Sanfield Building Contractors Limited (Sanfield)
a principal subsidiary of Sun Hung Kai Properties (SHKP),
applies VHDrawings, VHSoft's drawing & document management
system to enhance productivity.
SHKP, one of the largest property
companies in Hong Kong was publicly listed in 1972, and its
group of companies possess a culture of applying innovative
technologies to improve the quality and efficiency in property
development of premium-quality residential and commercial
projects.
In the development of any construction
project there are generally hundreds, if not thousands, of
engineering drawings, covering every aspect of the construction.
These drawings are modified from time to time during the course
of the development. The modifications, regardless of whether
they are minor, or major, require a further drawing to be
created, thus adding to the already large number of drawings.
The proper and efficient management
of such drawings in any project is absolutely vital to enable
the project to be completed efficiently and on-time. Thus
proper drawing management is an essential tool in building
construction, maintenance & fitting-out industries.
Sanfield is the main contractor
of many large scale project which include Union Square at
West Kowloon Reclamation and Ocean Shores Phase 2 development
in Tseung Kwan O Area 55A. In the past, Sanfield manages engineering
drawings manually by inputting keywords to identify a particular
drawing into a computerized database which is comparatively
time-consuming and costly.
In order to enhance the productivity,
Sanfield has introduced VHDrawings , a drawing & document
management system to automatically identify engineering drawings
in digital format. This facilitates users to immediately locate
and retrieve the engineering drawings from the database in
accordance with defined parameters such as date of creation,
date of revision, and drawing number.
VHDrawings is built as a 3-layer
SOCKET server-client based application which can be installed
in LAN, extranet and internet environment according to client's
needs. Sanfield has applied the extranet version of VHDrawings
to manage the drawing files during the whole life cycle from
design, proof, audit, approve and publish. When all the drawing
data are stored in a centralized database server, with secured
and comprehensive sharing and user management tools, different
parties of a SHKP project located in Hong Kong and Mainland,
including management and site staff, can access the database
with designated login name and password. With the built-in
traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters conversion
engine in VHDrawings, users can manage and search drawings
with any Chinese character sets. Inter-project communication
through various interactive collaboration tools such as redlining
markup tools can be further enhanced.
The drawing comparison and automatic
version control tools in VHDrawings helps Sanfield 's users
to locate any minor amendments on the drawings as well as
to keep the historic track record of any drawing version updates.
Draft and published drawings are now separately store, avoiding
misuse and accidental alternation by unauthorized parties.
Besides, an alerting function is equipped along with the published
drawings for notifying users the location path and issuance
date of latest drawings.
In order to achieve higher efficiency,
Sanfield also standardizes their folder structure for all
projects for better drawing management. This can be incorporated
with the convenient folder permission setting and the role
of Project Administrator. All levels of management can now
be familiar with the filing system in drawings storage at
ease.
Besides, email function of the system facilitates better communication
between VHDrawings users and other parties in sharing and
making comments on construction drawings.
In addition, descriptive information of a drawing such as
photos, correspondences and documents can now be easily located
for reference and since the drawing compression tool can reduce
the original drawing file size to 1/7, the storage space is
significantly reduced and the loading time for large size
drawings is largely saved.
With the network infrastructure and professional tools provided
by VHDrawings , Sanfield users are able to handle the circulation,
approval and publish of CAD drawings at ease, greatly enhance
productivity and quality of work. [more...]
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