How Document Management Benefits Facility Managers

Todays managers of manufacturing, office, retail, health care, educational and other types of facilities need to manage constant change.  Market pressures demand ongoing space consolidation, constant modifications, outsourcing, increasing volumes and strict regulatory compliances.  As assets increase and resources decrease, and as more and faster access is demanded of management systems, facilities managers are looking for solutions that can integrate documentation generated from their existing systems. Equally important, companies are seeking enterprise solutions that allow managers from different locations to quickly and easily access facilities information as they would if they were in the same office.

Fast access to facilities information helps to complete projects more quickly, shorten work interruptions, enforce safety standards, lower change orders, and provides the opportunity to use shutdown time and off hours much more efficiently. 

Hagerman & Company offers a wide range of electronic document management (EDM) including SmarTeam, AutoManager Meridian and AutoManager Teamwork that will solve these problems and help facility managers and anyone who needs access to facilities information be more productive in their daily work.  In addition, mySmarTeam and Autodesk Streamline allow facility managers to employ web-based project collaboration to provide more efficient integration with their architects, engineers and other suppliers.

Hagermans consultants work with each customer in order to determine which of these solutions will provide the most features and benefits and highest ROI based on each customers specific needs.  And Hagermans consultants provide complete, turnkey installation and implementation services, geared to the specific needs of each client.

Managing Facilities

Facilities management is no longer just about maintaining an inventory of equipment assets in a building, a campus or across multiple locations. It is about lowering costs and promoting quick response times by effectively and efficiently managing all site facilities and maintenance operations.  Each of these systems was designed by a team that recognized the unique needs of facilities managers and created tools that make their jobs easier:

Shorten downtime by allowing fast access to drawings when you need them most (including architectural floor layouts, equipment documentation, mechanical drawings, and HVAC information).

Enforce regulatory standards with the ability to call files from any point in the past.

Facilitate important equipment repairs with easy search tools allowing for rapid location and recall of existing files or assets.

Minimize synchronization errors with local facility personnel through tight and clear drawing version management and revision control.

Collaboration Across Facilities

In today s fast paced environment, company-wide access to and exchange of current documents is critical to effective management. Space consolidation and expansion planning involves the support of many disciplines:

A management team needs current asset documentation (plans and reports) to do informed space utilization and optimization planning.

Engineers, architects and designers need to do the essential space layouts.

Safety engineers need to advise on regulatory issues.

HVAC technicians need diagrams to make the necessary adjustments.

A resource manager needs a current plan to locate and move fixtures (furniture, PCs, cabling).

Environmental specialists need to make suggestions about the control of wastewater and other waste.

EDM systems offer a variety of tools to facilitate collaboration between your team members, whether they are next door or in remote locations:

Access can be from a local network or across the Internet.

Innovative work areas allow all changes to be tracked project-wide.

Electronic redlining/mark-up tools enable document review (even via the Internet).

Workflow and approval processes can be customized to fit your process.

Vendors or contractors can be permitted controlled access to documents.

Entire document packages can be tracked including drawings, plans, documents, and database files.

Web publishing so documents can be distributed quickly and safely with full revision tracking and security.

Manage All Popular Industry Document Formats

Facilities management requires access to drawings, plans, databases, and other documents from a wide range of disparate and incompatible software applications. The power of electronic document management makes it possible for companies to share documents in hundreds of popular industry formats, including MS Office 2000, AutoCAD 2002, Inventor, TIFF and others.

Maintaining As Built Documents

A main issue for facilities management is maintaining current as-is documents that reflect facilities status exactly as they are today. It is vital to minimize all possible synchronization errors between a central site facilities location and local facilities.  In times of plant modification or urgent equipment repairs, all documents need to be up-to-date and available. Flexible versioning allows independent version management of individual entities or facilities areas and their relationship to their parent facility independent of one another. By using the powerful History Mode, it is even possible to go back into the history of facilities and review their status through the life of a facility. This allows anyone to review past documentation, establish a common baseline, and create a facilities history. This baseline technique allows facilities managers to mark important phases in the development of their facilities, and better manage their assets.

Regulatory Compliance

Many companies are in industries that must comply with government or other forms of regulatory requirements including OSHA, ISO, FDA, ADA, QS, and EPA among others. Tracking the life of a facility or its related elements is a critical part of maintaining compliance, but continual auditing can be very time consuming and costly. EDM systems help enforce standardized methodology and documentation to lower the cost of review and compliance with corporate or external agency regulations:

Keep track of previous projects and related data for audit trails, patent justification, etc., with history mode and rapid search tools.

Set up and manage Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that enforce safety regulations with electronic approval and signoff, automated workflow, and varying security levels.

Standardize work processes to avoid business interruptions with easy management of standards documentation drawing templates.

Other Departments Can Benefit Too:

Best of all, other departments in your company can also benefit from these same systems.  For example:

Your accounting department can use the workflow capabilities to automate accounts receivable and payable processes

Your sales and marketing departments can use the web capabilities to make product information available to outside sales reps distributors and customers

Your service department can use the system to make information available to customer service and field service reps

Your product design department can use the system capabilities to manage the relationships between parts and assemblies and to help process engineering changes quickly and efficiently

And much more

With these systems, the price and complexity of electronic document management has finally come down to the point that full featured EDM and collaboration solutions are now within the reach of every organization.

We urge you to begin immediately exploring what these systems can do for you.