Are your facility drawings optimized to work for you? When it comes to your facility drawing storage solutions, most organizations should consider:
- Space availability
- Users’ safety
- Convenience of operations
- The final product
- Different operational aspects of achieving the right production results
We already know that a facility’s paper drawings follow a certain journey. But is it possible to eliminate frictions that lower productivity in order to improve your drawings’ accessibility and increase their ROI?
One approach you can take is to digitize your facility drawings.
Digitizing your drawings will make accessing them faster and more accurate, and ultimately get you the best ROI. How does digitizing your blueprint files get you the highest return on investment? Let’s explore that now!
1. Ease of Access and Distribution of Facility Drawings
The easiest way to digitize your facility drawings is by scanning them. You send your documents to a scanning service, like DCM’s hands-on service, and create a digital file system where any facility professional can access them whenever needed.
While scanning is a great start, you’ll need to move your facility drawings to a digital platform like echo to make them accessible universally in a matter of seconds. This improved accessibility allows any facility professional — architects, engineers, facility managers — to access the drawings simultaneously on any device. As a result, they can view the blueprints and make annotations without any need for paper.
Users can review annotations quickly, making the flow of information more efficient. This easy access and distribution of your drawings saves on transportation and paper costs.
The accessibility of digitized drawings also helps:
- Prevent the loss of or damage to drawings
- Allow easy access to previous versions of the facility’s drawings
- Easily monitor and adjust outdated drawings
2. Ability to Identify Potential for Expansion, Additions, and Renovation
Because echo Search makes it easy to share your facility’s drawings with relevant people, it’s easy to identify places for potential expansion, additions, and renovation.
A digital facility drawing remains unaltered, and in case of changes, the file system stores all the previous versions. This makes future facility management easier. This tidy drawing file management comes in handy when:
- Dealing with potential breakdowns
- Making plans for expansions
- Planning to make future maintenance easy
- Dealing with emergencies
All these allow easy organization.
3. Prevent Health and Safety Issues
Today, more facility management professionals consider environmental services, occupational health and safety, and air quality solutions for their facilities. You want your blueprints to help prevent minor issues from turning into big ones that could cost a lot to fix later.
Digital facility drawings enable easier monitoring of systems such as:
- Fire sprinkler systems
- Alarm systems
- Emergency lighting
- Emergency preparedness plans
Our baseline Master CAD Plans take this a step further by setting you up with a single digital drawing that shows multiple architectural disciplines. This optimizes your team’s productivity, especially when it comes to maintaining your facility’s health and safety.
4. Ability to Refer to Old or Future Blueprints for Facilities
Sometimes it’s necessary for facility managers to refer to older or future versions of drawings. Possible reasons include:
- Inspecting the entire facility to learn more about the building
- Figuring out what requires renovations
- Recovering information from previous managers
When a facility only uses paper plans, it can accumulate a huge archive that is difficult to navigate. This makes it tough to find the specific drawing you need. With echo, different versions of a particular drawing are easy to find!
Digitized facility drawings in echo save everyone’s time. All a person needs is the right keyword to locate the correct file in seconds, regardless of the size of the database.
5. Financial Savings Over Time
There are several ways that digitized drawings will save you and your facility money. These go behind the obvious savings from less paper printing and transportation.
Digitization Lowers Storage Costs
Maintaining paper storage is expensive. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you spend on physical facility drawings:
- Paper costs
- Printing costs
- Storage space
- Security
- Maintenance
- Lost opportunity for what could be done with the storage space
Ultimately, physical storage can end up costing you quite a lot each year! With your digital drawings stored in the cloud, you can accumulate a huge archive of them without the need to store and preserve paper, saving you money.
Increased Productivity Leads to Increased Profitability
Productivity and profitability are intertwined. A digitized file system allows facility professionals to access drawings in seconds from anywhere in the world. All any user at the facility needs is the right keyword.
Additionally, with digital drawings you can reproduce any section of your facility drawing in another project, which saves you the time of starting blueprints from scratch, saving you time and money.
Easy to Catch and Correct Errors
Digitizing a facility plan allows you to fix construction productivity issues that stem from design mistakes. For the most part, these mistakes translate to errors that require additional hours, materials, and money to fix.
Design mistakes, searching for project data, and resolving the resulting conflict add up to $177.5 billion annually in the USA. These issues stem from inaccurate project data and ineffective communication nearly half the time.
Digitizing your facility drawings can let you quickly identify errors in your designs, saving you money over time.
Digitize and Evolve Your Facility Drawings
Disorganized drawings, missing drawings, outdated drawings, damaged drawings — all of these limit how your facility drawings can work for you.
It’s time to evolve your drawing management solution. At DCM, we’re known as the Drawing Specialists because we’re deeply passionate about:
- Solving drawing management problems
- Simplifying drawing management
- Bringing clarity to drawing history
Contact us today to help you learn how we can help make your facility drawings work for you.