IQ Project - Drawing Archival System
by Helen Yip

Just barely six months ago, we were still struggling with the maintenance of 22000 as-built drawings which were filed and kept at (SPM) the Space Panning & Management unit. Out of this large volume, 79% were in hard copies with sizes ranging from A4 to A0 while the rest were in AutoCAD format and stored in CD roms. Due to the high humidity, the as-built drawings had deteriorated over time and became very fragile. For security and preservation purposes, these were stored in large metal cabinets which took up a space of about 20 sq.m. (approximately 215 sq.ft.) at SPM

Besides having difficulties in handling these drawings, we also encountered a plethora of problems, prompting us to find a solution to overcome these difficulties which were:

	Tedious and time consuming to retrieve drawings manually for viewing/printing
	Health risk as these drawings emitted strong ammonia smell
	Frequent disruption to work operations due to many requests for viewing/printing/borrowing of drawings by OED staff/Consultants/Contractors/Students
	Inconveniences caused to other users especially when those drawings were already on loan and not returned within 5 working days
	High risk of losing the original drawings
	Disaster recovery system at SPM was not in place yet, i.e. there was no back-up for hard copies

At that point in time, our wish list was to have a magic wand and make these drawings disappear or reappear at a wave of the wand. It really does sound like a dream but not anymore because we really did it! This was made possible with the assistance of Computer Centre's team headed by Mrs Goh Swee Wah, Manager of User Support. Their advice and guidance helped in the initial conception to the delivery of our project, i.e. to allow SPM's Drawing Archival System to leverage on the EDMS, thus, we could share their digital storage space and tap on their expertise and support in storing/maintaining the as-built drawings on-line. By doing so, this helped us to save about $105,000 in project investment costs, which excludes long time maintenance of the server and peripherals if we had opted for the stand-alone system.

In February 2004, we converted all the hard copies into soft copies in pdf format, indexed and uploaded all these files onto EDMS via Documentum with the help of a reputable vendor. Concurrently, Computer Centre's team also helped us to purchase and install the Vue Server which is a viewer software that allow users without AutoCAD software to view AutoCAD files via Documentum. All these processes took us 4 gruelling months to complete.

Drawing storage space (Before Implementation of Drawing Archival System)	Drawing storage space converted into office space (After Implementation of Drawing Archival System)

Upon completion, we conducted an in-house user training session followed by a post-training survey for 10 nominated representatives from the various sections of OED. Feedback from the survey was favorable. With the endorsement, we were certain that we can safely remove the as-built hard copies out of SPM and keep these off-site. The vacant space is now transformed into usable office. Besides the space savings,, we also saved on manpower. When translated into monetary returns, it works out to be about $97,814 annually.

Other than the tangible benefits, we also derived several intangible benefits from this project.
They are:

	Increased productivity, thus facilitating optimisation of manpower
	High availability of servers to prevent single point of failure.
	A centralized repository where all archived hardcopy documents and ongoing electronic documents can be stored
	Reduced paper flow and storage space
	Online sharing of project documents
	Operational efficiency
	Reduced risk of losing original drawings
	Reduced health risk due to ammonia inhalation
	Last but not least, it is in line with the ISO 9001:2000 standard and framework

Although we have encountered several unforeseen problems, we were blessed with a helpful facilitator, good team work from Computer Centre/Vendor and also the Senior Management's support. With such experiences, the learning curve has certainly shortened and we are now ready to share the Drawing Archival System with NUS community and other institutions, some of which have already expressed interest.

Email Helen at oedyiplc@nus.edu.sg
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