DCM echo vs Bluebeam Revu: Why echo is the Go-To Facility Management Software Choice

For Facility Managers searching for a powerful engineering drawing management system to get the chaos of their disorganized facility drawings under control, echo by DCM Inc. is the ideal choice. Other software may appear similar on the surface, but a deeper dive shows that no competitor can match the one-stop, all-in solution echo provides for facility drawing management.

DCM echo vs. Bluebeam Revu 

Take Bluebeam Revu for instance. It significantly differs from echo in its focus, features, and licensing criteria. Echo is designed to empower Facility Managers by putting them in full control of their drawing and document management situation. In contrast, Revu seems more limited in scope towards architecture, engineering, and construction professionals.

As the leading drawing management company, DCM Inc. aims to provide facility management personnel with a complete suite of features that will take their existing paper and digital drawings, and seamlessly integrate them into our cutting-edge engineering drawing management software.

 A Suite of Supporting Services 

With echo, Facility Managers can choose to opt into a variety of the supporting services provided by DCM Inc. for a drawing management strategy custom-tailored to their facilities’ needs. By outsourcing drawing management to DCM Inc., savvy FMs will find an all-in-one strategy that is vastly cheaper than having drawing management done in-house. These services elevate the echo experience into a true partnership between your organization and The Drawing Specialists.

Our certified Drawing Specialists get hands-on with your digital or hard copy drawings mess, including scanning, organizing your master drawings in echo where you will find your drawings in seconds. We can redraw old or damaged drawings, and create CAD drawings from existing PDF drawings. We even compile several master drawings into a single Baseline Master Plan that consolidates years of engineering drawings into much easier-to-manage operational master set plans.

 An All-In-One Drawing Management Strategy 

With Revu, each device used to access the software requires its own purchased seat. This pricing structure may be workable for smaller organizations that only need one or two users to access the drawing management software, but DCM Inc. aims to create a solution where it isn’t necessary for everyone to go to “the drawings person” at their office to locate the drawing they need.

With echo, your facility’s drawings are immediately accessible to any user at your facility who needs them—and we don’t limit our users to a certain number of devices or require a charge per user. By our estimate, a license to use Revu with CAD and technical support would cost approximately $548 USD per user!

In fact, many standard features of DCM’s echo are only available in Revu as an additional charge. Let’s go over the differences between the two facility management software options:

 DCM echo vs. Bluebeam Revu: Feature Comparison 

Have the Leading Drawing Management Company  Supporting 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.

How to be 2022’s Cutting Edge Facility Manager with DCM Inc.

Technology is marching on, and facility managers need to keep pace with cutting edge technology to keep their facilities relevant. We live in an era of rapid change and evolution, so embracing this technology is a key component to being a successful Facility Manager in 2022. These new technologies are constantly being introduced into our lives and changing the way we interact with the world around us. 

As technology improves, the devices Facility Managers use to remotely operate their buildings will be swapped out for the latest model every few years. But the facilities themselves are built to last. The lifespan of a facility may last 20, to 50, to over 100’s of years! 

As innovation continues to shape technology, the standards and demands that facilities are expected to meet also grow. Facility managers must embrace new and innovative methods and technologies to keep their facilities relevant in the face of an ever-changing world.

As the leading drawing management company, DCM Inc. offers our customers echo: our acclaimed engineering drawing management software, and an accompanying suite of services that can be custom-tailored for your facilities’ needs.

Here are 5 Ways DCM Inc. Modernizes Facility Management to help you be 2022’s Cutting Edge Facility Manager.

Going Paperless 

In an increasingly digital world, going paperless is the future. Drawings stored in a dusty basement or storage room reduce productivity by forcing employees to search for the specific drawing needed. The average employee spends 2.5 hours per day searching for paper documents. All of that time spent searching for documents can result in a 20% loss of productivity for your company!

Through our hands-on service, your employees can stop searching through piles of disorganized facilities drawings and have the time to focus on the jobs you hired them for. Leave the chaos of your paper drawings to us, and we will scan them for you into your own echo database. Our auditing process will ensure each of your drawings passes through the hands of our of our certified Drawing Specialists, so you always know you’re looking at the most current version of a drawing.

Going Green 

By choosing to level up your facility by digitizing your drawings, you also take steps towards going green and levelling up your commitment to corporate social responsibility. Not only will fewer trees need to be made into paper, but there are surrounding benefits as well.

