The As-built Drawing Challenge

Most organizations have rooms full of paper drawings, computers full of nested files and folders full of numbered and cryptically coded PDF’s or DWG’s.  Often one person acts as the librarian that controls these rooms. What do you do when your people need to identify the most recent as-built drawing for an upcoming capital project renovation? And if you are able to find it can you easily share the drawing with internal staff, contractors and consultants? Can you quickly access a drawing when you are on site?

At BuiltSpace technologies we believe your information should be easy to access. We add the building spaces to our database and descriptive “meta-data” to drawing files like; author, discipline, design stage and location in the building. This allows you to search and find the drawing you need, even if we don’t know exactly what we are looking for.

   

A project manager has been contracted for upcoming renovation of a basement mechanical room in an elementary school.

Accessing the document library for his school he sees all the drawings for the building. He knows the location of the project and that he needs the mechanical as-built. With two mouse clicks he filters all mechanical as-built relating to the basement level.  There are two.  With three clicks he filtered 70 drawings to the two most relevant ones.

The next day he is on site and realizes that he also requires a structural drawing from the original build. Using a tablet he quickly filters the same 70 drawings to find the structural as-built (scanned hand drawings). He is able to view this on his tablet and quickly make a decision to keep the project on track.

How does this play out in our organization now?