The owner of my company (principal engineer) and myself (principal surveyor) have had discussions over the past couple weeks about moving the office to a "paperless" office. I have always look to technology to help out the survey department, especially lean times. I am also all for efficiency. But, I really do not see how a surveyor/department can be totally paperless or much less 90% paperless.
For instance, field books, reference documents, hand calculations (yes I said hand calcs), notes, etc. we already scan all this data to the server. I prefer having a file at my finger tips with all the data there in front of me, instead of hunting files & squeezing on screen.
So my question is, have you gone paperless? Do you like it? Particular software to Intergrated? Do you still provide hard copies to client or do you provide a downloadable link to a completed plat?
Just seeing what everyone else is doing or thoughts on the subject
Thnx
Ralph
If you saw my desk....
you'd agree that 'paperless' survey offices are a myth.
> So my question is, have you gone paperless?
No, not by a long shot, but I do try to be careful about what goes into- and stays out of - the paper file. People have looked at my desk, and seen my files, and have expressed amazement that a person with a desk like that can produce files as neat, and complete, as mine. I take some pride in that.
I also try to do the same with computer data files. Keeping incremental saves of everything under different names drives me as nuts as multiple point numbers for the same point.
These kind of posts always get my attention. Hopefully some geeked out CAD guy will chime in.
Me, ain't no way to go paperless. People mail you things: checks, notices, bills, yadda yadda. They are NOT paperless.
So then you spend the time to scan them. Now you have data storage issues, not that is a problems nowadays - still you (or your helper) has to physically scan them in. Then you have to toss out the dead paperwork for your trash guy to pick up on Tuesday, even if you go through the process of shredding it to protect yourself.
RE: surveys. No problem there. Record them and then they are public record. Good for all, including your filing system. Somebody calls you, just tell them it's recorded. You don't even need the recording information, just hang up the phone.
Surveyor going paperless - ain't happening. I'm not so sure that any small couple employee company can ever do it. Unless of course you want to work 20 hr's a day.
good luck with your project
shoot we aren't even linenless. paperless would be a pipe dream.
I don't think so. It would require replacing the sears & roebuck catalog in the outhouse with corn cobs, and the secretary says it's just too big of a pain in the butt. You hard tails go for it.
Technology will only go so far!
getting there, to a point, but it's costly.
We have more paper now with emails and PDF's. Now all the consultants want a PDF before the project is submitted and to justify their fees they have to make changes. This did not happen before our elctronic - paperless world. What happens when your electronic media becomes obsolete or there is a thunderstorm in the "cloud" or your electronic media comes in contact with a magnet and all your paper is gone? About this time some lawyer wants all your records for a court case. That being said we have somewhere short of forty, four draw legal size file cabinets, four, three draw legal size file cabinets and three, two draw legal size file cabinets. Today I ordered three more four draw legal size file cabinets. So much for paperless.
> So then you spend the time to scan them. Now you have data storage issues, not that is a problems nowadays - still you (or your helper) has to physically scan them in. Then you have to toss out the dead paperwork for your trash guy to pick up on Tuesday, even if you go through the process of shredding it to protect yourself.
That's exactly why I can't. None of the courthouses that I work in have remote access (I'm not paying $100/month when my local courthouse is 1.5 miles away and only has scanned records back to 1967). I have to make copies at the courthouse to piece together my surveys, but I'm NOT going to take the extra, extra time to then slow scan, rename, etc... I may take extra time on my drawings because I'm anal, but turning paper copies into PDF is horribly mind numbing IMHO.
> RE: surveys. No problem there. Record them and then they are public record. Good for all, including your filing system. Somebody calls you, just tell them it's recorded. You don't even need the recording information, just hang up the phone.
That's a little cynical, but that might just be me.
> Surveyor going paperless - ain't happening. I'm not so sure that any small couple employee company can ever do it. Unless of course you want to work 20 hr's a day.
EXACTLY --- See my first post above.
>
> good luck with your project
Why would Paperless office
What is the big deal about paperless?
Something will happen eventually to cause a loss of data and then what.
I produce much less paper than before.
At times it takes several computers and multi monitor setups for me to pull it off to be able to have so many different sources of information on screen.
I would hope to find the time to scan much of my information so file cabinets of paper could be moved into storage and out of the active office.
😉
I have a bunch of computer tapes dating to the late 1990's for which I have no way to get the information off of them. Fortunately, I have a drawer full of originals of all of that information, flat and undisturbed.
Thank you Your Most Divine Boviness, my point exactly.
Years ago
I wanted to "start" trying to save all our digital data with our files. I attached a sleeve and 5 1/4 inch floppy discs in the file, then 3 1/2 inch floppies, then CDs, then DVDs. Now what? What are we going to be able to store data on which will be able to be read at a point in the future?
Andy
I entered coords from grid sheets into dos cogo and stored that onto flopies then hard floppies and then IOMEGA ZIP drive.
I skipped the tape drives and went directly to Cd.
Transferred every thing to extra HD.
Everything is now on several HD and USB drives.
SSD will be my next media.
I have already been thru a few programs that would only read the info that they created.
The Millennium Bug killed those off.
The only thing stopping files from being used is in the hands of those that decide what files that the software can read into their program.
In the event of the big computer crash and the end of the internet, all this digital data will be meaningless and the end of trees will be upon us.
B-)
I guess I qualify as a geeked out CAD guy, biut we're hardly paperless at our office.
We still run paper "project folders" that still occasionally become bankers' boxes worth of paper.
We stopped using physical field books in 1991, but even to this day we still print the RAW files onto paper for storage.
Our file server holds all the CAD files, and word docs and spreadsheets, and PDF "check prints"
Once a project is approved, we are scanning the paper original plans to TIFF format for cold archive. In fact, we gave scanned every original Mylar, sepia, tracing, and blueprint we had in the flat files or hanging files, going back to 1978.
So, we are paperless only when it comes to cold storage of finished plans. But I'm as geeked-out with civil 3D as they come!
I don't know how some of you work without field books. I have cut out a lot of what I used to put in the book, but I have to at least have a sketch of the property to put point numbers on the found monumentation to do whatever cogo I need in the field.
> We stopped using physical field books in 1991...
What about field notes and sketches, how do the crews go about it?
Sustainable office
> The owner of my company (principal engineer) and myself (principal surveyor) have had discussions over the past couple weeks about moving the office to a "paperless" office.
My experience over the last 25 years has been that one of the more important steps toward the sustainable, efficient office has been to run all adjustments in one bit of software. I've used Star*Net. There may be others that have been functional, with backwards compatibility, for more than 25 years, but I'm not sure which they are.
What backwards compatibility means is that a project I surveyed in 1990 is alive and well, ready for more measurements to be added to it, a datum to be updated, whatever.
The manufacturers's proprietary software that isn't backwards compatible just isn't that far away from throwing out the old job file when the software requires an update.
I'm far from paperless, but I eventually digitize everything.
I print every relevant doc and put it in the job folder. Some folders get pretty thick. After the bill is paid, the folder goes into a stack of folders to be scanned. It's not difficult to scan a job folder when you have an auto feed scanner. I just try to keep everything in the folder at legal size or smaller. Anything larger I cut up and scan by hand, but that is rare because I make an effort to not have large format prints. After the scanning is done, I count the pages and compare the scan results, to make sure two pages didn't stick together, which does occasionally happen. Any digital files (Cad, Raw data, Coordinates, Word, PDFs, Pics, etc.) are already tagged with the job number, so it's easy to move them from a working directory to the job's archived directory.
It's simple, and my work history is organized and can fit on a thumb drive.