Having your files stored in the cloud reduces your company’s carbon footprint by eliminating the need to transport physical documents between storage and office sites or copy and distribute physical versions of those documents to the employees who need them.

DCM Inc. has partnered with One Tree Planted to take going paperless a step further. Now, for every new echo user, a tree will be planted on our clients’ behalf. Going paperless by choosing echo gives back to reforestation projects around the world!

Mobile Technology – a must have for every Facility Manager in 2022

The introduction of smart technology in the palm of anyone’s hand represented a total societal shift in how information is shared between people. Once your facilities’ drawings are brought into echo, your team will have access to powerful engineering drawing management software anywhere you are in the world. In 2022, every facility manager, will need to offer the ability for their team to work remotely. Whether that is from home, at a construction site, or at the office.

You will be able to manage multiple facilities unconstrained by the physical distance between them. Tasks and operations can be managed remotely, all through the phone you use every day. Your employees will also benefit by bringing up drawings directly on their phones, as they work on-site.

Baseline 

BIM is great for erecting new buildings, but it doesn’t effectively capture what’s behind the walls once the drywall is up. That’s where baseline comes in.

With baseline Master CAD Drawings, 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 CAD plans service.

A lot of the things BIM can do can be done just as well or better by utilizing DCM’s Drawing Management Strategy. Like BIM, baseline + echo allows you to bring all your designs, including AutoCAD files, into a single database. Your echo database can be accessed by any employee you set up with an account, allowing your team to work collaboratively with ease while utilizing a single source of data.

Maintain 

Our maintain service is a powerful tool for outsourcing your drawing maintenance, ensuring your facility will stay on the cutting edge well into the future. Regular maintenance of your drawings is essential for maintaining your facilities’ health and protecting your investment moving forward.

You want to ensure your drawing assets remain up-to-date and accurate over time, but assigning your employees to drawing maintenance only dilutes their focus from your core business priorities. Outsourcing your drawing maintenance to the Drawing Specialists will provide you with on-demand service done on your schedule and your budget!

Make 2022 the year you become the Facility Manager that elevates your entire team and facility.

Have the leading drawing management company supporting your cutting edge facilities’ needs. We are the Drawing Specialists, and Facility Managers around the globe are trusting us to support them in leading their cutting edge, evolving facilities. Our team would be happy to discuss how our Drawing Management Strategy could best serve your facilities’ needs. Book a discovery call today for more information about echo from DCM Inc.

4 Ways Echo Protects Your Data Privacy

Data privacy is an essential component to maintaining the health and security of your facility. Your data needs to be able to flow between the team members who need it in a secure system, contained and protected from leaking out critical resources–or letting in malicious invaders.

This Data Privacy Day, January 28th, we at DCM Inc. want to reiterate our commitment to ensuring your data is kept safe and secure in echo: our cutting-edge engineering drawing management software. When agreeing to provide data to a Software as a Service, it isn’t always clear how data privacy is being ensured. We want to keep you informed so that you know you are making the right, informed decision when you choose to trust your data with The Drawing Specialists.

Here are Four Ways echo Protects your Data Privacy

Encryption

Any application containing sensitive information requires encryption. As the leading drawing management company, we take encryption seriously! It may seem like a good idea for a company to develop their own secret algorithm or method of encoding data, but this is considered bad practice in the cryptography sphere. In echo, your data is protected by the well-established algorithm, which has been around since 2001–plenty of time to be picked apart by millions of eyes. It is a trusted, powerful method of encryption that has never been broken by attackers.

Salting

Beyond regular encryption, echo keeps your data protected with another cryptographic practice called salting. Salting basically adds random bits of data–a sprinkle of salt–to each password set up in the system. This means that even if two users happen to have identical passwords, the encrypted forms of those passwords will be entirely unique and not resemble the other at all.

Scaling Password Policy

Most software services nowadays require users to include various types of characters in their passwords. You know the drill: at least one capital letter, a number, and a special character like a dollar sign.Of course, this makes it tougher to guess than a password that’s just a word or phrase. We take this method a step further by scaling the password policy based on a user’s permissions in the system. The more permissions a user has, the stronger their password has to be.

Monitoring

echo is always being monitored for suspicious activity, and we take action to ensure anything out of the ordinary is locked out and reviewed in-real time. You can be assured that our technical teams have their eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary that could potentially affect your data privacy.

