Digitizing your engineering drawings is essential for operating your facility both safely and efficiently. It also means that you and your employees will have access to your engineering drawings and critical building information from anywhere and in an instant!

Having instant access to your facility’s drawings is invaluable in many situations. These include general day-to-day maintenance, the planning stages for an upcoming renovation, or even in an emergency where every second counts. That’s why it’s important to have the strongest storage and accessibility solution for your drawings.

Let’s talk about why digitizing your engineering drawings is essential.

Shared, Physical Engineering Drawing Storage Locations Are No Longer Viable

Many facilities still fall back on storing hard copy drawings in a distant archives room. They rely on a few key team members to have the relevant knowledge memorized. While this might be a workable strategy in the short term, this “out of sight, out of mind” approach sets up many potential issues for the future.

A shared, physical location is no longer a viable option for drawing storage. A physical location doesn’t account for the challenges that come with employees working remotely, retiring, or otherwise leaving their position. Therefore, digitizing your facility drawings is a necessity. Having your engineering drawings digitized also adds another level of insurance, efficiency, and safety to your facility management team.

Hard Copy Drawings are Only Worth the Paper They Are Printed On

Your facility’s engineering drawings contain vital information, but paper drawings will deteriorate over time. They are vulnerable to being lost, ripped, folded, crumpled, and having liquids spilled on them. These drawings may be stored for countless years in rolls, boxes, hanging racks, and drawers.

This becomes especially problematic as these drawings are often used to find detailed information such as specific dimensions or equipment codes. Drawings stored in an archive room are also susceptible to accidents that can happen in a building, such as fires and floods! An entire drawings archive room can be damaged beyond repair if even a fire sprinkler goes off.

Digitizing your engineering drawings means they will always be safe, in top quality, and backed up in a secure location. It means your engineering drawings means the critical building information they contain is always protected.

Digitizing Your Engineering Drawings Saves Time Finding the Right Drawings

The smooth functioning of facilities is essential. For example, hospitals are advanced facilities that are continuously being renovated to both accommodate growing communities and provide state of the art care. Continuous renovations in a facility make management increasingly more difficult as facilities gain a mix of both new systems and old.

Depending on the age of the facility, this can translate into hundreds of projects over many years. These projects may be spread across all disciplines: ventilation systems, lighting efficiency projects, and more. Each new project means new sets of drawings are added to the ever-expanding archives room. These drawings contain critical information and often need to be referenced for the planning of new projects, repairs, replacement work, and even general maintenance.

Thus, finding the right drawing in a physical archives room becomes an ordeal itself. This can add countless hours to a project and hinder the overall efficiency of your maintenance department.

It can also lead to communication issues, especially between staff on opposite shifts. For example, the night staff may need to call the daytime manager because they know a particular piece of information or where to find a particular drawing. This only becomes more complicated when you factor in staff working from home, or key knowledge-keeping staff who have retired.

Digitizing your engineering drawings allows staff to access the drawings instantly and information they need. It also makes it easy for facility managers to share the building knowledge they have with the next generation coming into their field.

Digitized Engineering Drawings Provide Safety and Peace of Mind

In the event of an emergency, digitized engineering drawings can potentially be life saving. It means your staff have instant access to fire safety, security, and emergency exit plans. Every second counts during a crisis such as a gas leak. Being able to quickly and easily find the shut off locations and zone information can save lives.

Emergency power distribution and panel information can be critical as well. Catastrophic events such as a burst pipe can threaten the safety of those in the building and cause thousands of dollars of damage for every minute it takes to find the shut off.

In hospitals, such events have caused a lot of damage and caused entire departments to shut down. This puts the patients receiving care in those areas in danger. With digitized and up-to-date plans, staff can find these locations using the drawings accessible on their phones, drastically improving their emergency response time.

DCM Inc. Can Help With Digitizing Your Engineering Drawings

In a world where instant access to information is commonplace, don’t let your facility fall behind the curve. Providing facility management staff with instant access to the information they need is essential for the safe and efficient functioning of facilities.

