In a world where technology has delivered on its promise of instant communication via wireless phones, e-mail and faxes, architectural blueprints have firmly resisted the trend. The large, complicated documents need to be exactly right, and so far the only way to guarantee that has been to ship them physically to their destination.
But, thanks to a local company, it may soon become as easy to send blueprints across the country as it is to wire flowers.
That’s the goal of Dietzgen Corp., a Des Plaines-based firm that has been in the blueprint business for more than a century.
Dietzgen has created a network run by a subsidiary called A/E/C Express intended to be to blueprint-makers what FTD is to florists. The network has enlisted 53 partners across the country who are wiring up their blueprint-making equipment with electronics that can send and receive signals via satellite.
For some time now, architects have created their plans digitally on computer workstations and have taken discs of their work to firms, called reprographers, that use sophisticated equipment to read the files and produce pages and pages of plans used by contractors to construct buildings.
If a Chicago architect’s client is in San Francisco, the architect typically wraps up the needed blueprints and ships them off by an overnight delivery service.
What the new system does is to take the digital information as prepared by the architect and transmit it to a reprographer in San Francisco who prints it there and delivers the prints to the client by local courier.
“Architects tend to have close relationships with their blueprinters,” said Stephen Hata, general manager of A/E/C Express. “There is a lot of trust. If the Chicago blueprinter says, `How about you pay me the fee you’d pay FedEx and I’ll get the prints to your client later today instead of tomorrow?’ that’s an easy sale.”
Maybe the sale is easy, but the technology that makes it possible is difficult to create. Blueprints are complex documents that demand complete accuracy.
“If a satellite transmission of a TV show drops a byte here and there, it just results in a small blank spot on your screen for a fraction of a second,” Hata said. “But if you drop some bits from a blueprint, you might leave out a support beam critical to a building.”
So the transmission must be redundant and the software must count every bit to assure that nothing is lost. Also, there are many types of blueprint-printing machines on the market and the software must assure that the final drawings will look exactly as the architect intended, regardless of which printing machine churns them out.
“Writing software to do this was extremely tedious,” said Hata.
The network is just getting assembled, with about 40 partners sending test files to each other. But one Chicago firm, Digital Printing Center, already has transmitted a few actual blueprints for architects.
“The customers who have used it are very favorably impressed,” said Bob Mondo, president of Digital Printing. “They want to know when they can use it more.”
Getting full coverage across the United States will take some time, but that is only one step in the network’s goal of establishing international service.
“My opinion is that when they go international, they’ll own the market,” Mondo said.
“Right now it can take two to four days to ship stuff overseas, or even longer if it gets hung up in customs. With this system, you won’t go through customs and it’ll only take a few hours.”
Mondo said that some of his Chicago-based architects do 80 percent of their business with foreign clients.
Establishing A/E/C Express is Dietzgen’s strategy for making the transition to a digital world of architectural plans, said Larry Kujovic, president and chief executive.
“The industry is moving into digital technology, although the pace is slower than you might expect,” Kujovic said. “It’s been evolutionary. Dietzgen has served the reprographic channel with analog products and will continue to do so, but we want to serve the digital market as well.
“The worlds of digital and analog will coexist for a long time. General contractors work with hard copies of plans, and that’s not likely to change.”
Using satellite transmission to relay information to displace overnight delivery by truck is a well-established trend that began long before the recent United Parcel Service strike focused customers’ attention on their vulnerability to disruption.
Spot commercials for local TV stations, which once were shipped overnight by trucks, now can be transmitted much more quickly and economically by satellite. Newspapers that publish at more than one printing plant also use satellite transmission to send content rapidly.
Kujovic said that once the blueprint network is set up, it can be used to transmit any type of information needed by the construction industry.
