“This year I’ll figure out how to clean up my drawing room,” says the busy FM. Every year it’s on their list, but every year it gets bumped down each time some other project comes up. Well, a new year means a fresh start for resolutions that ended up being swept under the rug last year. And that goes for personal and professional resolutions. This is your year to get this project rolling!
It’s daunting when all your facility’s drawings and blueprints are stored in a chaotic mess of a basement or archives room. You want a fresh start, but where do you even start?
Well, we’re the Drawing Specialists, as named by your peers, and we’re here to help you get your drawing mess in order.
Here are 5 tips to clean up your drawing room in 2023:
Tip 1: Use Your Blueprint Space Efficiently
Are you making the best use of your storage space? You can bring some order to your drawing room chaos by making sure your drawings aren’t just stored haphazardly in boxes and on shelves. Use a category system to ensure drawings are stored in places that make sense to you and your team members. Your team will be able to more easily find them when they’re needed. You could save more time in the future by taking the time to sort through and categorize everything once.
Tip 2: Store Your Hard Copy Drawings Upright
One big mistake we’ve seen is seeing piles and piles of documents stored stacked on top of each other. This system may seem like a good way to use space on the surface, but stacks of paper aren’t efficient. They end up creating a stressful mess to sort through whenever you need something at the bottom of the pile.
Instead, you should be storing your documents upright. Going a step further, use labels on the ends or corners of each drawing that make it easy to tell what you’re looking at with a glance. With a system like this in place, you can pull drawings off a shelf like you would books at a library.
Tip 3: Control Your Paper Clutter with a Filing System
Drawing rooms often have tons of obsolete or redundant copies of drawings. This makes it hard to tell which version of a drawing is the most recent and updated. You may think you’ve found the most recent version of a drawing. But, whoops! It turns out the drawing you actually needed was buried in the next pile over. One of your team members put it back in the wrong spot! Working off an obsolete drawing by accident could end up wasting a lot of time and money. Talk about frustrating!
You need a strong filing system in place to ensure your paper clutter is kept manageable and organized. One simple way to ensure your team is always working from the most recent drawing is to use stickers in the corners of each drawing. A small green sticker can denote that a drawing is the most recent version. Then, a red sticker can be placed over it when a newer drawing is made.
Tip 4: Take the Plunge and Go Digital
So far, we’ve talked about ways to clean up your drawing room’s paper mess. But the best way of dealing with paper chaos is to eliminate paper altogether!
In fact, workers expect digital conveniences at their fingertips. To put it in perspective, it’s jarring for a worker to have their digital family photos automatically organized by facial recognition on their phone, but then go to work to use a dusty, 60-year-old filing cabinet to manage drawings and documents.
Storing your drawings digitally boosts productivity and ensures your drawings are safe from workplace disasters like floods or fires.
But how exactly should you go about applying digital transformation to your hard copy drawings? That brings us to…
Tip 5: Call in the Blueprint Experts
You could call a run-of-the-mill scanning house to technically get the job done. At least you’ll have a hard drive with all your drawings on it, and your paper mess will be successfully turned into a digital mess. That’s a step in the right direction, right?
Or you could call the Drawing Specialists to equip your facility with a single source of truth that helps your team members find any drawing of any discipline needed in seconds. We offer a range of services to custom-tailor the ideal Drawing Management Strategy for your facility.
In fact, we will do the dirty work with our hands-on drawing service and audit all of your hard copy drawings for you, saving you all the time and money of doing it in-house! We don’t just do the tasks above; we take it ten steps further by using the secret sauce we’ve developed after handling millions of drawings over our nearly two decades in the Drawing Management business.
The Drawing Specialists Will Help Clean Up Your Drawing Room
At DCM, we have the perfect team to help you with the process of cleaning up your drawing room and turning your paper mess into a simple-to-use, cloud-based digital archive. You can rest easy knowing you have our certified Drawing Specialists and years of experience creating custom-tailored Drawing Management Strategies for our clients on your side. We are confident that our team can provide you with the perfect solution to conquer your drawing room chaos. Book a discovery call today to learn more about how DCM can support your facility’s unique needs.