The Beginner’s Guide To Engineering Drawing Management

by Tammy Mitchell | | Drawing Management Strategy Articles

Accurate drawings and designs are a crucial piece of any development project. While designers may be working hard towards a viable prototype, managers and employers know that a codified design is vastly more important. With an accurate design and plan, even one-off prototypes can be easily recreated, which helps save time and money when it comes to developing and testing new products.

But all too often, a one-off prototype is just that — an unreproducible artifact that may present more challenges and questions than answers when the product goes on to production with loose guidelines. In fact, it’s possible to spend a pretty penny reverse engineering how and why something works or doesn’t, which is especially frustrating if you’ve already gone through it during the prototyping stage.

Instead, products that have been designed and well-documented during it are vastly more useful to an organization that excels at spinning up resources and putting them to use. Even a better product can be a significant handicap if the designs aren’t to spec and accurately captured and managed, which can drag down production efficiency and create more wasteful expenditures.

The solution is engineering drawing management.

Engineering drawing management is a sort of engineering file management system. Instead of different designs and protocols that will never magically align themselves on their own, a proper engineering drawing management system captures all your engineering drawings and supporting engineering data in one central place for easy reference and lookup.

It’s the engineering drawings themselves that are most important, as they tell the story of how to consistently reproduce any product or design. That consistent production is essential, and it allows for easy iterative improvements in the design, as well as production efficiency.

But don’t forget the supporting engineering data, which may govern the design constraints and considerations that form the basis of the product’s design goals. Without this important information, proof of conformance is unknown, and both internal stakeholders such as marketing, accounting and production, as well as external factors like customer groups, distributors and regulatory considerations remain unknown. When any one of these pieces can mean the difference between a successful and failed product, it’s crucial to know.

Some think that it’s sufficient to create an engineering drawing or two and to capture engineering data at some point, but it’s not. Your engineering department needs real engineering drawing management, which means proper creation, storage and review of all engineering designs and associated discussion and documents. Even failed ideas can be useful as it shows at least one way that a design won’t work, and that can help inform future designs and decisions.

You need document control for engineering drawings.

Whether you’re looking for a CAD file management system or some kind of digital blueprint management service, a crucial piece of engineering drawing management is control over your assets. From designs to document attributes, review processes and procedures, there’s a lot more that goes into an approved design than the design itself.

There’s the person, department or company that created the design, of course, but what about ownership, or who gave the final sign-off? With engineering drawing management, the answer is just a click away, and it also makes locating an old design a snap if, for example, the original designer has long since left the company.

With convenient titling and design descriptions, legacy designs are just a quick search away, as the iterative process that saw A, B and C give way to D, which stands on the shoulders of what came before. Authors, reviewers and any comments are all kept intact, along with dates, times and who said what. Along with the designs, that’s enough to create a viable company resource out of old designs and information that would otherwise be lost to your company’s growing pile of digital information.

Engineering drawing management also defines a set of procedures for creating and iterating designs, which includes the types of drawing files that are supported, as well as the contents and format of each. With helpful attributes such as the owner and design number, in addition to any revisions, it’s easy to see who is and was responsible at each step of the way. Creation, review and approval are all documented, and the system also governs when designs are released to other interested parties such as accounting, marketing or third-party vendors.

If a design is revised, replaced or canceled, it’s noted, making for easy forensic digging whenever there’s a question about a previous design. Even obsolete drawings can contain some genius or spark an idea in one of your designers, or at least show what has been attempted before, preventing redundant work that may monopolize resources.

With engineering drawing management, you’ll have quick access to a consistent set of drawings and their qualified attributes, which allows you to observe the lifecycle of any design project, past or present. That can help reduce product costs by streamlining design, production, marketing and customer service when all the information is immediately available for reproduction or further use.

Keep all that extra design data.

Beyond the formal engineering documents, engineering drawing management is a complete and comprehensive control system, providing access to miscellaneous information that would be otherwise lost. This includes product capabilities and functional requirements, as well as budgetary constraints, production volume estimates and schedules for each stage of development.