Do you want to trust that your company’s data privacy is in safe, reliable hands? 

Facility Managers around the globe are trusting echo, the leading drawing management company, with keeping their facilities’ data private and secure. Our security measures are tried and true. Our team would be happy to discuss echo and security further with you as we only sprinkled the surface with salt in the article. With DCM Inc. and echo on your side, you can be assured that your drawings are in safe hands. See more information on echo from DCM Inc.

The Different Types of FM Software

A facility management or FM software assists in tasks set aside for facility managers.

These include:

  • Scheduling repair and maintenance
  • Management of parts and supply
  • Tracking of personnel and tasks
  • Storage of drawings in a single digital format

Multiple FM software exists in the market, and we shall examine their differences.

Understanding the Different Types of FM Software

Male facility manager in a construction site using a tablet device to access FM software needed for managing his tasks.

Building Planning and Design

Building planning and design is the arrangement of various building components to form a homogeneous structure that serves its function. There are types of building planning and design software that help you to automate the process.

Floor plans illustrate how a building is laid out and related to fixtures, furniture, as well as walls. Technology allows us to build 3D rendered models that one virtually walks through to see the final design.AutoCAD and Revit are two handy software types of Autodesk. The older generation may remember AutoCAD from way back in 1982.

AutoCAD was among the initial computer-aided programs used on PCs. Engineers and architects create and modify various geometric shapes to create designs, blueprints for computer chips, buildings, bridges, etc., on both the mobile as well as the web. It has, however, undergone a lot of transformation since its inception.

Revit is a single app that creates geometry but with real-life data, launched in 2000. It is a 3D BIM (building information modeling) tool with structural engineering, construction, and architectural design features. The review allows you to create a smart building model in a virtual space.

Building Construction

With all construction projects, documents accumulate. Multiple projects generate a considerable amount of documentation that needs storage. The relevant people must have access to these documents, such as facility maintenance as well as construction management teams.

Construction project management software helps companies perform communication, budget management, job scheduling, as well as decision-making processes. The software also aims to make construction business processes more straightforward via automation. Examples include:

  • Jonas Premier
  • Acculynx
  • ProContractor
  • GanttPRO
  • eSUB Subcontractor
  • Knowify,
  • eSUB Subcontractor
  • Buildertrend

Building commissioning software digitalizes, optimizes, as well as tests equipment, and replaces computer and paper spreadsheet methods. It also streamlines workflows by using drawings and removes any inefficiencies in the conventional methods. Examples include BlueRithm and Quicx.

Building Maintenance

Without proper maintenance, even the best-constructed building won’t last.  Back in the day, before technology was a thing, this maintenance was all manually done. The process was long and arduous, and luckily, we now have FM software that automates the process.

Building management falls into two categories: soft and hard. Soft services include landscaping, janitorial jobs, as well as other tasks that do not involve being a physical component of the building. Complex services include door locks, fire alarms, windows, doors, etc.

Building management software should manage the building’s maintenance. It is a specialized computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) solution. It automates your maintenance processes and helps the maintenance manager with performing day-to-day tasks.

The solution also centralizes repair scheduling, enterprise asset management, managing costs, maintenance work orders, etc. Examples include Akitabox, Optergy Building Management System (BMS), Upkeep, etc.

Group of engineers and facility managers in a construction site looking at a laptop while accessing documents through the use of reliable FM software.

Space Planning and Management

Space planning is the proper utilization of physical space in a facility. A space planning and management system include various software that improves physical spaces’ supervision in the facility.

The software deals with floor plans, providing features that assist in capacity, occupancy maintenance, as well as property management. Ideally, a company should use every available space for its intended purposes, such as storage, meeting rooms, or desk space.

Space planning and management software also provide you with real-time and accurate data. You can use this information to determine if you can use the available space more effectively to cut costs.

It means you can re-allocate unused space for other purposes and even make a case for expansion or downsizing, depending on the real-time data. When you have accurate data, you can make better-informed decisions that cut your costs.

If you rent extra unused rooms in your facility, let them go by sub-letting them. The software also enables you to make sense of even the smallest spaces that you would never have anticipated. Examples of space system software include Wisp, iOffice, as well as Spacewell.

