers to refer to older or future versions of drawings. Possible reasons include:

• Inspecting the entire facility to learn more about the building
• Figuring out what requires renovations
• Recovering information from previous managers

When a facility only uses paper plans, it can accumulate a huge archive that is difficult to navigate. This makes it tough to find the specific drawing you need. With echo, different versions of a particular drawing are easy to find!

Digitized facility drawings in echo save everyone’s time. All a person needs is the right keyword to locate the correct file in seconds, regardless of the size of the database.

5. Financial Savings Over Time 

There are several ways that digitized drawings will save you and your facility money. These go behind the obvious savings from less paper printing and transportation.

Digitization Lowers Storage Costs

 Maintaining paper storage is expensive. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you spend on physical facility drawings:

• Paper costs
• Printing costs
• Storage space
• Security
• Maintenance
• Lost opportunity for what could be done with the storage space

Ultimately, physical storage can end up costing you quite a lot each year! With your digital drawings stored in the cloud, you can accumulate a huge archive of them without the need to store and preserve paper, saving you money.

Increased Productivity Leads to Increased Profitability 

Productivity and profitability are intertwined. A digitized file system allows facility professionals to access drawings in seconds from anywhere in the world. All any user at the facility needs is the right keyword.

Additionally, with digital drawings you can reproduce any section of your facility drawing in another project, which saves you the time of starting blueprints from scratch, saving you time and money.

Easy to Catch and Correct Errors 

Digitizing a facility plan allows you to fix construction productivity issues that stem from design mistakes. For the most part, these mistakes translate to errors that require additional hours, materials, and money to fix.

Design mistakes, searching for project data, and resolving the resulting conflict add up to $177.5 billion annually in the USA. These issues stem from inaccurate project data and ineffective communication nearly half the time.

Digitizing your facility drawings can let you quickly identify errors in your designs, saving you money over time.

Digitize and Evolve Your Facility Drawings

Disorganized drawings, missing drawings, outdated drawings, damaged drawings — all of these limit how your facility drawings can work for you.

It’s time to evolve your drawing management solution. At DCM, we’re known as the Drawing Specialists because we’re deeply passionate about:

• Solving drawing management problems
• Simplifying drawing management
• Bringing clarity to drawing history

Contact us today to help you learn how we can help make your facility drawings work for you.

Facilities managers (FMs) can make transformational changes to the long-term running of facilities, aiming to cut operational costs and improve service delivery. These are some areas where drastic or incremental changes can have far-reaching consequences:

4 Uniques Projects Facilities Managers Can Implement

1. Facilities Improvement

Optimizing space usage and minimizing energy wastage remains a critical part of the FM’s role. Here are some projects worth considering:

Space Redesign

Layout optimization is almost necessary post-COVID, as teleworking and hybrid working models force organizations to downsize office space. For the Facilities Managers, it could mean:

• Reorganizing floor plans and moving furniture
• Breaking walls in cramped-up spaces to ease movement
• Transforming office space into storage areas

Facilities managers facing increased product volumes at warehouses can increase the vertical storage space by installing racks and shelves. However, reimagining the space should not come at the expense of layout optimization. It wouldn’t be wise to spend half an hour fetching something that would have previously taken five minutes.

Improved Energy Use

Consider green retrofits for your properties to lower your energy consumption and boost business revenues. However, this can be a massive investment, and you’ll need financial support from the bank. Most would be willing to help if you can prove that it makes you money or saves what you’re currently spending. 

Alternative funding sources could come from state or federal incentives. Here’s what you could do to cut energy costs:

• Replace older lights with energy-efficient LED
• Replace HVAC equipment with modern, energy-efficient models
• Improve the building’s insulation to lower heating and cooling expenses

2. Process Optimization

Facilities managers need to make the best use of resources assigned to them. Some targets where they could increase efficiency include:

Eliminating Workflow Bottlenecks

Think of a parking space allocation requiring five different approvals. Finance is one of the departments involved, but they’re already swamped with work, and approving parking space is the least of their priorities. Parking attendants don’t have much to do as they await authorization, while customers are agitated by the delays.