Don’t forget component datasheets from your suppliers and product performance tests, in addition to qualification results, alternative design data and any notes, calculations and other written communications — they’re all important to any design project. Without engineering drawing management, these crucial pieces of information will likely never be seen again, or at least buried in online message boards like Slack or stuck in old mailboxes along with thousands of other cumbersome emails.

It’s only a complete engineering drawing management environment that archives all this useful information as organizational knowledge. By capturing all the information that led to a design, you’re increasing your company’s understanding of how a design came about, including the all-important human aspect of review, sign-off and any relevant discussion that took place.

The best part is that with all this information, you can more effectively run performance analysis, field diagnostics and engage in iterative design improvements over the entire product lifecycle — even with products that have long since been out of production.

Go with the right engineering drawing management solution.

While engineering drawing management can make creating, managing and iterating your digital blueprints easy, the wrong solution won’t be much help at all. If it’s hard to create new design documents and integrate them into your existing processes, your designers might just skip it altogether, or at least waste a bunch of time following awkward protocols.

What you need is a comprehensive engineering drawing management solution that works with you, making the design process both easily understood by various stakeholders as well as a viable tool for your nimble designers. The right system encourages better designs and design processes without grinding your engineers down with a bunch of extra work. Instead, it helps institute useful protocols that help make the designs themselves better and more useful to your organization, and that’s something anyone can appreciate.

How to Declutter Engineering Drawings

by Tammy Mitchell | | Phase 1: Hands-On Drawing Management

A cluttered engineering drawing causes wastes of time and resources, as your computer moves slower and slower, and there is significant chance of corruption. Here are eight ways to declutter an engineering drawing.

Audit and Recover

As these commands are generally used to remove errors from AutoCAD drawings, they can be perfect for a drawing that is overbloated with data.

To perform this function, use the AUDIT command (in the command line). The Command line will now ask you to specify whether you want to fix detected errors or not. Type Y for yes, and press enter to find all detected errors. 

The Recover command can be used when the drawing is corrupt to the point where it can’t be reopened. In this situation, open a blank drawing and type in the command Recover, and a window will open with a list of files to select from. AutoCAD will attempt to reopen the file and remove the errors from it.

DGN Purge

And sometimes a file may seem bloated even though there’s no data. This will become evident when certain functions seem to go slow, like selecting objects, or a slow cursor, or copy and pasting. 

The worst part about this error is that it can spread to other files if parts of the affected file are copied and pasted into it. The underlying cause of this issue is an improper data import of DGN files causing a massive drawing database.

With AutoCAD 2015 or later, type PURGE into the command line, then select “Automatically purge orphaned data”. The problem should then be fixed.

PURGE

These are probably the most common tools used to clean a drawing. Purging a drawing means to clean all unused or redundant entities such as blocks, layers, and line types. To use the Purge command, type PURGE into the command line, and a purge window will open. You can select specific things to purge, or hit Purge All. You may need to hit Purge All more than once to get rid of everything. You will know it’s clean when the Purge All button gets grayed out. 

Overkill

Overkill is another cleanup tool that deletes or merges all overlapping or duplicate entities. To use this, type OVERKILL into the command bar. You will be prompted to select an area, which you can do, or you can select ALL, and your entire drawing will be applied with Overkill. 

Write Block

This method should be used as a last resort because it causes a loss of data from your drawing, including layer assignments. The command transfers all drawing elements to another clean and blank template and leaves all of the unwanted clutter behind. The command for this is WBLOCK.

It will open the write block window, from which you can select Objects, and then select the base point for your selection, after which you expand the selection to encompass all drawing entities in your drawing area. You can also use the Entire button instead of selecting an area, but by selecting the area yourself you are sure you’re not selecting invisible layers outside your drawing area.

In the Destination window, specify a file path and name, and the cleaned drawing will go there.