Asset Management Software

The asset management system is a system that allows you to track critical details about all your assets in real-time. It drastically reduces your administration expenses, enhances your services, as well as enables you to understand asset use, maintenance, and costs. This software manages both hardware and software assets. Examples include:

  • Asset Panda
  • ManageEngine AssetExplorer
  • InvGate Assets
  • Ivanti IT Asset Management
  • MMSoft Pulseway
  • GoCodes etc.

Drawing Management (echo)

echo is a class apart from other available Space Management and FM software. echo and FM software is different. It is exclusively a drawing management solution whose purpose is to capture, then catalog all your organization’s current and past blueprints, documentation, and technical drawings.

The software audits documents and enters the documents into a version control system and is accessible to your staff through a web-based frontline. echo also makes it easy for anyone in your firm to locate any drawing they need within seconds. The system also guarantees that the drawing version they lookup is the latest and updated version. 

echo has several benefits, such as:

  • The software identifies outdated or missing documents and is thus either created or found.
  • The software finds low-quality or damaged drawings and puts them up for redrawing.
  • You can use the software to create up-to-date and accurate Baseline master CAD drawings from many as-built drawings.

echo also has colossal ROIs (returns on investment) for people who only depend on blueprints as they can save a lot of valuable time used to maintain a centralized digital or hardcopy drawing library. Searching for a specific drawing may take you ages, and also ensuring the drawings are updated is another hassle.

Facility Managers in Canada and the world have taken to using echo and its unique features. After using echo’s automation features, it becomes easy to track drawings without the hassle. Nobody wants to go back to the dark ages of manually searching for drawings in dusty storerooms. Make your life infinitely easier by digitalization. See more information on echo from DCM Inc.

echo vs Facility and Space Management Software

We’re going to break down the differences between our drawing management software echo vs Facility and Space Management software.

It is a common misconception that DCM echo is comparable to other forms of Facility Management (FM) and Space Management Software currently on the market. In reality, FM Software and echo serve entirely different purposes. This has led to echo’s successful adoption by dozens of large-scale facilities across Canada, as well as our extremely high rate of customer retention and satisfaction.

DCM Inc. presents: echo vs Facility and Space Management software

What is a Facility Management System?

A Facility Management or FM System, is a piece of software designed to assist in tasks required of facility managers. These typically include:

  • Repair & maintenance scheduling
  • Parts & supply management
  • Task & personnel tracking
  • Payments & proposal tracking
  • Storage of as-built drawings, usually in one digital format
FM System software intertwines with CMMS – Computerized Maintenance Management Software. 

Examples of FM System software include FMX, eMaint and Snapfix.

What is a Space System?

A Space System is a variety of software that intends to improve supervision, and management of physical spaces within facilities. These software packages typically deal exclusively with floor plans, and provide features intended to assist with things such as occupancy & capacity management for any given portion of the facility.

Examples of Space System software include iOffice, Wisp and Spacewell.

What is echo?

Unlike any of the software packages discussed above, echo is a drawing management solution. echo seeks to capture and catalogue all of the current and historical blueprints, technical drawings and documentation stored in a given facility.

DCM audits documents and enters them into a version control system. This system is made accessible to staff via an easy-to-use web-based front end.

Why choose DCM Inc. echo vs Facility and Space Management software?

echo enables any staff member in the facility to locate the exact drawing they’re looking for within moments. It guarantees that the version of the drawing they find is the most up-to-date, and accurate version available.

Additionally, DCM offers support to echo through a wide array of engineering services, including:

  • echo can identify missing and outdated documents
  • DCM staff can assist in getting these drawings found or created
  • Damaged or low-quality drawings can be redrawn into brand new CAD drawings by engineers at DCM
  • Drawing conversion rates are vastly faster and cheaper than performing the same work in-house
  • Large numbers of as-built drawings can be converted into a concise, accurate and up-to-date set of Baseline master CAD drawings

echo provides massive returns on investments for clients who rely on blueprints and other technical documents. It does this by saving them valuable time and effort spent maintaining a centralized library of hard copy or digital drawings.

Clients search for the drawings that are required for an ongoing project, all the while echo ensures that all drawings being used are the most up-to-date drawings available at the facility.

echo has become a favorite among Facility Managers in Canada. Our uniqueness among document management software solutions, continues to create satisfied clients who could never imagine returning to their old methods of managing drawings.

See more information on echo here from DCM Inc

DCM Echo vs Microsoft SharePoint

Are you using Microsoft SharePoint to store your engineering drawings? You need to switch to echo. Why? We’ll break down the differences between DCM Incs’ digital software echo vs Microsoft SharePoint. You can see for yourself how echo has the advantage over these two different forms of document management software.

