Property management and real estate
Hamburg Airport.
The foundation for Hamburg Airport was laid in 1911. Today, Hamburg Airport operates Germany’s fifth largest airport, covering an area of 570 hectares.
60 airlines connect Germany’s oldest airport with 120 national and international destinations. 53 planes can be prepared for takeoff at the same time. 1,800 employees ensure that everything runs smoothly.
Task
Hamburg Airport planned to digitise old construction plans. This was something that had been on the cards for some time and was finally decided on once the room used to store the plans was needed for other purposes.
The construction plans and files comprised around 8,000 plans concerning the infrastructure of the airport buildings, runways and taxiways. The plans were in various formats, A4–A0 and larger, some of them in the form of transparencies.
The oldest were from the 1960s. These plans are immensely important for the Airport, as reconstruction work is increasingly being performed as part of the constant expansion.
The internal Data and Services department, from the Real Estate Management division, supplies all of the Airport’s other departments with up-to-date plans relating to the buildings, runways and taxiways of Hamburg Airport. All reconstruc- tion work, any change no matter how small, is noted down and documented in these plans. In addition to the high quality and rapid implementation, our all-inclusive bid including collection and destruction, and the appealing price were reasons why the Airport decided on us. When the project was started, all construction files were collected, rolled up and transported off site.
High-power scanners specially designed for large-scale formats were used for scanning. This made it possible to complete the project in a short space of time. The challenging part of the project was the differing quality of the original copies, although we were able to improve this by the scanning procedure. The old plans, scanned by us, have been incorporated into the existing plan archive in the DMS.
The data was transferred online and by data storage media. The client performed sample checks of the scanned data. Since then, new plans are scanned immediately and the physical documents have been securely destroyed following client approval.
Client benefits
Before digitisation, finding specific construction plans was always a highly time-consuming process for the client.
The search was often made more difficult as plans were not always put back in the correct place. On top of this, the plans had differing and cumbersome formats.
Digitisation has put an end to all of this. The construction plans are now available in the document management system, where they can be accessed immediately, even by multiple users from different locations at the same time, and format differences are no longer an issue.
Client feedback
“We are absolutely satisfied with how the project was executed. From the structured questioning to the run-up and the prompt implementation. We were also impressed by the speed of the recording and scanning. We would happily do it again,” said Clemens Plückhahn, head of Data and Services at Hamburg Airport.
Follow-up project
Beyond the archiving of the construction plans, it has since been possible to digitise the construction archive and the personnel files. Further projects are set to follow.