Keys, Wallet, Phone – What Have I Forgotten?

 When I leave the house, I always check for these three things:

• Keys

• Wallet

• Phone

Although in the current climate, you probably want to add ‘mask’ to your list too.

We all have favourite places where we leave them so that we can easily find them later; whether it may be on a bedside table, in the kitchen drawer or a coat pocket, etc. Wherever it is, we know where to start looking, but what about office equipment and assets? Where are they?

Office Assets

An office asset could be almost anything, it might be electrical equipment like laptops, mobile phones, photocopiers, etc, but might also be valuable artwork or sculptures. It might also be things like software licences.

In each case, you will ask questions such as who has this asset and where is it now. In other cases you may need to find information relating to the asset or be reminded of:

• 3 months advanced reminder of when the photocopier contract needs to be renegotiated

• When the warranty on the laptop expires

• When the software licences expire

• When the last insurance valuation on the artwork was and what the value was

• In which building and which room the painting is in

Anyone with a little database knowledge can knock up a simple asset register to hold this type of information. It can have serial numbers of equipment, key dates, and the names of staff that they are allocated to. As anyone who has tried this will know, the problem is that staff forget where the system is, how to log on, and how to use it.

The ideal is that this type of asset management isn’t a separate toolset but instead an extension of your existing environment so that you can:

1. Click on a building and see what photocopiers are on each floor, their contract dates, and user manuals

2. Click on a person and see which laptop, phone, and desk space is allocated to them

3. See when the laptop warranty is due to expire, the software installed on it, and licensing data

4. Search for equipment, filter for phones, and find who has the outdated phone that needs replacing

Customers of our drawing management software Excitech DOCS benefit from not just having a CAD document management system, they also gain from the underlying foundations of M-Files as its vast range of capabilities opens a wealth of opportunities to become more integrated, efficient, and organised by taking control of all your assets.

To find out more about our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS, click here.

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.

Technology preview: Staggeringly fast Revit processing with Excitech DOCS

At Excitech we are continuously developing technologies to automate tasks that are: labour intensive, prone to human error, or simply just too slow. 

You may have seen some of the automation that we have achieved with our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS which involves automatically naming documents and drawing in accordance with ISO 19650 file naming standards, the creation of transmittals with all relevant information in just a matter of minutes, and uploading documents to a variety of extranet services with their metadata and connection details for each project to name a few.

In order to further speed up the workflows of architects and engineers, we have developed a method within our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS that allows us to modify and re-publish a sheet in seconds. 

Historically, Revit can take a significant time to process sheets and while you can use automation tools to schedule the tasks, you still have to wait for Revit to get the job done. With this new tool, you won’t have to go into Revit to update the drawings; it will be updated from directly within Excitech DOCS, and within a matter of seconds. 

For instance, let’s say you have a drawing that has the suitability code “S0 – Work In Progress (WIP), but you need to push it through the ISO 19650 workflow as it is now suitable for coordination, all you need to do is select “shared” for the CDE status and then select the code “S1 – Suitable for Coordination”, and then preview the PDF drawing and see the updates. 

Watch the short preview below to see it in action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=secf4B_csiI&list=PLyBt4gIhwg2dO8X8fWyqT_xrPqD8oKDdw&index=2&t=0s

To find out more about our document and drawing management software Excitech DOCS visit our website or contact us at info@symetri.co.uk or 01992 807 444.

Is Your Business As Mobile As It Could Be?

No matter how well organised the file structure within your business is, one of the main issues with the organisation of data today is that most of it is inaccessible via your mobile devices.

With today’s rapid increase of mobile working, we should be able to view, mark-up, edit and approve documents on the go directly from the devices we use every day; our mobile phones.

Despite the fact that many people nowadays do not even own a desktop PC, mobility is something that many businesses are slow to adapt to.  

This thinking applies to all businesses today, but even more so within the construction sector. On average, around forty photos are taken on-site of a construction project. Whether these are images of snags, defects or simply views of the structure so far, most of these will be taken on a mobile device.

What happens to these images once you are back in the office however? In most cases, you’d have to plug your mobile device into your laptop and drop the images into a folder on a file server somewhere which is quite a long and manual process. Can you be sure that you or your colleagues could find them months later?

Imagine you could upload those photos directly to your engineering document management software from your mobile device, associate them with a project, and locate them based on the most minimal information you know about them from your mobile device whilst out on-site. Not only would this save huge amounts of time, it would also prevent difficulty when you or your colleagues are locating the images at a later date. 

This can all be achieved with engineering document management software like Excitech DOCS. Know who took the photos ow which month they were taken in? You could create a filter to view all photos taken within a particular month or by a certain person. 

In addition to searching for documents based on minimal information, our engineering document management software will also provide users with information about where the photos were taken using geolocation properties which are already embedded into photos taken with smartphones. For example this could prove useful if you have captured defects on-site where the location is unidentifieable from the photo alone. With Excitech DOCS you can view exactly where this photo was taken on a map.

You'll also be able to view all project emails filtered by company, contact or by project via all mobile platforms as they are helpfully converted from email form to PDF form for easy reading.

Excitech DOCS is a forward thinking and easy solution which allows you to view drawings, photos and emails all from a single source of truth. To learn more about our engineering document management software solution, please call us on 01992 807 444 or click on the button below.