Our team would be happy to discuss how we can best serve your facility’s needs. Book a discovery call today for more information about echo from DCM Inc.

Building or property managers often manage facilities that have been around for many years. They may even be older than the property managers. Subsequently, many managers are also likely to experience certain issues pertaining to the building’s structure and the various equipment contained within it. Some of this equipment may include printers used to create drawings and the myriad paperwork that these printers create. To effectively manage buildings as well as their outdated equipment and systems, it’s important to understand the past.

If you don’t understand the past behind your facilities, you won’t be able to successfully manage them. This is because you don’t understand how they work. Take the time to look at the background of your buildings and equipment. So you’ll be well-equipped to deal with any issues that come about. You may also be able to make a more successful transition to contemporary solutions that improve upon the efforts of the past.

Why Building Managers Should Know the Past Behind Their Properties

There are multiple reasons why it’s necessary to understand the past and the systems and structures associated with a property.

Deal With Potential Breakdowns

If you have a good understanding of how your building and various pieces of equipment work, you’ll be able to prevent possible breakdowns and subsequent downtime. Otherwise, when something happens to hinder your operations, you won’t know the ins and outs of the facility or machinery to inform you of what specifically occurred. You would then need to spend more time figuring out what happened. This would only complicate matters as you suffer from even longer periods of downtime.

The more you know about what you’re working with, the more prepared you’ll be in the event of a malfunction or shutdown.

Make Future Maintenance Easier

Preventative maintenance and minor repairs are also inevitable. If you know how your facilities and systems work, you’ll know what to look for as wear and tear develop. You’ll also have a better idea of when you require maintenance and what specifically needs it. This will help keep your systems running efficiently as well as minimize the risk of potential breakdowns.

Be Prepared for Emergencies

You never know when an emergency could take place. From a building fire to a massive mechanical issue that compromises your operations and the safety of others. If you have a good understanding of your property’s layout, functionality, and the equipment on every floor, you can develop emergency plans for them in the event of a catastrophe. In turn, you’ll be able to remain comfortable in knowing that your systems and the people within your building are consistently safe. If and when an emergency does take place, you’ll have the resources to resolve the situation much more efficiently. This could even mean the difference between a minor emergency and a tragedy.

Manage Your Budget More Effectively

Having a clear window into your property’s past will also help you establish a budget that makes sense. As you look to maintain your facilities or consider making upgrades, you can determine how this would impact your budget. Based on the age and extent of repairs or upkeep needed, you would be able to more accurately calculate how much these tasks will cost you. You’ll then be able to make more informed budgeting decisions that help minimize expenses while maximizing profitability. 

Know Who to Hire for the Job

Chances are that if you require maintenance at any point, you’ll want to work with reliable maintenance contractors. However, you need to make sure the contractors you hire are capable of working with your specific facility or equipment. If you know what you’re dealing with, you can more selectively hire contractors who can actually help you.

How You Can Understand Your Property’s Past

If you want to know the background of your property and learn all about the equipment you’re working with, there are certain steps you can take. For instance, you can:

1. Inspect the Entire Facility

You can really learn about your building by exploring it in depth. Consider inspecting the building yourself or hiring inspectors to take a closer look at every part of the building. You may learn about certain potential problems early on that could have led to an unpleasant surprise if left unaddressed. You’ll also know more about how the building operates and determine how the layout will affect operations and emergency plans.

2. Figure Out What Requires Upgrades

For older drawing equipment and other systems, you need to know the original equipment’s intended use. Based on the functionality of your equipment, you can better determine what will require upgrades or complete replacements to bring your building into the modern age. 

3. Recover Information from Previous Managers

Find out what previous managers had to deal with and try to obtain their records. This can provide invaluable insight that helps you manage the property while further informing you of what requires updates and changes.

Work With the Drawing Specialists to Learn the Past and Move Forward

If you’re a building manager working with outdated engineering drawing systems and production methods, let the experts at DCM help move your business into the future.

