Engineering Document Management

The scope of engineering document management has increased substantially over the last 10 years. Improved technology permits larger, more complex projects while evolving CAD systems allow engineering firms to account for every detail, no matter how small. The result? Large or wide-format drawings that are cumbersome to transport, difficult to track and that make collaboration between colleagues and clients difficult. But there's a better way.

Plan to Scan

It's now common practice for engineering firms to scan large drawings, piece by piece, in an effort to make these documents portable. While this offers the benefit of a digital original in case physical drawings are lost and allows improved collaboration across project leaders, large format scanning may come with an unintended side effect: loss of quality. This may happen when the “seams” of large document pieces don't exactly line up, or if scanning quality doesn't match the original DPI. The problem is made worse when partners or clients attempt to print these drawings — often, the result is a blurry, unusable mess.

A Better Way

At Digital Documents, LLC, we see engineering document management differently. The key to success? Starting with the end deliverable in mind. This means thinking beyond the document — what does ROI look like for a particular project, and how does the drawing factor in? What level of quality and accessibility are needed, and how many changes are anticipated before project completion? To help answer these questions we offer document scanning cost assessment and ROI analysis, which lets companies identify any weaknesses in their current document management strategies along with giving them a clear view of how digital conversion can improve the bottom line.

Opt for Expertise

The biggest challenge when it comes to document management for engineering firms? Finding vendors that have the right mix of document scanning expertise and industry-leading technology. At Digital Documents, we employ a full team of Large Format Scanning Experts to assess company needs, offer several scanning options and deliver quick turnarounds. Our dDTruView and dDOptimaOCR technologies, meanwhile, provide the backbone of high quality grayscale conversion, full text optical character recognition (OCR) along with file naming and coding. Bottom line? We don't simply scan large format engineering documents, but take the time to understand how these documents impact the success of a company's document management solution and then deliver tailored services to match.

Large format engineering drawings are among the most detailed and complex produced in any industry. It's no longer enough to simply scan these images and hope for the best — to maximize ROI and improve document management, the key is a holistic scanning approach backed by industry-leading expertise.