The benefits of electronic documentation are indisputable. Experts can show that a paper-intensive business is phenomenally expensive when one considers the cost of human labor to create, file and retrieve a document; replace a lost or misfiled document; and warehouse paper records.  In addition, for businesses where the security of data is critical, or the ability to retrieve it after a disaster is important, these costs must be considered, too.

These above reasons, most big businesses have transitioned from a paper to an electronic environment. Now, users are looking beyond cost savings to explore the compliance and process improvement benefits of electronic document management. The enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley has forced many companies – private as well as public – to look for more efficient records-handling procedures. The benefits of methodologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI) – used by 50,000 private-sector U.S. companies for the past few decades – also encourage many to find ways to harness technology to streamline their everyday business transactions.

According to Kevin Joerling of ARMA International, a non-profit dedicated to the science of records management, technology to support work flow is a natural progression in document handling. “Typically, a company puts the technology to work first in accounts payable, because invoices usually need to be routed throughout several departments,” Joerling explains. “Then it becomes clear that a management system would be useful in other aspects of the business. When you’re building a power plant, for example, given the number of people and processes involved, a work flow system comes in handy.”
    
Complex Construction Projects
At Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise (FTE), documentation is the backbone of our construction efforts, and like many large owners, we’ve been evolving our technology to help us become less paper-intensive and more efficient in our procedures. FTE owns and operates the fourth-longest toll road system in the United States with physical assets worth approximately $3.6 billion. The roadway system includes 460 miles of roadway, eight service plazas and more than 130 interchanges. FTE continually upgrades its system by adding new roads and lanes, upgrading toll collection equipment and building safety enhancements – all of which are documented in reams of paper. 

Additionally, turnpike construction projects usually involve a multiplicity of constituents. A typical project includes team members from the Florida Department of Transportation, FTE, the general consultant staff, the construction engineering and inspection firm, along with additional contractors, design engineers, fabrication reviewers, the public and other stakeholders.

Often, these individuals are geographically dispersed. Many use their corporate networks for e-mail and Internet access. Yet others in the team may have a basic Internet connection with a service provider for e-mail, but no place to store data and applications other than their own computers.

Under these conditions, the sharing of information and access to common applications can be difficult or even impossible – a situation that can lead to unnecessary duplication of effort and sometimes confused record keeping. 

Shop drawings are intrinsic to a construction project even though they are expensive for contractors to produce, time-consuming and costly to administer by the owner. These drawings represent the assembly details for a project and should reflect the intent and rationale of the original design concept.

At FTE, one shop drawing for a large project can be as many as 700 pages. A single submittal can entail copying and shipping up to nine sets of drawings. Under a paper process, each set is hand-stamped and signed by the contractor before shipping. Once received, each page must be hand-stamped as it undergoes review. Comments may need to be incorporated onto each page by the engineer of record and FTE staff.

The ProjectSolve Initiative
FTE’s shop drawing unit was a prime candidate for an electronic document management and automated workflow system.  In early 2004, Turnpike management turned to its general consultants, engineering firm PBS&J and Parsons Brinckerhoff Construction Services (PB), to streamline the process.

PB was developing ProjectSolve, an Internet portal application, to facilitate team collaboration and provide a central location for housing project information. The site would handle the electronic processing of RFIs and lane closure events, and included an electronic document control for tracking project documentation maintained by the construction engineering inspection firms. At that time, the shop drawing review process was managed by PBS&J on a dedicated Web site. Because it made sense to include shop drawings in the same place where other key project documentation was stored,
the two companies “married” their technologies, and PB expanded its original effort to include a component for shop drawing reviews.

The shop drawing application eliminates shipping and hand-stamping numerous copies. Now the contractor simply scans the original shop drawing into the system and electronically routes it to the engineer of record. All subsequent routing, distribution, approval stamping, commenting and tracking are done electronically. This has cut the time required for review from weeks to days, resulting in cost savings.

Since January 2005, FTE has processed more than 3,000 shop drawings electronically.  Our calculations show that this process has saved FTE and its contractors more than $2.7 million in shipping and reproduction costs, accompanied by a 40 percent increase in productivity and a 26 percent reduction in overall processing time. The reduction in processing time is significant, because the Turnpike experienced a simultaneous sharp increase in shop drawing submittals during this timeframe due to an increased work program.

How It Works
Once given access to ProjectSolve, contractors submit the
shop drawing as a PDF to the engineer of record, who then incorporates comments and stamps the drawing to indicate its code disposition, and then sends it to the turnpike or the next person in the reviewer lineup. All changes take place online and all routing is handled by the application. The process ends with the final disposition and stamping by the Turnpike, and the return of the shop drawing to the contractor via the application. 

When the construction project is completed, the shop drawing is downloaded into an electronic filing system. If maintenance is required at a later date, the shop drawing can be accessed easily for reference. With one electronic copy routed to all, multiple copies and stamping are eliminated, along with reproduction and shipping costs. Processing is ramped up by a minimum of three days.  

The turnpike is now implementing ProjectSolve on all new construction contracts. Expanded add-on applications now in design will further enhance its usefulness. Notification triggers in the shop drawing application, and completely automating editing and stamping, for instance, will cut the review time further. Putting the turnpike’s shop review process into an electronic document management and workflow process has yielded all the benefits promised by this technology. Any large owner – whether a school district, state agency, local government or  large corporation – could enjoy the same savings of time and money with an application tailored to its own procedures.