How to go digital

- When I talk about adopting digital drawings in construction, I'm talking about adoption at all levels. Not just in the office, not just for the estimators, not just the managers, everyone. Including our people in the field. Our on-site project managers, our superintendents and crew leaders, and our skilled tradespeople out in the field. This process really only works when you go all-in. You need to switch everyone on the team to digital drawings to realize the full potential and benefits. The good news is that there are quite a few options out there for making this happen. Actually, let me back up for a minute. The good news, really, is that the designers of our construction projects have already made this transition. It would be very uncommon today to see a construction project of any real size or scope that was drawn by hand. That side of our process made the jump long ago using CAD software like AutoCAD to draw all of our two-dimensional drawings. In fact, many of them are already taking the next steps and designing in three dimensions now, letting the software create our two-dimensional drawings out of their three-dimensional designs. In the past, the issue has been that outside of those detailers who use the CAD programs, most of us really didn't have the ability to view or easily use these digital drawings. Well that's no longer the case. Many of you are probably already familiar with the PDF file format. Well that same PDF format is now also the universal file format for distributing our digital construction drawings. This is really good news, because it means that no matter what program was used to create the digital drawings, all the designer or detailer has to do is output that drawing in the PDF format and it's ready to distribute. Ready for us to use. Now, since the designers are already creating these digital drawing files, all you have to do is ask for the PDF file instead of asking for a set of paper drawings. Within the rest of this course, I'll show you several different ways that you can use these PDF drawing files to work out in the field. I'll show you five different software programs and apps that you can get right now, today, to work with these digital drawings at your desk, on your laptop, or out in the field on your tablet or your smartphone. The choice of which application to use is really up to you. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses, and they all have different pricing structures, but they're all easy to use. They all work really well, and they're all affordable, especially when you look at the software cost versus paper. And when you take it even further and start your whole team working from a common, shared set of digital drawings, one that lives out in the cloud, and allows the entire team to collaborate together, you really begin to see just how much time and effort digital drawings can save you.