Cleaning Unreferenced Regapps

The drawing’s performance may start to show signs of slowing and growing beyond its normal size if there are unregistered application IDs. To clean these, type -Purge into the command line. Then select Regapp and the command line will prompt you to select Regapps over and over until all are purged. 

There are other applications of Regapp, and if you’re looking to purge more than one file, the Regapp ID cleanup utility tool is a batch process you can use.

Drawing Purge Add-In

This is a free add-in from the Autodesk app store. This tool can purge almost all redundant data and unused entities in your drawing including unused DGN data.

If a drawing contains an X-ref then it will scan for DGN data in referenced files as well and ask you if you want to clean data from those also.

The tool can be used in bulk to clean many drawings at once. To do this, click on the Batch Purge icon and a batch drawing purge and settings window will appear. You can select which drawings you wish to purge.

Smartpurger

Also available from the Autodesk app store is Smartpurger. In its trial version it can purge a maximum of 10 files, but the full version can do unlimited files. 

The Best Way to Manage Drawings from Multiple Sources

by Tammy Mitchell | | Phase 2: Drawing Management Software

It’s a challenge for Facility Managers to manage drawings and access those drawings from multiple departments across multiple facilities. Why? Because not everyone who handles drawings is careful about documenting changes or tagging the most recent version.

Not being careful creates version control issues. Fortunately, there are ways to prevent duplicates and control access across internal departments and external contractors.

Read on, Facility Manager friends!

How do facility managers manage drawings that are already digital?

When there’s no automated drawing management system in place, facility managers typically digitize drawings and place them in organized folders on a shared drive.

That sounds better than paper blueprints on shelves. 

It does. But it’s not better, really—bummer! The downfalls of this system are many, the biggest being a lack of accountability. Anyone can upload, download, use, modify, or even delete drawings using a folder system like Google Drive or DropBox. That creates accuracy issues since everyone will have a preferred way of filing drawing sets (by project name, building, floor, discipline, etc.). 

Digitized files saved on an isolated digital drive give employees too much access than a paper-based system that makes access a pain. Curbing access is better when it comes to duplication.

Duplicate files happen when employees can easily access as-built drawings and upload that drawing to different folders. In this situation, managers should implement no-save policies. The drawing should only be shared from the source, which should be the only instance of that drawing. Requiring a check-in check-out policy only works, however, when employees respect that policy. But managing accountability without automated tracking is hard.

Best intentions here often fail. 

Restricting access has proven, even in small facilities, problematic when there is more than one user. Plus, there’s no way to track drawing revisions. Sometimes it takes months or years to realize drawings are missing associated files (CAD) or lack a version everyone can view (PDF).

A shared drive with a folder “tree” doesn’t work for large engineering drawings with a long life cycle.  

What if the drawings aren’t digitized?

Paper engineering drawings present a new set of issues, the biggest being that paper is no longer an acceptable medium in the industry. If you’re still housing paper drawings, you’re getting left behind. Your peers have modernized, transforming deteriorating paper to digital. This is no longer a luxury in 2020. It is standard operations. 

So if you have paper drawings, plan to digitize them because you’re not cool anymore.

Until then, limit access to the archive room (someone must track drawings to maintain version control and markups) and make sure drawings are stored with the basic organization (i.e., disciplines, building, or project sets), preferably standardized across your entire drawing history. 

Consider the difference between your facility and a digitally-run facility when it comes to onsite work. 

In your paper-based facility, team members physically access the storage room to retrieve the hard copy and deliver that hard copy to the worksite. In many cases, the facility manager runs around gathering what the consultant needs. Then, if something’s missing or irrelevant, another trip to the archive is necessary. That’s a lot of running around. 

Conversely, a digital-based facility grants access to the required drawing from the Cloud’s online engineering drawing library. That drawing library stores the current master drawing with correct markups—archiving all previous versions. When the contractor uses the file, all internal staff still have access to the same drawing. Requests for changes made by the onsite contractor are sent to echo admin. The master is maintained. People notice how great your management skills are.