With the help of our paperless drawing solutions, we can eliminate the need for extensive paper drawings, which can free up storage and make operations more efficient than ever. Less paper also makes for an even safer facility for occupants.

Simply hand your drawings to us and we’ll equip your business with a digital system that allows for easy organization. Through the implementation of an optimized and automated drawing system, you’ll never have to worry about losing important documents or spending time locating master drawings. You’ll never need to deal with the myriad hassles that come with outdated paper drawings.

Want to learn more about DCM’s capabilities and start working with the Drawing Specialists to digitize your drawings? Contact us today and we’ll put you in touch with one of our representatives.

More and more people are starting to make the transition to a purely digital lifestyle. In turn, businesses are going digital in response to the environmental, social, as well as corporate governance (ESG) movement. This is essentially leading people to “cancel” businesses that fail to go paperless. Here, we will discuss the importance of paperless plans in your architectural drawings.

Some businesses tend to use more paper than others. Businesses such as building design, facilities, and construction management companies often rely on paper drawings as well as other paperwork to facilitate the completion of various projects. However, as the ESG movement continues to grow and businesses seek to remain relevant and efficient, switching to digital formats is crucial.

Getting rid of paper will make your business more sustainable. It can also empower your operations as you incorporate a reliable digital solution.

Why Paperless Plans are Important

From an environmental standpoint, paper is one of the most wasteful materials out there. In fact, 40% of all waste in the U.S. consists of paper waste. This translates to 71.6 million tons of the country’s annual paper waste. Many may argue that switching to recycled paper is ideal, as moving one million tons of virgin paper fiber to fully recycled paper would have the same environmental impact as removing 248,000 cars from the road. If businesses got rid of paper entirely and went digital, the environmental effects could be even more significant.

Like any other waste, paper waste contributes to water, energy, and human capital consumption while wasting time, producing greenhouse gases, as well as polluting the air and water. Eliminating paper would help minimize this waste and contribute to a far healthier environment.

Paper isn’t just wasteful for the environment, either. Businesses don’t have a use for most paper materials. Consider the fact that the average business document has 19 copies. Additionally, over 81 billion sheets of paper are copied every month. Yet out of every 10 pages, most people only ever consult one. Printing those pages is also needlessly expensive. Over $5 billion is spent every year on printed materials, many of which wind up becoming obsolete.

By making the change to digital paperless plans, businesses can ultimately help save the environment and cut down on the cost of printing, among many other advantages.

The Benefits of Switching to Digital Plans

For many businesses, paper remains an integral yet wasteful resource, but it doesn’t have to be. With a digital solution, companies can save money, time, and energy with organized and easily managed plans. Here, we will further illustrate the ways your business can thrive with the help of digital plans. Read on the following specific benefits of paperless plans.

More Sustainable Practices

By removing paper from the equation, your business will be able to contribute to the ESG. This will reflect well on your business with others. You can avoid producing waste that continues to harm the environment as you become an industry leader.

Saved Time on Locating Documents

Employees in general often spend way too much time on locating and organizing documents. One Nintex survey of 1,000 full-time employees in the U.S. found that 49% of people had a hard time locating documents. Additionally, 43% experienced issues with document sharing and approval requests, and 33% struggled with versioning. By switching to an entirely digital solution, you can avoid all of these headaches with a far more efficient organizational process. Using a reliable platform, you can instantly search for and find the documents you need without sifting through file after file.

Saved Money on Paper Storage and More

As mentioned, paper is generally costly. Businesses would not only need to spend on printed materials, but they’d also need to cover the costs of storing massive amounts of paper and having staff spend time locating the most up-to-date versions. The costs of storing and protecting paper documents alone can climb up to as much as $241,307 over a period of 25 years. That doesn’t account for the myriad other expenses around relying on paper. If you want to eliminate these expenses, moving to a digital platform can make your business infinitely more cost-effective.

