Case Study: Facility Document Management™
The Challenge
St. Joseph’s Hospital is Catholic Healthcare West’s flagship facility and covers approximately 2.1 million square feet of space over a multitude of buildings. Over the years, numerous renovation projects and master plans, which included demolitions and new constructions, left the facility with a cumbersome collection of more than 30,000 construction drawings covering all major projects on the campus.
The facility’s construction and facility staff were continuously faced with the arduous task of trying to locate the most recent version of construction documents, eliminating duplicates and making sure the set includes all the relevant disciplines for the specific objectives in mind. In addition, precious time of the facility management staff was being wasted searching and sorting through thousands of documents.
The Solution
An intelligent, centralized web-based system that would allow St. Joseph’s Hospital to electronically manage its reference construction documents was deemed essential and Advanced Technologies Group, Inc. was called in to help by implementing its Facility Document Management™ (FDM) solution.
The project initially required review and sorting of the construction drawings to eliminate duplicate sets and those drawings that were no longer of value to the facility. Upon the completion of the initial task, ATG then started with the scanning of the documents using high definition engineering document scanning systems. Utilizing the FDM component of Enterprise Active Visual System™, ATG’s enterprise facility information system, the process continued with the creation of a relational database for each document. The database included information on project number, building, floor, date, and the A/E firm responsible for the project and the corresponding construction drawings.
The web component of the FDM allows authorized users to easily generate reports of different buildings and query reports based on any combination of above mentioned data fields and the ability to view and print the desired drawings in seconds.
Authorized users can instantly access facility-related information and run reports via the Internet.
The Results
St. Joseph’s Hospital has been experiencing considerable reduction in time spent finding, duplicating, and forwarding documents to different contractors and consultants involved with various projects on the campus. Instead, consultants are provided with limited online access to the FDM. Availability of this information from a centrally located system has also meant sizable reductions in professional fees charged by consultants for document retrieval.
In addition, the document management system has allowed the organization to be more responsive to compliance requirements and interdepartmental requests. All information is accessed online by authorized users anywhere, anytime, and in a matter of seconds. The solution has also eliminated the chance of different users accessing different versions of the same drawings. This project has also eliminated the chance of the documents getting lost, never returned, or damaged in floods or fires.
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