The Bank of England reports that 4 out of 5 loans to property owners and developers are in breach of their loan-to-valuation covenants. A total of £243 billion of commercial property loans exist and hang over the whole market.

The risk is that property valuations have been maintained artificially high in an attempt by everybody to ward off serious re-adjustments.  But is the banks start to become more aggressive in foreclosing, it will precipitate a cycle of valuation falls that will put more companies into breaches of their covenants and force more foreclosures; to everybody’s detriment.

The fact that in the 3 years since the peak of the property boom, indebtedness has only fallen by 3%. 54% of these loan will mature before the end of 2014 and there is no immediate prospect of refinancing becoming available.

It always takes a long time for traditional systems to be replaced, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the default requirement for an O&M manual is that it works as a digital document as well as a paper file.

The advantages of the digital manual are:

• Convenience:  A complete copy of a digital manual can be put on a simple CD or DVD, on a Flash drive on your key ring, or on a computer network.  This is so much easier to manage than carrying around many thick files of paper.
• Digital files are always complete: Every FM knows the feeling of going to the manuals and finding that the specific drawing that they want is missing. Probably it was used previously and not refiled correctly, so now it is lost for ever! This cannot happen with the digital record because you are just printing a copy of what you need.
• Easy to search: We have all used Google search to find information on the Internet and understand how liberating it is to be able to find information just by searching for key words. A properly produced digital manual is just that easy to search either through key words and/or through a consistent navigational structure.

The disadvantages of a digital manual:

• There are still some people who are uncomfortable with working from a PC screen and that has been the greatest impediment to making all manuals digital.  This is why mostly the digital manuals has to be printed as well.
• The digital manual uses the conventions that we have all become familiar with when using the internet ie you to link to files by clicking on specific words eg drawings or certificated or manufacturers literature.  These hyper links all have to be changed to Tab references in order to convert the digital manual to a paper version. But once the conversion is done, you have a pristine manual with a an index and page numbering system that works.

A little while ago we were asked by CBRE to convert some paper manuals to a digital format.  They were taking over a building and the outgoing tenant had literally thrown all the manuals (100s of files and drawings) into a big heap in the middle of the floor.

This was a slightly extreme example of a fairly common problem. They needed to be able to examine all the files and a lot of different people needed to have access.  The same issues arise for any purchaser trying to undertake a serious due diligence, or for a FM company wishing to provide a sensible quote on an unfamiliar building.

We have now developed a method of digitising and indexing all the information so it can be presented on a CD or DVD with a structured navigation that makes it easy to find what is there and understand what is missing. The typical cost is under £5k varying according to size and number of drawings.

The process is

• Sort the paper files and remove duplicates
• Scan all the paper and drawings building a basic index as you go
• OCR convert the scans into digital documents
• Construct a consistent navigation structure of file names and bookmarks
• Build into a single application that enables the navigation structure to be reviewed easily.