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?
- Caters each scan to the paper type and quality of your engineering drawing
- Repairs engineering drawings as needed, including taping, removing staples, etc.
- Crops and edits engineering drawings as needed
- Rotates images to fit the proper orientation before each scan
- Completely cleans images up, including removing cloudy, blurry, or smudged areas
- Custom-names the file to meet the needs of your system
- Scans in the proper DPI settings for each drawing
- Leverages world-class Quality Control Process (yes, it’s the same one we use for our platform!)
- Fully-audits of each drawing before scanning, eliminating duplicates and irrelevant drawings in the process
- 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
- Has the capacity to handle large quantities of drawings (e.g., we’ve had clients with +150k drawings to convert)
- 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.