Challenge
During construction of a new 40,000 sf Emergency Room and Acute Care addition at Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, CA, McCarthy Building Companies decided to take a hard look at the way they had been creating their Operation and Maintenance manuals (O&Ms). While McCarthy had implemented paperless building processes, meaning that everyone on the design and construction team had access to digital documents, their Owners’ facilities departments were still working with printed copies. The paper-based facilities workflow created several challenges including delayed access to information, misplaced drawings and difficulties documenting changes over time.
Solution
McCarthy concluded that many, if not all, of these issues could be solved by using digital O&Ms saved as PDFs. PDFs can be easily accessed by anyone with a computer and a free PDF viewer. Additionally, by leveraging PDF editing functionality, digital O&Ms can also hold much greater amounts of information, including electronic markups with updated notes and hyperlinks to relevant pages.
Creating Digital O&Ms With Bluebeam Revu
The key to McCarthy's success was finding a technology solution that would allow them to create a PDF manual that was easy to navigate. After evaluating different options, McCarthy concluded that the advanced hyperlinking features in Bluebeam Revu made it the perfect solution for their needs. Revu is a PDF-based markup and collaboration solution that enables technical professionals to communicate faster and more efficiently. Revu allows users to review and collaborate using industry-standard customizable markups and 2D and 3D PDF creation.
Revu’s robust hyperlinking tool enables users to add hyperlinks to project documents like drawings, as-builts, maintenance manuals, warranties, submittals and RFIs, and easily navigate through them. Even files that are only accessible online, such as product data sheets, can be viewed via the WebTab, which lets users browse the Internet from within Revu. As McCarthy defined the information the end user would need and the best way for them to access it, they began linking together entire sets of plans by adding links in the PDF that opened files containing all of the maintenance information they would need, and creating a table of contents so the user could easily pinpoint and jump to each page.
With the help of Bluebeam Revu, drilling into the electronic O&M can be done by clicking the area or an icon, or selecting an item within a table of contents.
Results
Using Revu's hyperlinking capabilities, McCarthy, the facility staff and Owner all saw the following benefits from the new electronic O&M manual format:
- Increased information sharing
- Reduced time spent looking for information
- Facilities teams can quickly easily update manuals using Revu to annotate files or add, delete or replace updated pages
- Better collaboration between facility departments
- Information needed for maintenance calls can be pulled up from any location
- The manuals are mobile when used on a laptop, tablet PC or iPad
To learn more about how to take your projects digital with Bluebeam Revu and download a 30-day trial, visit www.bluebeam.com.
