Decades ago, paper blueprints were common practice in the construction industry. But just as we (mostly) upgraded our horsepower from equine to turbo diesel, contractors are moving from paper to digital plans. The ease, efficiency, time, and money savings are just a few of the reasons why you should get on board too. 

We’ll guide you through the downfalls of using paper prints, why switching to digital is best for business, and how cloud-based platforms give your company the edge against your competition. 

Printing plans is costly, bulky, and time-consuming. Here are some reasons why paper plans just don’t stack up: 

They’re expensive – Printing is costly, but you know what really makes a dent in your bank account? When original plans are hundreds of pages, and the project comes with substantial changes and reprints. It’s not unusual to have $1000 per month in printing fees. 

Everything will be in slow-motion – In a culture of instant gratification, who wants to wait on a printer to print your plans? You’re setting your business up as laggards, with competition getting bids in faster via digital plans. Also, waiting for delivery or driving to the local printer for pickup is a waste of time and money. 

They’re inconvenient – Lugging around huge blueprint pages to the jobsite is frustrating, to say the least. Construction is a dirty industry, plain and simple, and you have the potential for prints to get damaged bringing them on site. 

They’re not accurately scalable – It’s unfortunately common that architects do not scale properly. The risk of doing an entire takeoff based on the wrong scale is real. Or, in Lakefront Roofing Supply’s case, they would waste time and money at the copy machine scaling prints properly. 

They’re just unsafe – Lose your paper prints? Cue the domino effect – profit loss, scheduling delays, rework, frustrated GCs or owners, etc. 

They take up space – Unless you’re Marie Kondo, if you’re still using paper plans your office is a cluttered, disorganized mess. How long do you plan on being in business? Multiply your annual jobs by the average number of pages of plans and find your yearly paper trail. Where are you going to find space to review and store all this data? 

They’re not collaborative – Only one person can work off a set of paper prints at a time. Paper plans can’t be in the office and at the jobsite simultaneously, causing scheduling delays. 

They’ll never be auto-updated – How many times have you printed a set of plans that require changes soon after? That’s more printing costs on your hands and dollars out of your pocket. 

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