Late last spring, engineers at Searle, the pharmaceutical subsidiary of Monsanto, discovered a design problem in a factory the company was planning to build. Two pipes on top of a piece of equipment called a fluid bed drier would stand 6.08 meters tall, but the ceiling would be only 6.05 meters high. To figure out whether they needed to raise the ceiling, engineers would normally have to roll out a jumble of blueprints and spend hours comparing architectural and equipment drawings.

"Nine times out of ten in this situation, you're looking at structural steel drawings from a different contractor from the one who designed the equipment," says Brian Dodds, director of manufacturing engineering for Searle, based in Skokie, Ill. "The two sets of drawings are not to the same scale, and they are not combined on one piece of paper, so it's difficult to marry up the different elements visually." That difficulty translates into time and money.