A plan room can do far more than store drawings. Here are seven ways to get more out of yours.

Most facilities teams think of a plan room as a place to store documents. You put drawings in, you take drawings out when you need them, and you hope they’re where you expect them to be. InfraMappa’s digital plan room is packed with capabilities that go well beyond that, and most teams are only scratching the surface of what it can do.

Facilities technician in a high-visibility vest browsing drawings in InfraMappa's digital plan room on a desktop monitor

Here’s a closer look at what you can do with your plan room.

1. Find anything, any way

Traditional plan rooms are organized in whatever way made sense to whoever set them up: by contractor, by date, by document type, or sometimes not organized at all. That means finding what you need requires knowing how the room was organized, which isn’t always obvious. In InfraMappa, every document is indexed and searchable by any parameter: year, architect, system type, keyword, or a free-text wild search that looks inside the documents themselves. Looking for everything related to the swimming pool? Search for it. Need all plumbing documents from a specific renovation? Filter for it. You don’t need to know how the documents were organized to find what you need.

2. Search by location

One of the most powerful features of the plan room is the ability to search spatially. Draw a polygon or circle around any area on the map (a building, a parking lot, a wing) and you’ll see every document associated with assets inside that area. Need to share information with contractors or design engineers? You can quickly pull up all the documents they need and share them, and/or add those partners as InfraMappa users so they can see an accurate, current view of your facility (since as-builts are often incorrect or incomplete). Also, if you have a master plan project underway, InfraMappa can provide exports of current asset data in AutoCAD format for your engineering design firm.

3. Connect documents to assets and vice versa

Every document in the plan room is connected to the assets extracted from it. Click on a document and see the associated assets highlighted on the map. Or click on an asset and see which as-built it came from. This two-way connection means you never have to wonder where a piece of information originated.

4. Open any type of file from any device

AutoCAD files, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or any other type of file all open directly within the InfraMappa application, from any device. No special software required on your phone, tablet, or laptop. If you need to share a document with someone in the field, they can open it without any additional tools.

5. Upload new drawings and keep your map current

When new as-builts come in after a project, you can upload them directly to the plan room. They go through a workflow on our end where we extract what’s new and update the map accordingly. Your plan room and your map stay in sync without any manual effort on your part.

6. Edit, correct, and maintain full control of your data

Documents in the plan room can be edited or deleted. If something is outdated or incorrect, you can fix it. You have complete control over your data in a way that paper plans or a shared drive simply don’t allow.

7. Preserve your documents permanently

Paper plans get damaged, misplaced, or lost. In one case, a facilities team discovered that a departing employee had shredded a significant portion of their documentation on his way out. Digital documents in InfraMappa don’t get shredded, water damaged, or accidentally thrown away. Your plan room is a permanent, always-accessible archive. And because everything is already extracted and living on the map, you’ll rarely need to go back to the original documents. But when you do, they’re there.

In addition, a tagging feature allows you to tag specific people within a document, which is useful for flagging something that requires attention or directing a team member to a specific detail.

The power of a digital plan room

Most facilities teams underestimate how much a well-organized, searchable digital plan room changes day-to-day operations. When your documentation is indexed, accurate, connected to your map, and accessible to everyone on your team from any device, managing your facility’s information becomes a fundamentally different experience.

If you’re a current client, you can always book a free training on the plan room or any other feature directly within the application. And if you’re a prospect, you can book a brief InfraMappa demo here.