There’s no doubt about it – one of the most important components of every city is its infrastructure. The roads and sidewalks, the potholes and cracks, the structure of bridges, and any other number of factors. What a lot of people don’t stop to think about is how it could be causing these problems. Improper management of blueprints and outdated Engineering Drawings can make errors stand out, which can become costly to your business. Therefore, it is important to have best practices in place; one secure central location and an organized single source of truth as a document repository for your team(s). The right tools can help facility managers save time and money, and do their jobs more efficiently. In this article, we will talk about how much money cities waste each year because of outdated engineering drawings.
How Do Outdated Drawings Cause Problems?
Cities are facing a growing problem with unorganized and outdated engineering drawings. As the number of city employees shrinks, so does the number of people who know the history of the building.
This leaves cities in a bind. They have to decide between paying more and more money for contractors, new plans created or leaving old problems unresolved. The latter option means that some neighborhoods will continue to suffer from poor water quality, unsafe roads, and other issues that could have been avoided with a drawing preservation storage, FM technology and efficient operations to retrieve both hard and digital versions of their most accurate operational drawings.
Most cities have engineers who create drawings of every aspect of their infrastructure — streets, water mains, sewers, etc. These are usually stored in an electronic format on computers, and drives in silo’d departments throughout the city. They’re also printed out on paper and kept in desk drawers, piled in offices, or as we’ve seen levelling out a fridge in head office. Yikes!
Issues That Occur When City Employees Use Outdated Engineering Drawings
Cities and states waste money on outdated engineering drawings. The main issue is that as engineers work on projects, they use different versions of the same drawing. This leads to confusion and mistakes in construction.
If an engineer needs something that is not readily available at their local hardware store, they may need to order it from another state or country. This takes time and costs money for fuel and shipping fees. In addition, there are issues with city employees using outdated drawings because it can cause them to spend more money than necessary on materials or equipment.
What’s the Cost of Using Outdated Engineering Drawings?
When it comes to engineering drawings, the cost of using outdated ones can be quite high. The reason is that they are not only inefficient, but they can also lead to costly mistakes that risk the health and safety of the community and building. Some of the most common ways in which outdated engineering drawings can end up costing your company money include:
- Inaccurate Quotes: When your team is using old plans, they will not be able to give accurate quotes for any work that needs to be done. This will cause delays in the project and make it more difficult for your team to receive payment on time.
- Accidents: If you are working with outdated drawings, there is a much higher chance that accidents will occur during the construction process, which could lead to injuries and accidents for some workers on site. This can cause you to have to pay out more money in medical bills and compensation claims from families of deceased workers if you do not utilize FM technology and efficient operations in your facilities department.
- Time Wasted: If your team has unorganized and outdated engineering drawings, it can lead to them spending more time decoding symbols and interpreting outdated language than actually being able to gain the needed information from them, like they should be able to do with up-to-date documents and organized plans.
There are a lot of different variables to take into account when estimating construction costs. However, there’s no doubt that using outdated drawings will cause problems throughout the project. Whether more money is wasted on extra materials, more time is wasted on extra labour hours, or more time is wasted making mistakes due to an inability to read drawings, there is a clear cost associated with using old documents. And did we mention the enhanced sustainability going green will have on the future generations and the future of FM’s work?
How Can echo Help?
Updating blueprints can seem like a difficult, time-consuming task. However, physical blueprints can get lost and other issues can arise that make it difficult for Facility Planning Managers to do their jobs efficiently. With that in mind, there are plenty of ways by adopting DCM’s four synergistic drawing management solutions including echo Search can make updating your engineering drawings as simple and efficient as possible.
The cost of using outdated engineering drawings is higher than most would think. Cities across the US are wasting millions of dollars on defunct engineering drawings and take-off lists. We’ve seen the effects that these budget leaks have had on cities such as Los Angeles and Cedar Rapids, IA. We can help you save money by preventing this problem.
One way that echo Search can encourage a more fluid workflow for your planning team by giving you access to feed data from your latest .dwg (e.g., live material even on drawings older than a few minutes), so you don’t have to worry about wasted time and effort trying to track down the latest version of a drawing or the correct format. Did your team forget where they saved the design file? No problem. With echo Search you can search through millions of files with ease in one single source of truth no matter how many sites you are managing. Narrowing down the search no matter what and who is looking for the most up-to-date version. With an easily accessible web-based storage system, echo Search can allow your team to quickly find previous versions, check in and out, markup the latest changes and submit for approval. This can help managers save a lot of time wasted looking through cabinets.
Cities waste time and money through outdated engineering drawings and unorganized blueprints. Visit DCM Inc. to find your drawings in seconds. The Drawing Specialists an help you save time and money by creating the drawings and blueprints you need to avoid costly errors and by adopting these four synergistic drawing management solutions will provide your team with one secure central location and an organized single source of truth as a document repository.