SMARTDRAW IN FACILITIES MANAGEMENT:

Quickly Create Floor Layout Plans

Shannon Wade is a project coordinator and software support specialist for Northern Quest Casino, which is located outside Spokane, Washington. She creates step-by-step client-side and server-side installation documents for all of the software NQC uses, such as UltiPro, Crystal Reports and MAS 500. In addition to these duties, Shannon is also a technology instructor for NQC administrative personnel, teaching more basic applications like WORD^®, PowerPoint^® and Windows^®.

Shannon has no formal graphic design background. Until recently, she worked primarily with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create logos, graphical interfaces for websites and to enhance photographs. When asked by the Food & Beverage department to find another solution for floor plan layouts used for Pavillion events, she began with the same product, while at the same time started searching for something that would be a better fit for the organization.

"I had the network administrator assist me in doing online research to find the best software for the least amount of cost to the Casino," said Shannon. "The Food and Beverage department was unsuccessfully using Photoshop to create floor layouts, which was timeconsuming, tedious and produced unprofessional results. Then they tried Microsoft Visio^®, which was not costeffective nor user-friendly."

After trying SmartDraw, everything changed for Shannon and her colleagues.

"I was thrilled to find such a user-friendly, cost-effective solution for the Food & Beverage Department," continued Shannon. "SmartDraw is fun to work with, and has many features that can be implemented throughout our business, like Gantt charts, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other business graphics. I'm equally impressed with the immediate customer support I received when I had questions. My questions were addressed in a very timely manner!"

So Shannon, how does SmartDraw compare to what you've used in the past?

"SmartDraw doesn't even compare with the Adobe products that I've used, because of its uniqueness in displaying images. SmartDraw definitely is a better tool for our purposes."

As an instructor, Shannon really appreciates SmartDraw's SmartTemplates™ and SmartHelp™ features, because it "takes over" the teaching burden, by walking users step-by-step in not only creating diagrams from scratch, but in how to select the right diagram in the first place.

"The inclusion of firefighter graphics, electrical symbols, and NFPA icons is a huge plus," said Keller. "It's great for people like me, who have basically no artistic skills."

"SmartDraw helped us meet the challenge of presenting to our customers a professional printout of the Pavilion floor layout plan. It allowed me to create customized symbol libraries that provided an easy way for the Food & Beverage department to quickly create floor layout plans. Not only was it easy to create the customized background and symbol library; it was easy for the F&B department to learn. SmartDraw is fabulous!"