Increased Overall Productivity

Using the ideal platform, you can also dramatically boost productivity with scanned plans. Your plans can be so well-organized that employees are able to meet urgent requests almost instantly. You’ll be able to minimize the potential for costly delays and make sure all documentation is easily accessed as needed.

High-Quality Data

Paper forms come with the increased risk of incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete data entries when manually transcribing or entering them into multiple systems. Human error is a real problem that can culminate in missed data. Even poor handwriting could contribute to misunderstandings and incorrect transcriptions. Keeping all of your data digital can eliminate the possibility of human error and help ensure your data is of consistently higher quality.

Improved Workflows and Collaboration

Collaborations between employees, clients, as well as partners can be much more challenging when relying on paper plans. Digital platforms can help simplify collaboration, serving to generate new workflows, increase efficiency, and improve current processes. As a result, everyone on your team can make use of the features and services they need. This is with the ease of access to all necessary documentation.

Integrate a Digital Solution Today

To increase your business’s efficiency and avoid being “canceled” because of outdated practices, it’s best to make the transition to paperless plans as soon as possible. Through the implementation of a hands-on digital solution, you can effectively organize all of your plans, significantly cut costs, as well as enable your business to flourish.

Imagine having an organized drawing situation that everyone brags about. Imagine having your plans organized and knowing exactly where your most accurate drawings are in a digital format. Does this sound like the perfect setup? Contact us today!

On the surface, storing paper blueprints doesn’t seem terribly costly. You spend a few bucks on paper, spend a few more to print it out, and shove it in a box in the dusty blueprint dungeon until it needs to be retrieved. But what if we told you those thin little pieces of trees could be costing your business hundreds of thousands of dollars each year? Sounds crazy, right? Get ready. We’re about to dive into the real costs of outdated blueprint storage.

This post isn’t filled with hyperbole, conjecture, or guesswork. We’re busting out the research, flexing our science muscles, and digging deep into the wild and terrifying world of paper blueprint storage. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

A Few Bins of Blueprints, An Old Storage Room, and Thousands of Dollars in Wasted Revenue

We can condense blueprint-related costs down into three simple buckets:

• Storage
• Productivity
• Security

For now, we’re going to cover these three simple buckets. But it’s important to note most businesses also have intangible costs (e.g., tribal knowledge, etc.) that we aren’t including in this guide. But they’re still costs. They’re simply harder for us to discuss with science.

The Cost of Blueprint Storage

How much could it possibly cost to shove some paper blueprints into a small room? More than you think. For the purposes of this post, let’s assume you run a smaller facility and only need a 10′ x 30′ blueprint storage space. That’s about the size of a master bedroom. Before we even dive into the costs of setting this space up with the right equipment, we need to discuss the costs of this room even existing. Here’s a quick breakdown of how much that room is costing you:

Utilities

Storing paper blueprints requires specific heating and cooling conditions. If the room gets too cold, you risk overspending on utilities. If the room gets too hot, it can damage your blueprints. So, let’s say you keep it at a comfy 73 degrees. The average cost of heating and cooling a commercial building is roughly $2.10 per sq foot. That works out to around $650 per year. Of course, this is hyper-area-dependent. Urban areas in Toronto will likely have higher utility costs than suburban areas.

Safety

Around 40 to 60 percent of businesses that experience a disaster go out of business. So, letting a fire run loose in your blueprint storage room is obviously off the menu. You can expect to pay $2 to $7 per square foot for sprinkler systems. That’s another $2,000.

Security

While most of the security costs of this room are already covered in your facility security costs, you’ll likely need additional wiring and hardware. So, you can assume at least $300 to set up this room for physical security.

Maintenance

The average cost of maintenance is around $1.85 per square foot of business space. That’s around $550.

Rent

The average rent in Toronto is $23.62 per square foot. That’s roughly $7,000 per year for this space. Obviously, this cost differs by area, so you’ll need to self-calculate these totals based on your total rent.

