Construction drawings are nothing but instructions drawn by the designer to interpret the owner’s ideas. These explain the materials, pieces, and parts needed for a project and describe the places these items should be placed in the field.
Hosted construction drawing management can be simple or complicated; hence, it is essential to understand the drawings to complete the project correctly and efficiently.
Drawings help Planners Make Decisions
Blueprints or construction plans are nothing but 2D–drawings that illustrate the details of a project. These display a visual representation of what should be built. All the information required such as parts, dimensions, placement, and materials can be found in the construction drawings to ensure that the project is complete.
Digital drawing management is becoming more and more popular. Every project is different, and so does the drawings which need meticulous planning and work. With so many different types of drawings required in a construction project, it is but essential that the team involved should be able to read it thoroughly.
Order of Drawings in a Construction Plan
Well, let’s admit that a residential project includes dozens of drawings (sometimes more than 100). There is no standard set on the number of drawings to be involved in a plan. The reasons can vary from the level of detail preferred by the architect, customs of the architect’s office to the project itself. Henceforth, it is essential to inspect the whole set of plans before knowing what is included by the architect.
Generally, an architect identifies every drawing with a number and letter. The letter signifies plan series.
A typical order of drawing includes a cover sheet and plan index. It follows the following order
- ‘G’ stands for General Sheets: Plan index, Cover sheet, and location plans
- ‘A’ for Architectural Plans and Site: Ceiling plans, floor plans, roof plans, sections, elevations, wall sections, and others. It is dependent on the preferred level of detail by the architect.
- ‘S’ stands for Structural engineering: Framing plans for floors, foundations, and roofs
- ‘E,’ ‘P,’ and ‘M’ stands for electrical, plumbing and mechanical components
- Door and Window Schedule and Finish Schedule: Door, window and other internal types and finishes.
- Specifications: Description of the materials in detail.
Each drawing attributes a title block in the lower right corner. It shows the name of a particular drawing, the drawing number, name who prepared, the record of approval, the data and the scale. An architect can either create the drawings on a gridded sheet to make it easier to pinpoint the location of different components of construction easy. It helps people view the sheets from remote areas at the same time.
And if a drawing is revised, it will include a revision block. Having a look at the revision block is essential. It ensures that you are looking at the latest and approved drawing.
Cloud technology is growing bigger and bigger. It works well within the construction industry in which indexing, capturing, sharing, storing and securing can get complicated and get expensive, sometimes small to medium businesses cannot even afford it.
For people working in the construction industry looking for a hosted drawing management software, they are fortunate. There are many SaaS (Software-as-a-software) drawing management solutions in the market.
Irrespective of the kind of hosted drawing management software you choose, here are a few features of the cloud-based SaaS models.
It Isn’t Expensive
All the companies looking to move to a hosted drawing management do have concerns about the expense to be incurred. Debunking the initial costs of the software, a cloud-based software removes the requirement for complex IT architectures or high powered servers. For instance, if you compare the monthly fee of hosted engineering drawing management pricing, you will find that it is way less than the expense on a premise-based solution.
You must consider the money your company will save in operating system upgrades, system upgrades, server maintenance, UPS and security infrastructure. Don’t forget the IT support it requires.
A Boost in Security
Every company is worried about security especially when using cloud-based DMS solution. It implies that if you can access the programs and files remotely, then even the hacker can do so. So, what is stopping him?
It provides immense relief to know that there are plenty of things that stop hackers from doing so. First, the primary job of a hosted drawing management software is to look after the security more efficiently, and it does its job far better than an in-house IT system. The latter has to divide its resource and time to an array of things apart from security. The hosted software especially the cloud-hosted gets transmitted over the networks and then gets stored in the database. Encryption makes it difficult to break the data by hackers or others having no authorization to it.
A boost in Mobility and Flexibility
A hosted drawing management system makes it easy to access the construction drawings through various devices and smartphones. With millions using smartphones worldwide today, it is a beautiful way to ensure that the team remains updated all the time. It is useful when one has to accomplish markups in real time while on the field. It is shared immediately with all the members of the team using the similar drawing set.
Increase in collaboration
To make a project successful, cooperation and teamwork are essential. The priority in the construction industry is to work as a team. It is important because when a team member makes a mistake of working from an old construction drawing, it could result in losses in hundreds to thousands. A hosted drawing management software assist the team members in loading, sharing and making markups to the drawings in real time. It ensures that everyone who is working in the same drawing set receives updates instantly.
Automatic Data Backup and Automatic Software Updates
Time is everything in the constructions industry or any other industry for that matter. Everyone who is busy and wish to make things happen, the most bothersome thing is the IT team telling you to install system updates which can take a lot of time.
However, hosted drawing management software makes it easy to update and install the updates. This converts into time and money saved for the organization.
Additionally, the hosted systems have automatic data backups thus ensuring that you don’t lose your data and it can be checked from any computer having an internet connection. It can be helpful in instances when the laptop faces a hard drive problem which can wipe away the data stored, or the computer loses all the stored data.
Hosted Data Is Environment-Friendly
A lot of companies today are focusing more and more in going green as an effort to deal with the environmental issues becoming more prevalent on our planet. These companies are well aware of the fact the real sustainability needs solutions which can tackle wastefulness. So, going with a hosted drawing management service is a more viable and environmentally friendly option and has reduced carbon footprint as compared to the premise-based DMS system.
It can be attributed to the ability of the hosted software which offers a virtual server and not any hardware or physical products. It reduces travel-related emissions, paper waste and boosts energy efficiency.
Engineering Drawing Management
Drawings display a significant part of the intellectual property of an organization. Illustrations include vital information to be used to construct, design, operate and maintain tremendous fixed assets. Maintaining the integrity of the data is essential. Digital drawing management must be well thought and organized for enhanced document management of the project.
Engineering drawings are far more complicated than other business documents as they are created by using CAD (computer-aided design). It may also have compound documents containing unlimited linked files and multiple layers of information.
Benefits of construction drawing management
- No drawing goes missing and can be accessed within the drawing management system
- No confusion on the latest drawings having been distributed to the people concerned
- The hosted drawing management system can be used for legal purposes
- It has in-built security to restrict users from doing certain things. People authorized can update the drawing management system.
To Sum Up
The comprehensive illustration of the drawing construction management in this article should help the readers understand drawings and their use in the construction industry.