Drawing Management Software, not just document management software

SharePoint is a general document management software, produced to handle a variety of corporate documentation. But echo is a drawing management software .

Echo stores, maintains and improves the client’s blueprints and technical drawings. It offers peripheral supporting documentation such as equipment manuals, warranties and reports.

This has many implications with regards to how the software operates, which features are available to the user, as well as the support that is available to the user through the provider of the software. 

While Microsoft’s support team may or may not know anything about technical drawings or blueprints, here at DCM, we are The Drawing Specialists. 

DCM staff are well-versed in how blueprints and other technical documents work. We understand the procedures related to their utilization and storage, and have a thorough understanding of the process of bringing all the contents of a drawing room into a software solution.

And there is often a lot of content that builds up over the years, in those drawing rooms. 

Echo vs Microsoft SharePoint

Implementation & Customization

One of the largest differences between implementing a software solution like SharePoint instead of echo is that, when implementing SharePoint, you are on your own. It is the client’s job to get the documents that they currently possess into the system. This includes:

  • Scanning any hardcopy documents into a digital format.
  • Ensuring that they are using the most current version of the documents they possess.
  • Capturing information currently on the document, into a format which is accessible to the software’s searching features.
  • Customizing the system such that it meets the needs of the client’s, staff, etc.

Whether performed in-house or by a third party, these operations require a large amount of expertise, and can become quite expensive. This is not a concern at DCM. Our processes are specifically tailored towards a smooth implementation of our echo software for facility managers.

DCM is ready to do the work for our clients, such as:

  • Uploading digital drawings with their associated information
  • Scanning, optimizing and uploading hardcopy drawings in a digital format.
  • Ensuring that different versions of the same document are entered into the version control system, instead of as separate documents.
  • Customizing the echo system to meet the stated needs of the clients.
  • Providing infrastructure to store the documents

When sourcing this work from current employees or a third party, this can be costly and time-consuming. DCM benefits from the economy of scale—we process millions of documents for a multitude of facilities, and we have the processes laid out to do it accurately, quickly and efficiently.

Testimonials

According to a report conducted by AIIM Research, 40% of SharePoint customers do not consider their implementation of SharePoint to be a success. The same report shows that, although 35% of customers with an Office 365 subscription utilize SharePoint, only 2% of their staff were actually using it.

DCM services a smaller number of clients in a smaller subset of industries. As a result, we are able to invest much more into the business relationship that DCM has with our clients and ensure that everybody is receiving a system that meets their needs.

DCM CLIENT TESTIMONIALS

Here are some of our clients’ testimonials regarding their experiences with DCM and echo:

“Implementing echo was seamless! Our workflow has improved. DCM delivers on the promises they make. I highly recommend their product and services.”

Nancy Bishop – Brant Community Healthcare

“echo is easy to learn, quick to administer, and provides a comprehensive revision history for each drawing.”

Danica Johnston – BGIS

AutoCAD

On the whole, SharePoint does not support AutoCAD documents in any significant way. As AutoCAD is a proprietary software, it is difficult to integrate support for DWG, DWF and Xref files into any software not created by Autodesk.

That being the case, DCM has written their own proprietary software tools intended to interface with files created by Autodesk. This allows Echo to support them to a greater extent than other softwares such as SharePoint.

A comparison of Microsoft SharePoint and DCM Inc's echo

Searching

For customers using SharePoint, searching is one of their most common gripes. Many customers consider it to be unintuitive and difficult to customize. Often time they feel it is slower than simply looking for the document themselves.

Echo offers a fully customizable searching system with a variety of options for how individual users wish to search for their documents.

It guarantees that our search system will integrate with the way that our clients intuitively desire to look for their documents.

Document Services

Technical documents don’t just need to be stored properly, they need to be maintained. Construction, policy changes and evolving circumstances such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, often lead to structural changes. These changes then require updates to blueprints, procedures and other technical documentation.

Using a service like SharePoint, this maintenance will either need to be performed in-house or by a third party. With DCM echo, our drawing and software experts are capable of performing this maintenance on the client’s behalf, including:

  •  Adding new documents to the system.
  • Updating existing documents with their newer versions.
  • Redrawing old or low-quality documents.
  • Creating CAD versions of non-CAD documents.
  • Our Baseline Drawing services.

