I want flexibility but I also want controls, is that possible?

It’s a problem that all organisations face. They don’t want to constrain the creativity of staff but at the same time, they need them to follow policies and adhere to certain rules.

Whether your business is a major corporation or a small business with a handful of staff, your reputation hinges on the quality of your work. You personally can’t check everything that leaves the office, so your business has certain procedures and rules in place to ensure that things run smoothly. It may simply be that all formal issues go via Joanne for instance and she checks the quality of the material and that the correct versions are being sent. Or it may be much more involved with separate people checking for technical content and documentation standards before a director sign it off as fit for release.

Both have structure and yet both need a degree of flexibility too. Joanne may be off sick and someone else needs to step in, or the process in the corporate business needs additional steps and multiple people to approve the work for a particularly sensitive project.

Creativity is also a concern. Creative people work best when they have fewer constraints; designers rarely develop their initial ideas in a 3D modeling tool because the tool can inhibit them. So they will favor more traditional methods like paper and pen, or simpler tools like sketching programs.

As a result, when it comes to ensuring the best management of documentation, there is tension between the creative need to be uninhibited by the system, and the management needs to have some structure and procedures.

This has often been the undoing of document and drawing management software, especially in the Buildings & Infrastructure market where the need to maintain creativity has almost ruled out the use of such systems. Organisations that have invested in more strict document and drawing management software have found that adoption has been a problem as the staff does all they can to avoid using it. Others have tried CAD document management systems that either manage their email, which at least provides some control, or ones that additionally index their folder and hence provide a fast search service.

These systems can be expensive, yet they fail to address the full need which typically includes:

1. Project-specific:

    • File naming

    • Checking and approval

    • Extranet upload

2. Transmittal:

    • Content assembly

    • Transmittal document creation

3. Mobile:

    • Search

    • Approval

    • Editing

    • Mark-up

4. Legacy projects:

    • Leave where they are but the search finds them

5. Efficiencies

    • Less time spent on mundane tasks

It is possible

While some CAD document management systems just provide a search facility with a few peripheral capabilities and others provide rigid control, our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS gives you the flexibility to not only vary the level of control from project to project but also to leave your legacy data where it is. All the while gaining the incredible deep-content Search across all your documents and from any device; imagine via your phone searching for a document that could be on one of the company file systems servers or in the CAD document management system and finding it instantly, editing it, and saving it back.

Learn more about our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS here.