CAD Management’s Future: Document Management and Distribution - Part 1

As a CAD manager, you have your hands full maintaining software and hardware and keeping users productive. Sometimes this day-to-day firefighting keeps you from noticing trends that might shape your job in the future. So starting this month, we’ll be examining some of the trends that you should at least be aware of.

Then you can talk them up with management. You’ll look good and you won’t be playing catch up later on if trend turns into standard operating procedure.

This month, let’s look at trends that affect document management and distribution processes.

Basic Document Management

The trends toward Product Data Management (PDM) in the MCAD world and BIM (Building Information Management) in the ACAD world generate a lot of interest (some might call it hysteria), but overlook the basics of document management. Here’s a quick primer on what a good, basic, document-management process should achieve:

Organized Directory Structure Enables you to easily separate project documents from one another, yet has a sophisticated enough structure that you can also group files by discipline, department, and the like as illustrated here using an imaginary Q drive as a drawing storage drive:

Q:\DRAWINGS\DEPARTMENT\DISCILINE

Examples might be

Q:\DRAWINGS\CONSTRUCTION\FOUNDATIONS

Q:\DRAWINGS\ARCHITECTURE\WALL PLANS

Basic Revision Control Allows you to store document revisions as separate files, yet makes sure you can always easily identify the latest release of a drawing.

File-to-File Relationship Control Acknowledges the part-to-assembly relationships in MCAD and the design object-to-XREF method in CAD, so you know that any drawing you produce uses the latest version of an assembly or of an XREF file.

File Security Creates a network-based file security matrix that lets you assign view-/print-only permissions and edit/delete permissions to specific users.

Basic File Viewing Allows you to assign view-only permissions for key files, so non-CAD personnel cannot inadvertently edit them. Functions with internal users as well as vendors and customers. How much use can you make of the sophisticated document-management tools that are emerging if these fundamental protocols aren’t already in place? Tackle these basics first. Establish your procedures and periodically audit them to make sure they’re being followed. After all, you can’t automate what isn’t already standardized.

Transmitting Documents

Are you still distributing paper drawings? Using Fed Ex to do it? OK. But the competition has been transmitting digital drawings (much more easily and cheaply) via e-mail for quite a while now. You can make that shift (sooner or later you’ll have to make it) and beat the competition, too. First, figure out how you’re going to accurately track, manage, and update that digital flow before you’re eyebrow-deep in it. That’s something many of your competitors are still messing around with. And they’re losing some business because of the mess. In using e-mail to transmit drawings, your document control process has to tell you:

Who has been e-mailed what file.
That the responsible parties have all the correct XREFs they need.
That the correct revision of documents was mailed.
Who responded to transmittals and what changes they’re requiring.
How to prevent someone from making unauthorized changes to your drawings.

If you establish basic document-management procedures and monitor them effectively as I suggested earlier, you’re going to have a much easier job of handling these e-mail complications. That’s true whether you’re just starting out with an e-mail-based process or already struggling to manage it more effectively. If the basics aren’t in place, add them now.

Although design processes are now almost entirely digital, tracking and auditing digital file transmissions lags far behind. Despite the software companies serving niche PDM and BIM markets and those selling general-purpose, document-management tools, no company has yet released a well-designed, off-the-shelf software solution for these e-mail tracking and auditing tasks. Once again, that means it’s up to you to build or integrate your own system. A daunting task to be sure.

So you’re going to have to involve not only CAD personnel but also management and IT staff as well. At a minimum, you must build an archive of e-mail correspondence that you can cross reference to such key parameters as project name/number, relevant dates, drawing numbers, and so on. Think about all the permutations and you can see that effectively managing e-mail transmittal of drawing data is going to be a key part of your job description sooner rather than later.

Document Formatting: PDF vs. DWF

A number of software solutions have emerged over the years that you can use to prevent unauthorized or inadvertent drawing changes during e-mail transmission. Essentially, these formats capture an AutoCAD® file to a neutral and noneditable format that the user can view with a free viewing utility. The most popular formats are Autodesk DWF™ (Drawing Web Format) and Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format).

DWF is offered as a plotting option in all AutoCAD based products , and it offers intelligent layering and 3D viewing. You can download the free viewer, Volo® View Express, from the Autodesk website. With the View Express tool users can open, view, do lightweight markup, and print AutoCAD drawings, including DWG, DXF™, and DWF (ePlot and eView) files. (There’s even an Autodesk Inventor® plug-in for the Viewer.)

You can download the free PDF viewer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, from the Adobe site. However, Adobe’s basic file-creation tool, Adobe Acrobat—which most corporate environments standardize on—costs about US$200 and has no CAD-specific viewing functionality. A higher-end Adobe product, Adobe Acrobat Professional (US$449), does offer that functionality.

Whether the ubiquitous PDF format will replace the more CAD friendly DWF format in architecture and engineering offices is anybody’s guess, but the battle is already shaping up. According to the Adobe website, the Professional product offers “full creation, navigation, and output support for large-paper formats; preserved layer integrity from AutoCAD and Microsoft Visio; Adobe PDF creation from within AutoCAD, Visio, and Microsoft Project; professional review and commenting tools; and improved security options.”

Start the format discussion now while you’re transitioning to an e-mail-based document-transmission process. If you decide to go with DWF and View Express, be prepared to educate some of your vendors and customers in how to use these tools, which are not well known outside the CAD world.

Using the Web

Design firms simply do not want to put their drawings on a freely accessible Internet site. Why risk the loss of intellectual property (design data)? That does not mean, however, that you won’t be using web technology for CAD management.

Think Intranet not Internet. You’re going to want to give favored customers and vendors at least online view-and-comment access to your documents (do it before they ask for it; that’ll impress them). You’ll end up providing that access from the safety of your company’s Intranet with its protective firewall. Don’t overlook this growing trend. It has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of CAD management.

Wrapping Up

Your challenge now is to determine how you want to tackle these document control problems. Think through your current document transmission and management practices with a critical mindset to see where you should focus your time and energy. As you identify problems, write them down, and then draft a plan that corrects them.

In next month’s installment, I’ll outline some strategies you can use with Autodesk products to manage and distribute documents electronically with minimal cost and hassle. Until then...