It’s More than Just Storage Space

These costs are simply for space itself. Now we get to talk about costs associated with retrofitting this space to store blueprints. First, you’ll need shelving and racks. A simple shelf costs around $400. You’ll need at least 5 of these. That’s another $2,000. You’ll also need some racks, bins, and boxes. You can estimate around $1,500 for these. But wait! Who is going to organize these blueprints and ensure that they’re retrieved and returned in a timely manner? You’ll need someone on watch.

The average file manager has a salary of around $62,641. Of course, you could attempt to forgo a file manager in favor of an ad-hoc system, but you’ll add significant costs to the productivity bucket (which we’ll discuss next).

And we can’t forget about the cost of paper. There are two costs associated with blueprint paper. The paper itself (which can be expensive depending on the quality of print used and the size of the paper), as well as the cost of using paper from a customer perspective. Eighty-eight percent of consumers are more loyal to environmentally-friendly brands, and 87 percent will purchase products from brands with an environmentally-conscious workplace. We won’t actually include these costs (they’re hyper-intangible), but they’re something to keep in mind. We’ll also skip any guilt talk over the environment. But remember, paper comes from trees. And each piece of paper you store contributes to deforestation and carbonization. For now, let’s assume you spend $4,000 on printing your blueprints. Given the cost of blueprint-quality paper, printing services, and the number of blueprints the average facility stores, that’s a fair (actually, more than fair) assumption.

What You Could Do with the Space

Finally, you have the cost of lost opportunity. What could you be doing with that space instead? That space could be generating revenue, used for R&D, or leveraged for growth initiatives. Again, this cost isn’t even calculated into our total. But it’s certainly important to consider.

If we add these costs together, the space you store your blueprints in costs you around ~$78,000 per year. Yeah! That’s significant. But buckle up; because space is actually the smallest cost associated with blueprint storage. It gets worse.

The Cost of Productivity

Trying to quantify the cost of lost productivity isn’t easy. But we’re going to give it a shot. The average employee spends 2.5 hours per day searching for files and paper documents. To make things worse, they’ll only find those documents 56 percent of the time. According to IDC, paper documents like blueprints cost your company a 20 percent loss in total productivity. That’s terrifying, right? It’s hard to quantify just how insanely expensive this is for facilities. We’re not talking about thousands of dollars here; we’re talking about hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Of course, blueprints only make up a small percentage of your total paper load, but you can assume blueprints are costing you at least a hundred thousand in productivity each year.

How is this possible?

Well, just take a look at our post about the lifecycle of a paper blueprint. You’ll start to see how lost documents and tribal knowledge slowly consume productivity. Here’s a little hint: 7.5 percent of paper documents get lost and 3 percent are misfiled. Imagine the amount of time employees spend searching for non-existent blueprints. It’s maddening.

So, already paper documents like blueprints cost you 20 percent of your business’s overall productivity and incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs due to lost productivity. That’s massive. But it gets worse. Paper documents aren’t just a pain; they’re life-sapping. Eighty-five percent of employees are unhappy. And why wouldn’t they be? Ninety percent of them spend the majority of their long, arduous days with repetitive, mind-numbing, and boring-as-heck tasks. Here’s the big secret: unhappiness can destroy your profits. Happy employees make 37 percent more sales, create 21 percent higher profits, and take 10 times fewer sick days each year. In fact, disengagement costs businesses billions a year.

So, those teeny-tiny paper blueprints bleed hundreds of thousands in productivity, happiness, and lost sales. Yeah. And, to make things a little spookier, we still haven’t hit the biggest cost. Buckle up.

The Cost of Security

Facility blueprints are one of the most precious resources at your disposal. And losing blueprints to threat actors compromises your security, safety, and facility health. According to research, a breach impacting customer records costs the average business nearly $4 million to rectify. There is a good chance facility-related breaches will cost you even more. You may need to completely rewire security systems, deal with regulatory fines, reputation damage, and the ever-looming risk of employee safety hazards. Unfortunately, security is a major reason some businesses avoid digitizing. They fear the risks of cloud solutions. Here’s the problem: 21 percent of security incidents involve paper, and 61 percent of security attacks on mid-market facilities are paper-based. In other words, digital cloud storage backed by billions of dollars in R&D and security isn’t the worrying risk vector. Those easy-to-access pieces of paper in a dungy basement are far riskier.

