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CAD Drives Efficiencies in Capital Asset Planning and Cost Recovery

Transportation Industry | United States

W   ith global operations spanning more than 80 countries, this company provides products and services to a wide variety of private and public sector customers.

 

To support these services, the client owns or leases approximately 800 facilities ranging from manufacturing plants, warehouses, office buildings, and logistics centers. Based on the rapidly changing needs of the client’s customers, the use of these facilities changes frequently. In this dynamic environment, managing ongoing facility utilization lease and maintenance costs, space allocation, and chargeback to client business units poses an enormous challenge. A clear and detailed facility-level understanding of available space is fundamental to  accurate cost allocation and is a prerequisite to the client’s facility management and chargeback process implemented in SAP.

 

In the past, tracking space allocation was a haphazard, inefficient, and error-prone process which consumed significant amounts of employee time and proved to be a distraction from the client’s core business. With the introduction of SAP for facility management and chargeback, accurately representing and tracking space moved from difficult to critical.

ISSUE

Accurately representing and tracking rapidly changing space is essential for allocating internal costs and recovering those costs when used for client activities

SOLUTION

Transformed facility drawings into actionable information, for incorporation
into SAP, which provides clientverifiable support for facility cost allocation and the
basis for demand planning for capital assets.

BENEFIT

Verifiable facility cost allocation eliminates waste, captures and passes along costs, freeing up employee time, and driving down operating costs.

SERVICES DELIVERED
  • Computer Aided Design (CAD)

SOLUTION

In order to address these challenges, this client relied on Access Sciences to transform existing facility drawings into actionable information, for incorporation into SAP, which provides client-verifiable support for facility cost allocation and the basis for demand planning for the client’s capital assets.

 

In this environment, Access Sciences resources were more than CAD drafters performing basic drawing update tasks. In order to provide an accurate and up-to-date representation of the client’s facilities, these resources communicated and closely coordinated updates to available space information with on-site facility managers, often located on other continents.

 

To achieve this level of accuracy, Access Sciences CAD resources consolidated and standardized CAD drawings from client facilities located around the world, uploaded them into SAP, and applied occupancy and square footage metadata
along with additional SAP data requirements. Specific tasks included:

 

  • Collect AutoCAD and/or paper facility drawings for each of approximately 800 global sites
  • Convert the drawings into a common AutoCAD format (AutoCAD 2011)
  • Facilitate calls with on-site facility managers to validate occupancy and usage information
  • Review the converted facility CAD drawings for any anomalies or inaccuracies (via a Quality Assurance process developed by Access Sciences) and complete any needed corrections
  • Review converted facility CAD drawings with on-site facility managers to determine if additional changes or updates are required to accurately represent the site
  • Combine the native and updated CAD drawings, resulting in one layered CAD drawing per site; finalize the AutoCAD/polyline work for all drawings; and, upload the updated drawing into the SAP Real Estate and Enterprise Asset Management module where it is used in conjunction with Cideon visualization application
  • Validate a successful SAP upload

 

In addition to facilitating the centralization and standardization of facility-level CAD drawings, Access Sciences developed a taxonomy that provided standard terms and alternative terms (i.e., a thesaurus) for the CAD drafters’ usage.

OUTCOME

With Access Sciences’ assistance, this client can now provide client-verifiable support for facility cost allocation and the basis for demand planning for its capital assets – eliminating waste, effectively capturing and passing along costs, freeing up employee time, and driving down operating costs.

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