With more than 20 years of work experience, Vincent Cicchino, CFM, is a facilities management professional specializing in health care facilities. He recently served as Deputy Chief for Health Facilities Development for Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha, Qatar. There he was a member of the Executive Management Committee and had responsibilities for all healthcare sites in Qatar.

As an FM pro, he has overseen $12.2B in construction worldwide. He is an expert in asset management, operational optimization, and compliance management. We recently chatted with Cicchino about how facilities managers can save money, reduce risk, and find the right technology. Here are Cicchino’s top 7 tips for facilities managers:

1. Keep Your Facilities Management Documents Current and Accurate: If you’re a responsible facilities manager, you have to know what you’re responsible for. You cannot do your job properly without the correct information. If you don’t have proper records on the state of your facilities, you can’t do your job as a facilities manager. Without accurate documentation, you can’t even get a good bid from a vendor for work on your building. The first thing they will ask is, Where are the As-Built drawings? Without the As-Builts, the bid could be much higher.

2. Ensure You Can Easily Find Your Building Documents During an Emergency: You can more effectively handle tough repairs during an emergency situation, if you know your building’s documents are correct. But having to troubleshoot to find the problem could mean unnecessary demolition, greater inconvenience, and higher repair costs.

3. Do an Asset Assessment and Document Those Conditions: If you’re trying to get a handle of your documents, the first thing you should do is an asset assessment. Detail the condition of all the main equipment and systems, and document those conditions. No technology can help you unless you document what you have. After the assessment, you should create and begin a proactive maintenance program, as well as an equipment replacement plan—that should be a 3-year to 5-year plan. Even if the piece of equipment is 30 years old, you need to know when you need to replace it.

4. Use Facilities Management Technology from a Company with Extensive Industry Experience: When looking for a facilities management app or software solution do your homework. Check with professional organizations, trade organizations, and industry magazines and see what’s out there. And when considering a company to help with managing your records, check their history because track records do matter.

5. Get Your Finance Team to Back Up FM Software and App Purchases: As a facilities manager, you’re always fighting to replace pieces of equipment, and you often need to justify the expense. But if you’ve got a capital improvements program and your finance people are aware of it, they realize a certain amount of money is going to be spent on capital improvements.

6. Find a Company That Can Digitize Your Documents and Show ROI: A lot of firms can help with digitizing records, but it’s not going to be cheap to digitalize plans and put together an organized system—it costs money. People want a tangible ROI for that. After assessing the client’s needs, the consultant must provide that ROI.

7. Convince Your Boss or Company to Invest in a Mobile and Digital Facilities Document Storage System: Find a vendor with proven experience and client references. You won’t get my attention unless you’ve proven you already can do the work.

Want to see how you can accomplish these goals and more with SKYSITE facilities management solution? Click here.

Technology is rapidly changing the construction industry—the era of the clichéd contractor carrying a clipboard with blueprints has come and gone. His clipboard is now a tablet or cell phone that he uses to update plans on the fly, directly from the jobsite. Though they are as old as civilization itself, the industries of architecture, engineering, and construction are now some of the most modern and innovative, and they continue to update their standards for cutting-edge tech.

But it can be overwhelming when so many technologies claim to solve so many of the daily challenges architects, engineers, and construction professionals face. It’s easy to get lost in the choices and see the countless construction and facilities management apps as more of the same.

So you’ve probably asked yourself what makes SKYSITE special? How is it different from other construction management software or apps? Well, it would be easy for us to sing our own praises so we checked in with a few of our SKYSITE cloud users to hear what they had to say about their experience.

What Your Peers Had to Say About SKYSITE for Facilities and Record Management

“We haven’t purchased paper in close to six months now.” — John M., Palo Alto’s Chief Procurement Officer

What Your Peers Had to Say About SKYSITE for Construction Drawing Management

“SKYSITE is so easy to learn. A few of the architects mentioned that it matched the way they managed projects, so it was far less disruptive than expected.” — FFA’s IT Manager, Josh R.

“Using SKYSITE is like having another project manager on the team.” — Nicholson’s Purchasing Manager, Dorothy D.

“SKYSITE ProjectLink makes your life one hundred times easier.” — Farrar & Associates

“SKYSITE works better than Dropbox™.” — National Commercial Builders’ President, Sheldon Oxner

Learn more about SKYSITE here.

We often think the most complex activity involved in the lifecycle of a building is its construction. But even if it takes several years to build, that’s a drop in the bucket when you think about how long a building will stand. Look around your own town. You can probably find examples that are well over 50 years old. In many cities, you can find plenty of buildings that are approaching a century in continuous operation.