These services can all be performed by DCM at a rate which is faster, and less costly than performing them in-house.

Baseline Services

One of the unique aspects of implementing echo into your workplace is access to our suite of DCM Baseline features. Baseline is a feature wherein DCM can create a set of Master CAD documents. These documents integrate all of the relevant information from the client’s current set of masters.

This process can greatly reduce the quantity of documents through which the average staff member must search to find what they’re looking for, and unifies all of the client’s master drawings into a small set of modern, up-to-date CAD drawings.

Version Control

Blueprints and other technical drawings often come with large lists of revisions. But which is the most recent? What drawings are duplicates of each other? Which are superseded versions of newer documents? When implementing a software like SharePoint, these are questions which must be resolved by the client.

Echo, by the use of software-based auditing tools and the expertise of our staff, is able to condense our client’s documents. This ensures that duplicates are not entered into the system. After that, superseded versions of newer documents are attached to the newest version via our Version Control System.

Revisions to documents occur without the creation of new documents, allowing clients to easily find the master file, at all times.

Using our Version Control System, the user always knows that what they’re viewing is the newest, most up-to-date version of the document that is in our client’s possession.

Ease of Use and Training

As much as two thirds (66%) of SharePoint customers blame their low adoption rates of the software on the difficulty of use, as well as lack of proper training received by Microsoft. Conversely, echo is a far simpler system. It is aiming at users who are not necessarily IT & programming professionals.

Echo features a wealth of training resources. Its knowledge base contains articles about every aspect of the system. As well as including a live support line that can put users in touch with software experts at DCM Inc.

DCM also offer training courses to teach key staff members about how to use the software as effectively as possible. We make our software adoption process as easy as possible. Our software tools assist our clients staff, rather than impede them.

echo vs Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a document management system used by a wide variety of businesses.

But echo by DCM Inc is a drawing management system for facility managers.

By pursuing a niche market, we have created the best software solution for facility managers to store their technical drawings and documentation.

Our software has numerous features that support and target the specific needs of our clients, as well as a team of Specialists who understand our client’s needs.

They know how to help them improve their drawing management situation so dramatically, that they could never imagine returning to the way things used to be done.

A Non-Carrot-and-Stick Approach to Better Metadata

Recent surveys suggest that AEC companies and facility managers are embracing digital transformation at record-breaking speeds. Partially fueled by the black swan event of 2020, digital transformation has become the table stakes of modern facility management and engineering. And it couldn’t come at a better time. In this article, we will discuss an approach to better metadata.

Back in 2019, McKinsey estimated that construction companies could see 15 percent cost reductions. And 6 percent productivity gains from simple digital transformation strategies. Facility managers saw nearly equal gains. Now, in 2021, those value drivers are being realized by thousands of companies across the globe. But digitization comes with its own set of challenges.

In a non-digitized world, engineering drawings were labeled and put into buckets, boxes, and flash drives. Now, those engineering drawings are digitized and sitting in the cloud. So how do you find the right document without those labels? After all, what’s the point of digitization if you’re bleeding time and revenue trying to find the right documents at the right time?

The answer to these woes is something called metadata. This helps you organize and explore your precious drawings. But there’s a problem. This game-changing data organization technique comes with a few pain points.

What is Metadata and Why is it Important?

While there are a few definitions, it’s easiest to think of it as data that describes other data. We like to use the leftover analogy. Let’s say that you cooked a nice big pot roast. You didn’t finish it all, and you want to store it in the freezer for leftovers. Easy enough! But when you open your freezer, you see a ton of other food containers you stored in the past. How will you know which container has your pot roast next time you open up the freezer? Obviously, you could look through each container in the freezer. But that’s time-consuming and energy-draining. Instead, you whip out a label and sharpie and write “pot roast 1/1/2021” on the container. That label is like metadata. It describes what’s in the container. Allowing you to easily find the right leftovers next time you take a peek in the freezer.

Now, let’s apply the freezer analogy to engineering drawings. When you store your engineering drawings in a big database, how do you find the right drawing at the right time? You use metadata. It describes the data in your drawings for you. So, instead of searching through every engineering drawing in the bin, you can input a quick search term and find the exact drawing you need.