Most facility managers see the problems created by paper (like drawings that go missing or are returned but incorrectly filed). They decide to convert paper drawings to digital drawings. But sometimes, FMs opt to invest in a wide format scanner and hire students to do the scanning—and that’s a no-no on multiple levels. 

With an in-house scanner run by in-house staff, it’s easy to use the wrong scan settings, resulting in oversized files. Even if an in-house team uses the correct settings, they’re unlikely to properly understand the drawings throughout their history to categorize them accurately for file naming. And then, too many times, these new digital drawings are stored on a shared drive. 

What you’ve done is replicate the same problems you had with paper in digital format in an attempt to curb costs. But in the end, improper sorts, improper scans, and improper storage create a cost spiral. Sadness.

The point of going digital is to streamline searching for, sharing, and updating drawings. Improper scans, a lack of care when decided which documents supersede others, an improper nomenclature, and isolated servers create the same problems that existed with paper. 

The only advantage with digital done this way is that digital files aren’t affected by natural disasters and aging—provided there are backups. But, here again, improper backups add to the ball of wax, Stanley.

What’s the great big deal about oversized files, anyway?

Unnecessarily big files are always a problem because sharing, storing, and printing is cumbersome. This is especially true for engineering drawings because they’re already hi-res large files even at the barest requirements.

To give some perspective:

A client scanned drawings in-house in grayscale to achieve a high-quality image. However, they didn’t realize the scan created a photo image rather than a line drawing. The file size was more than 500x larger than necessary. 

The client couldn’t share it via email, it took a long time to load, and it took up a lot of space on the server, costing them more in storage use. When it came to printing the image, the whole page was shades of grey, not just the lines. That cost a lot in ink.

Okay, okay! So what’s the best way to manage drawings?

This is where things get straightforward, and stress begins to lift off Facility Manager foreheads across the country and around the world—so listen up!

There’s an easy answer to drawing management woes: pass the problem to drawing professionals. You can integrate automated drawing management software (DMS) into your system regardless if it’s paper-based or digital-based. The process is the same. It starts by sorting through your entire drawing history to discover the engineering drawings that stay (a small percentage of what you have now) and what drawings go (hundreds to thousands). You’re left with a tidy, accurate, modern set of drawings. And they’re all the right ones. 

Does that sound good to you?

Ask these starting point questions:

  • Are there multiple places to retrieve drawings?
  • How confident are you that 100% of your drawings are accurately identified?
  • Do you rely heavily on one person? 
  • Is there a bottleneck in the flow of sharing drawing information?
  • Are the drawings outdated?
  • Is time wasted locating and retrieving drawings?
  • Are drawing discussions overall a frustrating element of your existing process?

These problems won’t go away on their own. They only worsen since there are always new projects, and senior staff members with building knowledge will always retire. Managing the problem with a half-digital solution can create as many problems as exist with paper drawings.

Take active steps to address these issues and look at the benefits of a DMS. Before uploading drawings to a DMS, one set of accurate, optimized master drawings is defined. Master drawings can be easily found at the click of a button. 

Echo, by The Drawing Specialists, is an online digital library for large format engineering drawings that protects access and pulls up the right drawing for those with defined permissions in seconds (no matter where you are). 

Unlike traditional drawing management systems, echo is tailor-made for your facility and offers up-to-the-minute accuracy for your team. On-the-ball Facility Managers keep up with revised engineering drawings from various sources and manage many versions over a long life cycle like the pros they know they are.

Like, yeehaw, right? That sounds amazing.

It is. Read on.

echo app on mobile

How does the echo DMS work?

The Drawing Specialist’s echo app is a standalone SaaS product. It is ready to customize out of the box to your unique drawing needs. Before your drawings can upload to echo, however, these are the preliminary steps we take to ensure your DMS delivers the results you’re after:

  • Sort through all drawings to determine the most current version and relevant markups.
  • Merge and update your data with hard copies and electronic images.
  • Scan masters and include 25+ points of relevant data for each drawing to make drawings easy to find through a wide variety of search criteria.
  • Determine what’s required to update your CAD Plans.

