• Government
Case Warwickshire featured

The solution

War­wick­shire Coun­ty Coun­cil suc­cess­ful­ly dig­i­tized and opti­mized its his­tor­i­cal prop­er­ty draw­ings using GTX solu­tions. The tran­si­tion result­ed in stream­lined work­flows, enhanced col­lab­o­ra­tion, and time sav­ings, ensur­ing long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty of impor­tant archi­tec­tur­al documents.

Case Warwickshire Shakespeare

War­wick­shire Coun­ty Coun­cil: Dig­i­tiz­ing his­toric engi­neer­ing drawings

Man­ag­ing 16,000+ prop­er­ty draw­ings, War­wick­shire Coun­ty Coun­cil need­ed a dig­i­tal solu­tion for acces­si­bil­i­ty and updates. GTXRaster­CAD® enabled effi­cient raster clean­ing, hybrid edit­ing, and struc­tured data­base man­age­ment, allow­ing archi­tects to retrieve and mod­i­fy plans five times faster.

War­wick­shire Coun­ty Coun­cil, respon­si­ble for over 1,000 prop­er­ties, includ­ing schools, fire sta­tions, farms, and her­itage sites, faced sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges in man­ag­ing their lega­cy prop­er­ty draw­ings. Their Prop­er­ty Ser­vices Depart­ment (PSD) need­ed a mod­ern, dig­i­tal solu­tion to stream­line doc­u­ment access, stor­age, and updates while main­tain­ing the his­tor­i­cal integri­ty of their records.

Chal­lenge

With thou­sands of paper-based archi­tec­tur­al, elec­tri­cal, and mechan­i­cal draw­ings, War­wick­shire strug­gled with doc­u­ment dete­ri­o­ra­tion, stor­age lim­i­ta­tions, and slow retrieval times. Many of these draw­ings exist­ed in mul­ti­ple loca­tions, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for engi­neers and archi­tects to access cru­cial infor­ma­tion effi­cient­ly. Man­u­al draft­ing updates were time-con­sum­ing, and the depart­ment need­ed a cost-effec­tive, scal­able way to bring their archives into the dig­i­tal age.

Solu­tion

The coun­cil adopt­ed GTXRaster­CAD®, inte­grat­ing it with­in Auto­CAD® to facil­i­tate seam­less raster and vec­tor edit­ing. The intel­li­gent image clean-up fea­tures allowed engi­neers to deskew, crop, and despeck­le scanned draw­ings, ensur­ing high-qual­i­ty dig­i­tal ver­sions. Addi­tion­al­ly, hybrid edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties meant engi­neers could mod­i­fy raster images with­out full vec­tor con­ver­sion. A key improve­ment was the abil­i­ty to replace old draw­ing bor­ders with updat­ed CAD-based ver­sions — stream­lin­ing design work while ensur­ing consistency.

A Fox­Pro-based data­base was devel­oped to man­age 16,000+ scanned draw­ings, enabling secure retrieval and con­trolled access across mul­ti­ple depart­ments. Remote teams, includ­ing archi­tects work­ing on new build­ing exten­sions, could access dig­i­tal plans and make quick mod­i­fi­ca­tions with­in a hybrid raster-vec­tor environment.

Result

By lever­ag­ing GTXRaster­CAD®, War­wick­shire mod­ern­ized its doc­u­ment man­age­ment approach, improv­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty, accu­ra­cy, and col­lab­o­ra­tion. Archi­tects now retrieve and edit draw­ings effi­cient­ly, reduc­ing project com­ple­tion time by five­fold. Addi­tion­al­ly, the dig­i­tal archive is acces­si­ble to over 150 users, ensur­ing smooth plan­ning and record-keep­ing for prop­er­ty developments.

“The sys­tem has proved to be invalu­able to our in-house archi­tects for doing exten­sion work.”
- Owen David, War­wick­shire Coun­ty Council