Traditional engineering drawing storage can be very time consuming, difficult and extremely expensive.

Pictured below is part of an engineering storage site that had 176 five-drawer flat files that equaled a total of 880 drawers full of documents. Over 75,000 full size engineering documents was a good guess to start with. The index to these files consisted, in great part, of old ledger books filled out by hand.

Not shown in the photographs below is an additional archive of over 25,000 microfilm aperture cards.

These drawing were accessed on a daily basis by 25 engineers and their staff. Well over 600 additional people from throughout the client's organization had access to these drawings on an as-needed basis.

Can you imagine trying to find a single drawing?
What happened when a drawing had not been refiled yet?
Or worse yet, had been filed incorrectly?

This drawing storage site occupied over 3,800 square feet of floor space.
How much money would you guess was spent annually for floor space just to house this archive?
Our client's best estimate was around $86,000 per year!
And the money being wasted searching for, printing and refiling the drawings?
No one really knew, but it required two full-time employees!

There is a better Way!

ComputerGraphics / Atlanta worked through the scanning phase of this organization's project by making regular pickups and deliveries to the site. The total number of documents scanned was in excess of 86,000 30" X 42" engineering mylars and sepias and 25,000 aperture cards documenting the total history of the site. The final phase of this work was to scan several hundred 36" square color aerial photographs for use with MicroStation and Descartes imaging software.

The scanned images were delivered to the client on ISO9660 CD-ROMs. As the CDs were received, the data was loaded on one of the organization's servers, in active storage. The CDs were then stored off-site as part of the client's disaster recovery plan. All of the drawing files are contained on a total of 31 CDs or just over 20Gb of data. Another interesting way to look at the savings - 35,000 cubic feet of storage space was reduced to just under .2 of a cubic foot. Quite a reduction in storage space and cost from the previous situation.

With the image files available online, images can now be retrieved in seconds rather than the days under the old method. Reviewing, editing and plotting tasks are now accomplished by any computer on the client's network eliminating the time previously spent searching for, printing, delivering and refiling the originals.

Based on square footage, personnel time, drawing retrieval, refiling costs, and printing expenses, this scanning project paid for itself in under 14 months. When the project was completed in early 2000, the old storage space was developed into much needed office and equipment space shown below.

CGA offers complete Scanning and Imaging Services tailored to Our Client's requirements.
With over 120 different raster file formats, we can meet your needs. Large engineering and mapping documents are our specialty. We also offer aperture card scanning and page scanning to Adobe Acrobat^® PDF file format.