You may be thinking “we have world-class physical security, those paper documents aren’t going anywhere.” Think again. Forty-seven percent of business leaders say their last hack was due to the accidental loss of a document by an employee — not a masked bandit. Misplacing a single blueprint can compromise your facility. It’s a major problem — especially when threat actors attack every 39 seconds on average.

In other words, security may not cost you today. But it will eventually. And a single breach can cost you millions.

Are You Ready to Digitize and Evolve Your Blueprint Ecosystem?

Tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the shredder each year? It’s time to evolve. At DCM, we provide a world-class blueprint digitization and organization platform for facility managers looking to maximize the value of their facility ecosystem. Contact us to learn how we can save you money, time, and headaches with your blueprint storage challenges!

Thinking About Digitizing Your Engineering Drawings? You’re Not Alone! Ninety-one percent of business owners who are on the path to digitization. Whether your motivation is investing in an engineering drawing digitization platform, or simply trying to reduce your paper wastage, you’ll need a top-tier service to convert your valuable drawings to a suitable digital format.

So, how do you spot the right scanning service? What should you do post-scanning?

Choosing Between Scanning and Platform: Your Engineering Drawing Solution

A whopping 98 percent of engineering and construction companies recognize digitization as the future, leading to a surge in digital transformation in AEC and facility management. The initial step to digitization almost always starts with documentation. Filing cabinets, costing over +$2,000 annually for maintenance and occupying 30% of employee time, are an evident choice for starting the digital transformation.

So, how can you digitize these documents?

One of the simplest and widely suggested solutions is scanning. You send the documents to a scanning service, get them digitized, and arrange them in a digital system. That’s often where engineering drawing projects begin. Dusty bins of documents and old flash drives aren’t secure, easy to navigate, or readily available. They are thus often dispatched to scanning services for conversion.

While there’s no issue with this digitization method (after all, we offer scanning services ourselves), it’s good to remember that scanning services are essentially stopgap solutions rather than comprehensive problem solvers. Post scanning, you’ll need to address several issues:

• Where are your files going post-scanning?
• What filing system do you use?
• What are your naming conventions?
• How are you sharing, using, and managing these digital documents on a larger scale?
• How do you ensure format consistency across departments?

Making the Shift to a Digital Platform

While document scanning is an excellent initial step, eventually, you will need to transition to a digital platform—think echo—for your engineering drawings. Scanning is undoubtedly effective for temporary bursts of digitization, but it isn’t entirely transformative.

After determining that scanning fits your needs for both digital and physical issues, you need to consider where to get your documents scanned. Most businesses rely on traditional scanning services, effective for marketing and sales documents. But, engineering documents call for exceptional care and deserve distinguished treatment. At DCM, we offer top-tier engineering drawing scanning as kind of an “unlisted” service. Let’s delve into how our service compares to traditional scanning services when it comes to engineering drawings, our specialty area in digitization.

The Reality of Using Standard “Scanning Houses” for Engineering Drawings

Should you choose a regular scanning service to digitize your engineering drawings, prepare for a standard outcome. This typically means one preset is applied across all your documents. They get scanned with no specific editing, cropping, or customization. In essence, the resultant scan might be as good (or bad) as that which the small legal practice down the block gets. Needless to say, this is a far from ideal situation.

We often find new clients looking to migrate to our echo platform after experiencing disappointments with conventional scanning houses. Once these clients come on board and digitize using our system, it’s common to find a significant portion of their drawings poorly formatted, devoid of critical elements, mislabeled, or simply blurred.

We aren’t knocking on scanning houses. They just aren’t built to handle engineering drawings. This is such a niche space. So, it’s a little unfair to expect them to have the right equipment, experience, and set up to handle these drawings. But the point still remains, scanning houses do a poor job at digitizing engineering drawings.