Workflow bottlenecks create unnecessary delays and may cause some employees to suffer burnout. Fortunately, it is possible to smooth out the process flow by cutting the number of sign-offs and redistributing unbalanced work schedules.

Supplier Sourcing

Finding good suppliers as well as aligning them to your organizational goals can be time-consuming and difficult. However, adopting strategic supplier sourcing decisions reinforces long-term stability, and your customers are assured of quality and reliability. It also helps you control operational costs thanks to well-negotiated long-term contracts.

Prequalifying suppliers will streamline the procurement process, ensuring that you have the best deal for your facility without compromising quality. 

Preventive Maintenance

Always aim to go a notch higher on preventive maintenance. It takes a proactive facility manager to identify and prioritize maintenance needs. The goal is to create a long-term strategy for improving the service life of growing equipment inventory while minimizing breakdowns as well as user complaints. 

Preventive maintenance is also easier with:

• An up-to-date asset inventory
• A suitable monitoring schedule with clear hierarchies or equipment priorities
• Reliable service technicians
• Reliable parts suppliers

3. Human Resource Design

Finding, developing, as well as keeping talent remains a challenge for many facilities managers. Here are some unique ideas on how to address those challenges:

Recruitment

With many organizations adopting a project-based approach, FMs need to find talent that can easily switch roles without losing sight of the organizational goals. The sheer variety of roles and responsibilities means that there is no one way to recruit a candidate. Every potential candidate is unique and often requires experienced screening to determine suitability, and here’s where specialist recruitment firms might need to step in. 

Beyond job boards and recruitment firms, the FM also needs to design new strategies for attracting top talent, like redesigning job roles and rebranding job descriptions. They can build talented communities on social media and engage them by sharing exciting developments within the industry.

Retention

Winning the talent war during recruitment only guarantees short-term success in the job marketplace. Many managers rush heading into recruiting without fully considering the costs and challenges of retaining top talent. And things can be a little expensive on this end, with competitors offering higher-than-average pay packages to lure top talent.

The facility’s manager also needs to review their value offering to employees, hoping to fit as many personal aspirations as possible into the big picture. To succeed in the new realities, the FM might need to trigger a culture shift, even if it’s just for their department, and review their hiring attitude. They might also need to design new in-house training models and innovate winning career development goals.

Outsourcing

Facilities managers are changing their HR strategies by shifting some roles to contractors and subcontractors. Increased competition for top talent coupled with high labour costs makes it nearly impossible to keep some services in-house. Some tasks, after all, are only cyclic, and keeping permanent staff would only blow up your expenses.

Though it looks like HR’s forte, the FM’s responsibilities here would include:

• Identifying roles that would suit the outsourcing model
• Participating in contactor sourcing and evaluation
• Managing contractor groups on site
• Ensuring that contractor tasks remain within budget and scope

4. Technology Integrations

Technology integration simplifies the facility manager’s work by aggregating data collection, storage, as well as reporting. Working with the IT department, FMs should ensure that the following roles are covered by selected software:

Drawings Management

What would happen to your decades-old engineering drawings if an accidental fire broke out in the filing facility? You’d be better off storing copies of these precious documents digitally rather than crossing your fingers, hoping that the drawings are safe. A streamlined drawing management system uses architectural industry best practices to index, store, as well as manage access to scanned engineering drawings.

Automation makes it easier to pull out the floor plans when you need to investigate and solve the source of flooding in the basement.

Asset Tagging and Serialization

Asset tagging occupies a special place in facilities management because it helps manage valuable assets. Assigning unique labels to an asset has the following benefits:

• It makes it easy to trace asset movement and usage.
• It allows the FM to track asset maintenance histories.
• Likewise, it helps in physical verification during audits.

Movable assets can be tagged using RFID as well as GPS devices, and the internet can be used to track their locations. Barcode printers and scanners can also be used on low-value inventory.

Safeguard your drawings with a modern software solution designed with engineering and architectural specialists in mind, get in touch with DCM Inc. to discover how.