If a building stands that long, there are going to be plenty of changes – in equipment, technology, tenants, renovations, materials upgrades, and on, and on. And that means a lot of complexity – maybe more complexity than constructing it.

Facilities Managers and Owners have to know everything about their buildings, from when and how it was built, to the inspections it passed, problems that were fixed, upgrades that were made, and tenant improvements that have taken place over the lifespan of the structure.

Thousands of documents have to be maintained, updated, and kept easily accessible. In many ways, these documents are the lifeblood for facilities maintenance.

When construction is finished, most Facilities Managers receive a “closeout” set of documents that reflects the building as it was constructed (usually referred to as “as-builts”), complete with operating and maintenance manuals for its new equipment, locations of key infrastructure, and emergency and life safety documents. Over time a lot will be added: maintenance documents, safety and upkeep records, new construction drawings, and more.

When faced with all these documents, facilities managers are often faced with several challenges, key among them are:

• Information is required to be continuously updated
• Documents and information are stored in multiple locations
• Documents are often found to be in different formats
• Vital information is often found missing
• Information is required for tenant improvement and maintaining health and safety conditions
• Good document and information governance is required for regulatory compliance and audits

A good document archiving and management system is crucial to address these issues…and SKYSITE was “purpose-built” for the task.

SKYSITE, drawing management software, makes it easy to receive and organize closeout documents at the end of the project. Once received, it’s even easier to build a whole operations workflow around the closeout documents. Building supervisors no longer need to hunt for information in traditional, paper-based facility plan-rooms. Instead, they can access the information they need on a mobile device when and where they need it.

SKYSITE for facilities includes features to manage document retention and document purging, automate information governance policies, and otherwise mitigate risks associated with outdated or irrelevant documentation.

SKYSITE provides owners and facility managers with the ability to store, sync, share and retrieve their documents and information from the cloud. Users can access and view more than 170 file types. It drives process improvement and a superior user experience with powerful features:

• Advanced search: fast document search due to SKYSITE’s ability to find information through customized search filters, including projects, folders and files, including Microsoft Outlook’s .msg files with attachments and even document metadata, generating precise results within seconds.
• Two-way sync between mobile device/desktop and cloud: touch-based access to information. Robust document synchronization enables real-time sync of specific documents or an entire folder. SKYSITE’s Sync has a unique ability to sync operations, maintenance, health and safety, and as-built documents with mark-ups, revision updates and annotation, keeping everyone on the team current and always using the right information to make decisions.
• Compliance, retention and information governance: SKYSITE eases the burdens of regulatory compliance by classifying documents required for compliance, making them available on demand and mitigating risk by extending a department’s ability to classify documents by type, as well as set a date to repose or purge. This enables an organization to implement a written retention policy with a solution that automates information governance digitally while mitigating risk.
• Data ownership and loss prevention: unlike alternative solutions, SKYSITE is account-based, so the organization’s content remains with the company, not an individual, resulting in the content ownership remaining with the company even after an employee’s departure. SKYSITE provides best-in-class cloud data infrastructure and security, with higher data availability, redundancy, security, and scalability when compared to generic information distribution tools.

So how long is your building going to stand? Is your document retention and management system up to the task?

If you think it might be time to re-evaluate (and get those boxes of drawings out from underneath the water mains in the basement!), join us for a deeper look into SKYSITE.

The next time a contractor wants to know if he can break through a wall to put a new door in (maybe next week?), an air conditioning unit goes on the fritz (maybe in the next six months?), or a water main breaks (maybe 10 or 15 years?), you’ll be glad you did.

James Mercado, SKYSITE’s Product Manager, recently sat down with the ConTechTrio at JBKnowledge to talk document control, James’ time at DPR Construction, and construction tech. Take a listen to the podcast below and let us know in the comments if you have any questions about using SKYSITE construction app for document control.

Introducing SKYSITE Facilities: the brand new way for facilities managers to store, search, and share their information—from desktop or tablet.

Filing cabinets, printers, and paper are all a hassle that equals a significant lost of time and money. SKYSITE makes it easy to find the exact file or information you need when you need it. No filing cabinet or paper necessary. Access all your synced documents and info from your browser, desktop, or tablet.

Who is SKYSITE Facilities for?

SKYSITE been built from the ground up for facilities managers, owners, and record managers. It can be difficult to organize and manage all that important information on top of all your other work priorities.

