By ChanChi-Loong

DRAWINGS are the lifeblood of architecture and interior design companies.

'The worst nightmare is to lose files in our industry,' said David Leow, 35, managing director and founder of Davoe Creative. This local SME is a one-stop shop that does architecture, interior design and construction of homes, mainly landed properties and condominiums.

Any one single construction project will typically produce a thick binder of drawings and documents that represents hours of work done by the design staff. This includes initial concept plans to blueprint tweaks requested by clients.

Losing any of these files - typically big graphic files up to several tens of MB in size - means having to redo the work and delays.

Therefore having a backup is critical to the business.

When David, who has worked in the construction industry all his life, set up the company in 2004, he had about six staff. It has now grown to around 40 staff and they include in-house designers together with skilled labourers like plasterers and bricklayers.

This IT issue became more problematic as Davoe Creative grew both in terms of manpower and number of projects.

Yearly revenue has grown from $500,000 in 2004 to an expected $5million by end of this year.

David used to manually backup all the data to an external hard disk and he would stay back late - often past midnight - twice a week just to do this.

'We tried transferring files during office hours but that jammed my whole system for hours,' said David. High network traffic during business hours meant that the system was stretched to its limit and files could be corrupted during transfers.

Like many SMEs, Davoe Creative did not have an in-house technical person who could give advice on IT and David struggled with this painful cobbled-up workaround.

The situation turned around when Davoe Creative won the 2008 HP Total Care Challenge, a competition run by HP for SMEs to spell out their IT vision and challenges. HP gave Davoe Creative $30,000 worth of products and consulting service and one of the first things the company did was to install a backup system.

HP put in a ProLiant ML350 server which had four internal high-speed hard drives in which the company's data is stored. A hardware Raid controller that managed the hard drives was also installed to automate the entire backup process. An external backup tape drive and a UPS (Uninterruptible Power System) further ensured that no data was lost.

The result: Backup is done automatically and is transparent to the user.

'With just one click, I can transfer about 20 to 30GB of data between different systems in the office and the system is very stable,' said David.

One other IT improvement that made a direct impact to Davoe Creative's business was the change from a colour laser printer to an HP inkjet printer.

The inkjet printer can print on glossy photo paper, which makes the graphics look more professional to clients. In the past, Davoe Creative used to print diagrams with their laser printer on normal paper but put them in glossy folders to give them sheen and make them more attractive. Of course, with the inkjet printer, this is now unnecessary.

'In our business, it's all about the presentation,' said David.

High performance

Davoe Creative uses five design workstations and each costs about $20,000 to $25,000.

This price reflects the total hardware and software costs per workstation.

Workstations cost more because higher specs are needed to run resource-hungry software like 3-D Studio Max.

Besides the workstations, the firm also uses five PCs and laptops for business and administrative needs.

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This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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