Types of Metadata

There are three types of metadata that can be applied to engineering drawings (and data in general):

  1. Descriptive: This type is used to make data searchable. You could label an image in a drawing with tags, add titles to documents, as well as use keywords to discover drawings based on specific criteria.
  2. Structural: This type is used to organize data in a database. For example, you can add types and versions to engineering drawings to help you find the right one. You could also describe how a specific drawing is related to other drawings in your database.
  3. Administrative: This type is used to describe the administrative needs of drawings. For example, you can add permission levels, dates, as well as drawing types.

That’s it in a nutshell. Easy peasy, right? Or… is it?

Common Pain Points

We all hear about metadata as this magical, problem-solving data mechanic. But an unfortunate number of companies struggle with it. There are serious pain points hiding beneath the seemingly simple premise of metadata, including:

  • Manual labor: Adding metadata to every engineering drawing is labor-intensive. You have to classify every image, categorize every series of drawings, and add robust, comprehensive, and uniform tags. It’s not easy. And it certainly eats away at your time. Worse yet, manual data entry introduces errors. Research suggests that the error rate for a single manually-entered spreadsheet hovers over 30 percent. Metadata mistakes can lead to serious headaches. You won’t be able to find the right document, and incorrect metadata can actually make document retrieval more difficult.
  • Complexity: Remember those three categories? There are hundreds of types of metadata within each of those three categories. You need to apply all of them correctly on every single drawing.
  • Departmental frictions: Chances are, your engineering drawings intersect multiple departments. Finding consistency between those departments in terms of metadata language is challenging.
  • Governance: Metadata requires governance. Access privileges, compliance, and a bucket of other pain points come into play when you start trying to pool engineering drawings together under one roof.

Wait… so is it bad? It certainly seems like metadata is useful. But those problems seem pretty dire. What’s the solution?

echo + Metadata: A Match Made in Heaven

The secret to leveraging metadata correctly is automation. Manually entering it is a recipe for disaster. And trying to build ad-hoc metadata structures can leave gaps between departments that impact “searchability.” The act of data cataloging and tagging is notoriously time-draining. This can defeat the purpose of using metadata in the first place.

When you’re dealing with something as mission-critical and facility-impacting as engineering drawings, every mistake counts. You need pitch-perfect metadata structures, and you need those structures to be holistic and uniform. That’s why we created echo. Not only is echo the world’s most powerful engineering drawing platform. But it also automatically catalogs over 15 metadata points from every drawing uploaded into the system. In other words, echo streamlines drawing ingestion, digitization, and categorization all under one roof.

Are you ready to digitize your engineering drawings in a way that makes them easy to find, retrieve, and discover? Contact us. We’ll help you embrace the real value of digital transformation.

Ten Echo DMS Enhancements In The Next Release

Yes, our users love managing their drawings and getting results in 1 click using echo DMS; we have been listening carefully to your feedback and have some exciting enhancements launching soon.

We will keep you updated on social media with a release date. Meanwhile, follow DCM on LinkedIn.

Here are Ten (10) Echo Drawing Management Software enhancements we are delivering in the next release:

  1. Get Started dashboard: shortcuts to use your most valuable tools from across echo DMS at a glance
  2. Key Plans: the ability to utilize Key Plans as a searching method practice
  3. Project Search: the ability to search for drawings/blueprints/plans by the project using a brand-new tool in echo
  4. Project Years: projects now have optional year values, which can also accept multiple years as a search range
  5. UI Improvements: the UI has been modernized to utilize current web technologies
  6. Mobile Compatibility: the core UI has been upgraded to better support mobile users on all mobile devices
  7. Customization: users can customize their system to reflect their usage patterns
  8. Breakout Tools: users can view building breakouts in a brand-new echo tool
  9. Live support: users can interact with the chatbot and live support resources
  10. New echo Coaches: All users now have access to the echo coaching team for on-demand support to ensure every echo search is a success!

Bonus enhancements:

  1. New discipline & author-based versions of the echo DMS search wizard
  2. Speed enhancements for quicker echo DMS search results
  3. We are listening to performance improvements to support and manage feedback

“If you can search the internet you can manage drawings with echo Search! ”

We don’t want to brag but we are the leading drawing management company!

Digital drawing management with echo has many cost benefits:

  1. Accurate document retrieval with 1 click echo search
  2. Zero physical storage costs
  3. Free disaster recovery
  4. Vastly reduced paper and ink consumption, which is good for the environment!

We will keep you updated on social media with a release date.

Follow DCM on LinkedIn to keep up-to-date.

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.

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!