Adobe has made Acrobat 8 Professional the tool to solve the paper problem in AEC.

FTP (file transfer protocol) sites are used to transfer information to the project team or vpn (virtual private network) sites to actually work together on the same files.  This saves tremendous printing and shipping costs as well as the time to print and ship. A major benefit of this is all parties in the project are working with the latest and greatest plans and specs.

Submittals have historically been a very paper intensive process. Usually 6 sets are developed of each submittal and sent to the architect or engineer. The AE then routed them to the reviewers, they were marked up and returned to the AE. The AE had to combine all the comments and send the reviewed submittal to the contractor. With Acrobat, this is all automated and tracked. The initiator needs Acrobat 7 or 8 Professional to enable the document for Adobe Reader review. The document is tracked by the Review Tracker. The reviewer marks on the documents with the comment and drawing markup tools. When complete, the reviewer clicks Send Comments to return them to the initiator. The comments are merged into the original document and the initiator can accept or reject the comments. This saves several steps and considerable time.

At the end of each project, the contractor furnishes the owner sets of red-lined plans and boxes of manuals for the project. The review and commenting tools can be used for the redlines. The manuals are usually available in PDF. The owner is furnished with an electronic file that becomes a lifetime Owner’s Manual of the project. This also becomes the archive for the architect, engineer and contractor. This saves considerable paper and space, while eliminating the fire hazard of a dungeon full of old project files.