However, the fact remains: when it comes to digitizing engineering drawings, typical scanning houses often fall short of expectations.

The Drawing Specialists vs. Traditional Scanning Houses: The Key Difference

DCM stands out with its custom scanning equipment explicitly tailored for engineering drawings and a team of specialists with 69 years of combined experience. Our setup is directly aimed at addressing your specific needs.

How is DCM different from traditional scanning houses?

1. Caters each scan to the paper type and quality of your engineering drawing
2. Repairs engineering drawings as needed, including taping, removing staples, etc.
3. Crops and edits engineering drawings as needed
4. Rotates images to fit the proper orientation before each scan
5. Completely cleans images up, including removing cloudy, blurry, or smudged areas
6. Custom-names the file to meet the needs of your system
7. Scans in the proper DPI settings for each drawing
8. Leverages world-class Quality Control Process (yes, it’s the same one we use for our platform!)
9. Fully-audits of each drawing before scanning, eliminating duplicates and irrelevant drawings in the process
10. Completely understands the end-to-end lifecycle of engineering drawings, and leverages those insights to produce the best-possible scans at the highest possible quality
11. Has the capacity to handle large quantities of drawings (e.g., we’ve had clients with +150k drawings to convert)
12. Does an on-site gathering and packaging of engineering drawings

In summary, DCM excels in handling engineering drawings from every angle.

It’s that straightforward.

Ready to Digitize Your Engineering Drawings?

We’re ready to help you digitally with over 60 years of experience and cutting-edge technology, DCM is prepared to guide your facility through a seamless digital transformation, one drawing at a time. Embrace the future with The Drawing Specialists and start your journey towards digital transformation – one carefully chosen drawing at a time.

Fill out the form below to discover more.

It can result in significant problems if there is no clear person in charge of tidying blueprint files. Our drawing management software can significantly increase the accuracy as well as the efficiency of your blueprint file organization system. 

What are the common issues associated with having no one in charge of your blueprint files?

It can be difficult to quickly find any piece of information in a large number of files if there is no designated person to tidy up blueprint files.

Problems Go Undetected

It’s hard enough to keep engineering drawings organized. Moreover, adding an internal process to keep these drawings up-to-date with the changes can feel daunting. Having a designated person in charge of tidying up your blueprint files regularly can go a long way toward catching and fixing small issues right away.

Disorganization Increases Over Time

Not tidying up your blueprint files regularly can lead to more significant disorganization over time. Large numbers of employees that use your files may have different ideas of what “organized” means. In addition, a filing system that gets messier over time and not cleaned up can result in losing information. Or not being able to find important information when you need it. 

Issues Can Still Arise if Someone is in Charge

Having a dedicated person in charge of maintaining your blueprint files can minimize many of the most serious issues that can occur if no one is keeping track of them. However, human error and workplace inconsistencies mean that problems can still occur. 

Overload of Files

Depending on the size of your company, you may have too many blueprint files for one employee to manage efficiently. Large or excessive files may not fit properly on the program that you want to use. And they may be too much for one person to keep organized. This is especially true if you have more files than you need. In addition, many businesses only need about 30 percent of the files they have.

Employee Turnover

Passing every detail of your file management system from employee to employee can be challenging if your company experiences frequent employee turnover. Particularly in the blueprint file manager position. Important information can be misplaced, passwords can be forgotten, and new employees may adopt slightly different organizational systems over time. 

Unclear Processes

A company with a large number of blueprint files may require multiple complex processes to effectively manage them. A person may not have a thorough understanding of every step of maintaining your organization. After all, how in the world are you supposed to know how to catch up on years of no drawing management? You didn’t get a degree in “Drawing Management” and neither did anyone on your staff.

Misalignment Across Departments

Large companies that are comprised of several departments may experience challenges surrounding communication and organization across departments. A blueprint file organizational structure or goal that works well for one area may not be thoroughly implemented in other areas. 

