The Paperless Construction Office

By Carol Hagen posted 03-07-2013 00:31

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The Paperless Contracting firm is getting closer to reality daily. Electronic plans, emails and PDFs are common place and every contractor I know has a smartphone or tablet. They share documents with Box, Dropbox, Sharepoint and a whole host of Cloud storage solutions from the big vendors. The reality unfortunately is that many people print out the documents to review and sign them. Why? Because that's the way they've always done it.

It's time to enable our team with larger monitors, multiple screens, touch devices and electronic signature capture and free us from paper. This will likely help the Windows 8 push from Microsoft. I sign documents sent via email on my tablet PC and email it back to the sender. My document management can capture the conversation in a repository or I save it to a local folder. Electronic signatures can expedite the process too.

So what makes this so hard for some? Trust. Trust that the document hasn't changed between the time I originally sent it and the version I get back. It's time the construction industry learns how to do a document compare. I know you're all thinking Microsoft Office Side by side compare or the legal blackline but when it comes to important documents I find the PDF to reign supreme.

So how do you compare PDFs? If you use Acrobat Acrobat XI you get a report that then steps you thru each change (see sample on-line)http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/feature-details/acrobat/axi/pdfs/file-compare-sample.pdf but that's not very efficient if you need to compare construction plan revisions side by side.

Most construction project managers, estimators, and field operation professionals I know are very visual. A picture or diagram saves time and conveys information quickly. What if you could have every change clouded for you and then step through the differences visually? You can - using the Document Compare feature in Bluebeam Revu. There's even a way to compare sets of documents. Watch the video and learn:

To get a 30 day free trial of Bluebeam Revu use this link: www.bluebeam.com/us/partners/network/hagen/standard/

Bluebeam can also convert Office documents to PDF and construction specific applications like AutoCAD, Revit and Navisworks BIM files.

My next post will be how to achieve the Paperless Planroom. Stay tuned and add me to your construction or tech circle and if you are a contractor interested in mobile apps, software and technology request to join my Community: "Construction Apps, Software and Technology" on G+ or my LinkedIn Group with the same name.

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