The Benefits for Facilities Managers, Owners, and Record Managers

SKYSITE users experience the benefits of significant time and cost savings and improved control over the management of their information. More specifically some of the benefits include:

• Advanced search capabilities: easily find folders, files, or even specific pages and words
• Easily share any document with colleagues or clients—right from your desk or on the go
• Real time sync: changes, additions, or disposals show up instantly across all your devices
• Ensure that important documents and O&Ms are never misplaced or lost—especially during emergencies!
• Stay compliant: built-in information governance and disposal
• Significantly reduce the amount of time and money wasted searching for documents

If you’re ready to improve the way you manage your information or would like to learn more, go to SKYSITE.com and click on the SKYSITE Facilities page.

We’re proud to announce that SKYSITE has expanded its functionality from construction drawing management to include facilities information management!

This means SKYSITE now includes two applications for the AEC&O (architects, engineers, contractors & owners) industry to manage construction and facilities documents across almost any device. The bigger, better SKYSITE gives you two ways to share, edit, and distribute depending on whether you’re in active construction or managing a facility.

SKYSITE by teams with specific needs such as design/build phases of a construction or facilities management. Better yet, the applications can be used together to manage documents and information through the entire lifecycle of a construction project or building.

SKYSITE For Contractors, Home Builders & Architects

The construction drawing management app lets you store, organize, auto hyperlink, and easily share ALL your project documents across your mobile device and desktop.

SKYSITE For Facilities Managers, Owners & Retention Managers

We’re excited to announce the brand new way for facilities managers to store, search, and share their information. The SKYSITE application provides users with a single location for all your digitized documents and information.

SKYSITE isn’t just a personal cloud storage app like Dropbox™—it’s a company-centric solution that provides users with highly detailed search capabilities. No more slogging through paper files and folders. SKYSITE lets you instantly find the info you need when you need it—from your desktop or tablet.

Make sure to read the full product overview to discover how SKYSITE can streamline your work as an owner, facilities manager, or retention manager.

Want to Learn More?

Try out the new SKYSITE for yourself or text chat live with a customer success rep at skysite.com.

PIM Streamlines Processes and Increases Efficiency

Documents are the primary means of communication between designers, engineers, and contractors working on a construction project. Yet, we’ve found that many of our customers find it challenging to navigate through the massive amount of information a project can generate, whether on paper or even on a computer’s hard drive. Finding one project document among thousands is always a challenge especially as the volume of information grows throughout the life cycle of a project.

Project Managers’ and Project Engineers’ time is precious, their priority is to ensure the project is delivered on time and within budgetary guidelines. Hence, it is imperative they spend time and stay focused on the project rather than trying to manage tonnes of documents.

In order to address these challenges, ARC Documents Solutions has introduced a value-added service called Project Information Management– PIM through SKYSITE ProjectLink. PIM is a major addition to its Construction Document and Information Management solutions. Designed for active construction projects with thousands of documents, PIM offers quick and easy access to building plans and other information from a centralized, graphic dashboard. Once a project is complete, the dashboard and associated documents can then be turned over to the project owners to facilitate building operations.

The problem of document management during an active construction project is three-fold.

1. First, active project documents are rarely collected in a single place. Plans, specs, and product sheets are often maintained in separate locations – they can be stored in digital folders or hanging on drawing racks.
2. Second, the connections between documents are lost – for example, the detailed drawing of an electrical panel referenced in a floorplan is often tied to a special numerical code that references another document in the plan set. On paper, that means looking up the code and searching one document among hundreds of others; in digital form, it means someone has to search for files on a hard drive.
3. Third, turning over the “as-built” drawings to an owner or facilities manager often consists of three-ring binders, product manuals, and a mix of paper and digital files on CD’s or thumb-drives. Lose or damage any of these documents and a building’s “instruction manual” is incomplete.

PIM offers tremendous advantages to construction professionals;

• Keeps project engineers and other key personnel in the field rather than organizing, searching, and distributing documents from an office or project trailer
• Saves time and increases productivity by maintaining one comprehensive master set of documents
• Makes all project documents available to anyone on the project team via the cloud
• Keeps current project documents up-to-date with document links that carry forward from version-to-version
• Access linked project documents from anywhere using any device
• Synchronize markups from one device to all devices
• View and interact with a user-friendly, touch-based dashboard
• Gain a competitive advantage by providing a digital, easy-to-use, and comprehensive project closeout package to clients

PIM services makes the process immensely faster and easier over its conventional counterpart. Finding documents is as easy as “point-and-click” on a computer, or “tap-and-swipe” on a mobile device. PIM make its easier for a project user to find connections between plans thereby improving collaboration with web-based markup.