Those four bullet points represent weeks and months of work! It takes a lot of resources to digitize your drawings properly. It requires additional equipment and specific skill sets to understand drawing life cycles and complete these processes, ranging from a drawing handler to a CAD technician. 

The best way to manage drawings from multiple sources and departments across multiple facilities is to hire The Drawing Specialists to do everything for you. 

All drawings are processed at our facility and delivered back to you in the echo DMS. All Masters will be accessible from any device, and all irrelevant drawings will be archived. Aside from the added efficiency, the immediate gain is space—you’ve eliminated hard copies. Make your old storage room a foosball room. And put an espresso machine in there. And a couch.

The process goes something like this:

  • Kick-off meeting: Capture all your specifications and customizations with The Drawing Specialists applying years of experience to make recommendations.
  • Ship drawings to The Drawing Specialists: We’ll audit the drawings and produce a set of masters to populate echo, our lightning-fast, powerful Drawing Management System (DMS).
  • Set up training: We will train your team to use the custom echo system. With a clean, modular design, you’ll see how easy it is to hit the ground running.

The Drawing Specialists dive in and get dirty. When finished, we’ll know your drawings better than veteran employees. That means we’re fully up to speed to support you moving forward, whatever questions you may have. We’re known for our hands-on approach that starts in your back room. 

Our goal is to help you bring your drawing history up-to-date as fast as possible and make it easy to manage it with a powerful database and user interface (UI) that is simple and intuitive. You’ll go from chaos to cheers in no time.  

And we dance.

What is the best way to prepare for a valuable employee’s retirement?

by Tammy Mitchell | | Next-Gen Facility Manager

I know you’re wishing that “Bob” would take back his intention to retire and keep on working alongside you until his last breath. We know it’s hard to let go after decades of experience; it’s obvious there are things that just cannot be taught!

Bob deserves to kick back and breathe in retirement. Living the good life with a newspaper in his hand on an idle Monday morning. 

Sign up for the Drawing Specialists Blog

But before I give you the industry secrets, I must give you some facts.   

Approximately 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day? We both know they hold key management positions with tribal knowledge and secrets that they’ve built up over decades.

Also, it’s good to note a higher cycle of turnover is a new reality in the 21 century! 90% of millennials expect to stay in a position for less than three years. Yes, three years. Millennials move around a lot, and just when things are flowing smoothly, they get bored. Thank you, social media.  

How will your company manage the turnover of key positions every few years as opposed to every decade or two?

Here are seven ways to excel at extracting and storing valuable information from turnover to turnover.

Don’t Undervalue Older Staff

Long-time workers have built in routine knowledge about how to work efficiently, and they know their way around facilities like second nature. They understand what has worked in the past, what hasn’t worked, and the why’s of everything. 

Value your older workers by having open conversations with them about their history in the company and their plans moving forward. Applaud them on the knowledge of historic renovations, the discoveries they’ve made and all the pieces of the puzzles they have help solve.

Manage Cross-Generation Learning

Your aging employees need to know that it’s a part of their job to train the younger generation coming in. At the same time, younger workers need to know they are required to learn from their more experienced peers during this critical transition.

You can help facilitate cross-generational learning by noting that there is much to be learned from different perspectives, generations and work styles. Before training starts, communicate your expectations, which will minimize feelings of discrimination that older workers may feel as they begin to transition to retirement.

Avoid Knowledge Silos

Your long-time employees have formed relationships across the company, giving them a deeper understanding of how their job impacts someone else’s work in another area. Without a broader appreciation for other departmental roles, less experienced employees may cause delays in performance.

To avoid knowledge silos, encourage collaboration and accessibility through echo Drawing Management System to streamline, document, the process moving forward. Capture the information in a format that is transferable.

Cross-Train Employees

Cross-training is another remedy when long-time employees leave. By giving a new hire a three-month post in another department allows them hands-on experience in areas of the company unfamiliar to their job title.

