I've been putting together a few proposals over the past week, and have been going back to a great statistic that The Economist stated in 2000.
An article in the January 13th issue, in a piece titled "Virtual Construction", The Economist stated that a typical $100 Million project would generate 150,000 individual documents. Read that last sentence again. I'll wait.
Now take that number, and apply it to some of the larger projects in the market right now. The three proposals I was writing this week were for $500 million, $600 million and $1.5 billion. If we take The Economist's numbers, that means the projects would generate 750,000, 900,000 and 2.25 million documents respectively. Again, take a second to think about that amount of information.
Here's some perspective. If you took 2.5 million documents, and laid them end to end, they would go back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge 592 times. That's 710 MILES OF DOCUMENTS (both plans and specs).
Lastly, those numbers are if you print each document only once. Anyone reading this blog certainly knows that you'll likely print most of the documents multiple times. How much paper are you wasting then?
Construction is getting more complicated, and is generating more information these days, not less. And there are real costs associated with printing waste. If you're in Development/Construction, you need to be seriously thinking about what your company is doing to reduce printing and to become more efficient.
It adds up.
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