Automate Your System to Prevent Problems

Having someone in charge of tidying up your blueprint files is certainly better than having no one in charge. It’s a helpful approach to create a relatively automated system to manage file organization. This method automatically keeps your blueprint files organized. It also ensures that the various departments within your company are adhering to the same procedures and eliminates human error to minimize any issues that may come from employee turnover, lack of clarity of processes, or other inconsistencies. Our custom drawing management software was designed with the unique needs of your company in mind. It also offers a variety of highly-customizable options for automating your blueprint file organization. 

The Drawing Specialists are here to help you find modern solutions for keeping your blueprint files organized. Contact our Drawing Specialists today to get your customized strategy for efficiently managing your blueprint files!

A cluttered engineering drawing causes wastes of time and resources, as your computer moves slower and slower, and there is significant chance of corruption. Here are eight ways to declutter an engineering drawing.

Audit and Recover

As these commands are generally used to remove errors from AutoCAD drawings, they can be perfect for a drawing that is overbloated with data.

To perform this function, use the AUDIT command (in the command line). The Command line will now ask you to specify whether you want to fix detected errors or not. Type Y for yes, and press enter to find all detected errors. 

The Recover command can be used when the drawing is corrupt to the point where it can’t be reopened. In this situation, open a blank drawing and type in the command Recover, and a window will open with a list of files to select from. AutoCAD will attempt to reopen the file and remove the errors from it.

DGN Purge

And sometimes a file may seem bloated even though there’s no data. This will become evident when certain functions seem to go slow, like selecting objects, or a slow cursor, or copy and pasting. 

The worst part about this error is that it can spread to other files if parts of the affected file are copied and pasted into it. The underlying cause of this issue is an improper data import of DGN files causing a massive drawing database.

With AutoCAD 2015 or later, type PURGE into the command line, then select “Automatically purge orphaned data”. The problem should then be fixed.

PURGE

These are probably the most common tools used to clean a drawing. Purging a drawing means to clean all unused or redundant entities such as blocks, layers, and line types. To use the Purge command, type PURGE into the command line, and a purge window will open. You can select specific things to purge, or hit Purge All. You may need to hit Purge All more than once to get rid of everything. You will know it’s clean when the Purge All button gets grayed out. 

Overkill

Overkill is another cleanup tool that deletes or merges all overlapping or duplicate entities. To use this, type OVERKILL into the command bar. You will be prompted to select an area, which you can do, or you can select ALL, and your entire drawing will be applied with Overkill. 

Write Block

This method should be used as a last resort because it causes a loss of data from your drawing, including layer assignments. The command transfers all drawing elements to another clean and blank template and leaves all of the unwanted clutter behind. The command for this is WBLOCK.

It will open the write block window, from which you can select Objects, and then select the base point for your selection, after which you expand the selection to encompass all drawing entities in your drawing area. You can also use the Entire button instead of selecting an area, but by selecting the area yourself you are sure you’re not selecting invisible layers outside your drawing area.

In the Destination window, specify a file path and name, and the cleaned drawing will go there.

Cleaning Unreferenced Regapps

The drawing’s performance may start to show signs of slowing and growing beyond its normal size if there are unregistered application IDs. To clean these, type -Purge into the command line. Then select Regapp and the command line will prompt you to select Regapps over and over until all are purged. 

There are other applications of Regapp, and if you’re looking to purge more than one file, the Regapp ID cleanup utility tool is a batch process you can use.

Drawing Purge Add-In

This is a free add-in from the Autodesk app store. This tool can purge almost all redundant data and unused entities in your drawing including unused DGN data.

If a drawing contains an X-ref then it will scan for DGN data in referenced files as well and ask you if you want to clean data from those also.

The tool can be used in bulk to clean many drawings at once. To do this, click on the Batch Purge icon and a batch drawing purge and settings window will appear. You can select which drawings you wish to purge.

Smartpurger

Also available from the Autodesk app store is Smartpurger. In its trial version it can purge a maximum of 10 files, but the full version can do unlimited files.