Every season we work to improve your SKYSITE experience. This winter is no different. Seamless storage integration, quality of life improvements, and new iPad and Android features make this the best SKYSITE update yet.

Check out what’s new in SKYSITE Winter 2016 Release:

• Seamless storage integration with Box, DropBox, Google Drive, One Drive and Egnyte. Use these storage apps to move your files to SKYSITE
• Publishing page redesign in SKYSITE now displays 20 sheets per page for publishing, means even faster indexing of drawings and specs.
• New document sorting enhancements gives you the ability to sort your project documents alpha numerically
• Enhancements to the SKYSITE punchlist administration feature allows you to CC: other project participants when creating tasks. The Punch Report now includes the zoomed area of the drawing and photos associated with the punch
• RFI workflow enhancements include RFI Reassign, RFI Forwarding and enhanced download functionality for all RFIs. With RFI Reassign, you and other project members can transfer an RFI to another user. With RFI Forwarding, you can copy other users on the communication and have deeper visibility on resulting activities
• Enhanced filtering allows you to now filter photos by who uploaded them and filter projects by city, state, or by any of the fields you enter in the project info.

The latest iPad features include:

• Sync your project file structure and download documents or folders on demand with Thumbnail Download
• Wi-Fi printing allows you to mobile print to any wireless printers in your Wi-Fi network, in the office or in the job trailer
• You can now sort project documents by name or ordinal from your tablet
• Punchlist CC: delivers to you the ability to copy other project team members when assigning any task
• You can now forward RFIs to other project members right from your iPad with the new RFI Forwarding feature
• Gain faster searches with the Jump a Page feature when viewing a multi-page PDFs

The newest Android features include:

• New RFI functionality, including create, view, assign, forward, comment, close, reject or reopen an RFI from SKYSITE
• Work on an RFI even without internet connectivity using offline mode. This enables you to work on the RFI and automatically sync the team when a connection is available later
• New Punchlist features include create, view, assign, complete and close punchlist in the Android app. Create a punchlist at a project level or annotate and link a punchlist on any drawing
• You now have capability to access the voice recorder on your tablet and the voice memo attached as a MP3 file on a punchlist
• Take photos right from the SKYSITE Android app and store directly in the project’s library or upload from the tablet’s library for previously taken photos. SKYSITE allows a photo or a group of photos to be pinned on the drawings, working as a quick link to specific photos in the Gallery
• New Document Sorting functionality allows project document sorting by name or ordinal on your tablet
• Now print to any wireless printers in your Wi-Fi network with SKYSITE’s new Wi-Fi printing capabilities.

If you have any questions about these new features, call 1-(844)-SKYSITE or contact the SKYSITE Customer Success Team here.

Want to speak with a SKYSITE expert directly?

West coasters email Joell at joell.jones@e-arc.com

East coasters email Wendell at wendell.loyd@e-arc.com

ARC customers are some of the busiest design and construction professionals you’re likely to find. Their experience and changing needs make their opinions important to us as we serve them, but their insights also identify emerging trends and inform forecasts into the industry as a whole.

We’ve identified six topics that were top-of-mind from conversations, surveys, and research around the topic of document management conducted over the past several months. They point to the practices and preferences of construction professionals everywhere as they manage projects both in the field, and think about projects on the boards.

Here’s a look into the future of construction document management as they see it.

1. An Integrated Solution over Point Products

The downside to traditional project management tools is that project information is scattered across various products that often stand alone, without any practical or convenient way to interact with one another. Once status changes are noted in one tool, users often have to log into several others to bring their various records up to date. Access isn’t the problem, but rather capturing everything in a timely way, making sure it’s accurate, and avoiding errors.

Documents are the principal mode of communication across the various trades and disciplines in the AEC industry. More than any individual product enhancement, industry professionals want an integrated solution that enables a dynamic “single source of truth” to store, collaborate, and access documents from any digital device. An integrated solution also addresses the growing demand for better project communications and collaboration, both of which help keep construction projects on time and on budget.

2. Industry Specific Technology Solutions

Cloud-based file-sharing solutions started out as an experiment carried out on consumers and business-users alike. Free, simple and limited in their scope, they made believers out of nearly everyone who tried them.

Today, however, generic file-sharing tools don’t meet the specific demands of construction professionals. Communication is wildly unstructured. File-sharing permissions between team members is either too loosely structured, lacking in the controls that large project teams demand, or too cumbersome to use in the field. Identifying files or navigating the massive volume of files that characterize a construction is frequently reliant on manual procedures like naming conventions, or adding directory after directory. Specialized version control is non-existent.

