There are a few organisations that do not recognise the benefits and significant long term cost savings made by converting paper drawings, microfilms and negatives to digital raster or intelligent CAD format.

This is certainly not true of Essex County Council Property Department.

They scanned and indexed 60,000 property drawings held as A4 negatives and paper drawings. All scanned drawings plus existing CAD drawings are now held on a server with easy access which means they can be found in seconds.

They further decided to convert 600 scanned building floor plans to AutoCAD.

After KDH Ltd provided sample CAD drawings and tendered at significantly lower prices than their competitors, they were chosen to provide the manual CAD conversion service.

KDH guarantees the lowest prices anywhere for this service.

The CAD conversion process involves “lifting”, from the scanned drawing building outline, walls, partitions, doors, windows, sanitary and room titles, leaving behind sometimes cluttered and unwanted information, to produce a clean and tidy intelligent 1:1 CAD floor plan scaled at 1:100 or 1:50. After this process, area calculations are made for each room and displayed on the drawing and also listed by a schedule. This data can then also be automatically displayed to an excel spreadsheet. Click here for an example

The completed CAD floor plan now provides a framework for their in-house asset management teams, to easily extract, view, print, modify drawings for their consultant architects, civil and M & E engineers and in-house facility management and space planning teams. Saving significant print costs and many hours of manual work that used to be undertaken using their old systems.