Cross-training will prevent information silos gifting all new employees’ full access to the knowledge available.

Start the Knowledge Transfer Now

Knowledge transfers take time. Do not wait until two weeks before your older workers last day to start the process. Yikes.

The best thing you could do for your business during this critical time is to have your retiring worker share in this process. Have them be a part of the process of getting your facility drawings organized and into an echo Drawing Management System. By working together with a Drawing Specialist along with your older staff, we can capture the knowledge in their head. This allows for the future of your buildings to be organized, moving forward.

Another option is creating Baseline drawings. Baseline helps your older staff’s knowledge and history out of their heads and on one master drawing: securing your future today for tomorrow.

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Bringing in the human element to the conversation when dealing with your older staff’s retirement helps them feel appreciated. Remember, you are touching on this person’s livelihood, identity, and legacy. Please proceed with kindness and respect – we are all human. 

You Are Not Alone

Now that we know 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day and Millennial’s are cutting careers short, you can know with confidence you are not alone. It’s true, Facilities across the globe are managing the turnover of key positions every few years as opposed to every decade or two. But don’t worry! It’s figureoutable. DCM has affordable solutions to assist you with managing turnovers like a pro. 

Our goal is to improve your drawing management so profoundly; you can’t imagine going back to the old way. Which means, the timing is perfect since your old way is retiring!

Book a call with a Drawing Specialist for your free no-obligation plan for 2020.

CAD Conversion Services Explained by The Drawing Specialists

by Tammy Mitchell | | redraw - CAD Conversion Articles

CAD Conversion Services Explained

If you are a Facility Manager, Engineer, Architect, Contractor, or Property Manager occasionally you may find yourself in a situation with blueprints and engineering drawings that are not in an editable format. Some of the drawings may require you to modify and or update the drawing information for upcoming renovations, additions or merely to keep the drawing current. By converting your drawings to an editable Computer-Aided Design (CAD) format; software such as AutoCAD provides significant features. Such as flexibility that paper, scans, or composite hybrid drawings do not.

What is AutoCAD software?

AutoCAD is a 2-D and 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application, equipped with powerful drafting and detailing tools to create precision engineering drawings or illustrations.

blueprints to digital

Why facilities benefit from converting to CAD?

Having your paper, tiff, jpg and pdf convert to AutoCAD is useful for many reasons. 

Customization

CAD allows individual entity and attributing with editing capability, customized colors, layers for more natural interpretation and standardization.

Reduce the Cost of Revisions / Modifications

Revisions done in CAD are typically much faster than the same revision done by manual methods. Conversion allows the user to take advantage of these savings even when working with old paper drawings.

Drawing Storage

Storage of hard copy (paper) drawings can typically take up a lot of floor/office space.

Security of your Assets

Having your drawings within a digital format can help prevent loss of original printed drawings. Unforeseen events can cause a loss of relevant information. A single sprinkler malfunction could destroy your drawings and essential information.

Sustainability

The environmental impact of paper is significant; we at DCM have been leading changes in facilities since 2000. Our drawing services, conversion services, Baseline and echo drawing management system all offer balance to our environment.

Don’t Let This Happen To You!

In this situation, the Director took us to this room and he said:

“We used to call this our drawing room; now we call it the drying room!”

Conclusion

You can see why our services at DCM Inc. are leading CAD conversion in North America. We offer high quality, rapid turnaround, and economically priced services worldwide. 

What are your options to get your Paper drawings to AutoCAD?

You may opt to manually redraw in the house, or use a PDF to AutoCAD conversion software but we would suggest you sub-contract your redraw work to DCM Inc. Here’s Why!

Clean up your paper mess and get digital files with DCM’s Conversion Services. Or our Baseline Services layer all engineer drawings into one working document.

In a few swipes, our echo Drawing Management System finds what you need at top speed! Echo, created by DCM, loved by organized customers.

Ask about our services

Get a quote!