In many ways these problems make going back to paper sound like a good idea. As technology adoption is growing and products mature, specialization is not only desired, it’s become a necessity.

3. It’s All About the Cloud

When cloud computing started to gain popularity, many people were hesitant to get on board. Initially there was some hesitation, years later, it’s clear that cloud is lead the way.

Not anymore.

Cloud computing has revolutionized software in general, and has had a profound impact on information and document management for the industry. The cloud ensures that documents and information are available at anytime, anywhere and from any device.

Cloud based offers scalability, ease of access and reduced costs making it an ideal document and information management software for businesses both small and large.

4. Collaboration & Mobility is the Key

Construction is becoming more complex. Not only have building themselves ballooned in complexity – driving a corresponding increase in the volume of documents and information generated to construct them – but the number of people who have to collaborate on their execution has also expanded enormously.

And in the face of the increasing interactions between data and people, project members are expected to work, share, distribute and collaborate in real-time no matter where they may be working.

Hard copies of drawings, email, and FTP sharing and distribution can’t cope up with such a business scenario. That’s why cloud applications enabled by mobile devices are central to any technology solution on a construction site.

5. Scalability is Must

The smallest construction project is still big in terms of the volume of documents and data required to complete it. That means even a small contracting firm or supplier has to wrestle with the problems of dynamic scaling. One project can get complicated quickly; three projects can overwhelm if the tools aren’t up to the task.

Adding users has to be easy. The user interface has to be intuitive to cut down on training time. Project team members don’t want to think about how much data they have left on a subscription, or be stranded when there’s no Wi-Fi connection.

When construction professionals expand their teams, or join others; when they take on a new project in the middle of an existing one; when they have

to track a new set of documents or a new piece of data, their tools have to expand and move with them.

6. Security Concerns are Waning

Cloud-computing is maturing. As adoption grows, security concerns are shrinking thanks to the rapid evolution of features designed to address threats as they arise. The lack of hardware concerns actually frees staff to deal with more meaningful issues like data management and collaboration.

Cloud security management is evolving and maturing readily. The gaps are being closed rapidly. Vendors are work closely with their customers in setting and enforcing consistent cloud security policies. Data at rest and in motion is being encrypted.

This is not to say that one can dismiss potential threats to their data but it certainly means that we’ve passed a tipping point where the cloud is a pretty comfortable place for most users.

A construction project is constantly evolving and managing changes is always a herculean task. It’s even harder when several issues come up at the same time; it’s easy to miss details which can be problematic later. That’s why having an easy way to document them through completion and closure is so critical to a project’s success.

The SKYSITE Punch Lists application streamlines the process from identification to closure. It makes it easy for a project member to capture, distribute information, and track defects, issues and actions taken in real time. SKYSITE Punch Lists is a cloud based application designed for iOS and Android.

Take Your Punch Lists to The Job Site

With SKYSITE Punch Lists, users can report an issue directly from the construction site using a mobile device. Simply pull up the associated drawing and document the issue on the spot with photos, voice memos and comments that are attached to plan itself. As soon as an issue is reported, other project members can immediately pull up the plan, see the issues, and track their progress through completion. Issues are organized around trades and locations making it easy to find them later.

You can even use SKYSITE on your tablet when it’s offline – the application automatically syncs when an internet connection is restored.

Track Progress

SKYSITE Punch Lists application has built-in functionality to monitor due dates and can send overdue notices to keep team members on track and on task. The status of punch lists items can be viewed in several different ways, including “open,” “pending,” and “closed.” Punch Lists reports are also available to share with any team member. Users can create a new report template and schedule it to be sent automatically each weekday, eliminating the need to compile it manually each time.

All items are tracked and recorded in a permanent fashion – they cannot be deleted. SKYSITE Punch Lists provides a transparent and a complete audit trail.

SKYSITE Punch Lists Features

• Create punch lists items directly from the field
• Create an assigner and due date
• Drop punch lists item directly to a drawing
• Filter by status (open, closed or pending)
• Maintain real time history of all actions
• Export Punch Lists item report for distribution to any project participant
• Keep a clear list of issues, assign responsibility to a specific person at a specific company, select a due date, and track an issue’s current status

The sooner Project Managers complete a Punch Out, the sooner they can confirm that a facility is ready for handover, saving money and improving efficiency every step of the way.

Start a free trial and discover how easy Punch Lists are with SKYSITE.