ARC Document Solutions offers new centralized graphic dashboard for construction, building management documents

Project Information Management Dashboard (PRNewsFoto/ARC Document Solutions)

ARC Document Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: ARC), a leading document solutions provider to design, engineering, construction, and facilities management professionals, today introduced its Project Information Management (PIM) services, a major addition to its Construction Document and Information Management solutions. Designed for active construction projects with thousands of documents, PIM offers quick and easy access to building plans and other information from a centralized, graphic dashboard. Once a project is complete, the dashboard and associated documents can then be turned over to the project owners to facilitate building operations.

“By using PIM services, we access required project documents and information with just a few clicks,” says ARC customerGeorge Lioio, Clark Construction Group project engineer. “We get more done and get it done faster with PIM.”

Finding a needle in the haystack of documents

“Finding one project document among thousands is always a challenge,” says Chris Savarese, ARC’s Director of Business Development for Construction Document and Information Management, “especially as the volume of information grows throughout the lifecycle of a project.”

Using ARC’s PIM services makes the process immeasurably faster and easier over its conventional counterpart. Finding documents is as easy as “point-and-click” on a computer, or “tap-and-swipe” on a mobile device.

“Documents are the primary means of communication between designers, engineers, and contractors on a construction project,” Savarese says. “Yet we’ve found that many of our customers find it challenging to navigate through the massive amount of information a project can generate, whether on paper or even on a computer’s hard drive.”

Collection, connections and closeout: addressing document management during active construction

The problem of document management during an active construction project is three-fold.

• First, active project documents are rarely collected in a single place. Plans, specs, and product sheets are often maintained in separate locations – they can be stored in digital folders or hanging on drawing racks.
• Second, the connections between documents are lost – for example, the detailed drawing of an electrical panel referenced in a floorplan is often tied to a special numerical code that references another document in the plan set. On paper, that means looking up the code and searching one document among hundreds of others; in digital form, it means someone has to search for files on a hard drive.
• Third, turning over the “as-built” drawings to an owner or facilities manager often consists of three-ring binders, product manuals, and a mix of paper and digital files on CD’s or thumb-drives. Lose or damage any of these documents and a building’s “instruction manual” is incomplete.

“PIM enables a user to access thousands of linked digital documents from one central page, making it easy to follow connections between plans, specifications and other project documents,” explains Savarese. “PIM digital document linking and web-based mark-up tools improve project collaboration, and collecting the final drawings into a project closeout package for the owner is simple and quick.”

PIM advantages for construction professionals:

• Keep project engineers and other key personnel in the field rather than organizing, searching, and distributing documents from an office or project trailer
• Save time and increase productivity by maintaining one comprehensive master set of documents
• Make all project documents available to anyone on the project team via the cloud
• Keep current project documents up-to-date with document links that carry forward from version-to-version
• Access linked project documents from anywhere using any device
• Synchronize markups from one device to all devices
• View and interact with a user-friendly, touch-based dashboard
• Gain a competitive advantage by providing a digital, easy-to-use, and comprehensive project closeout package to clients