Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
(OP)
Hello
How do "other" companies keep track of there drawings? Before AutoCad our shop had paper drawings, when a draftsman made a revision it was a fairly involved process and a new "paper" copy was properly documented in our log. Now, with AutoCad we are getting a folder full of names. When a drawing is first made it is assigned a catalog number and properly entered in a book. But... revisions are ever so easy, and likely the revised copy has a name change to reflect the change (pump1 rev1.dwg) but that is the end of it. So it is not ever reflected in our catalog and if it was would make for a very cumbersome list.
So, what works for other machine shops where we get both customers drawings and contract out drafting needs.
Thanks
Ralph
How do "other" companies keep track of there drawings? Before AutoCad our shop had paper drawings, when a draftsman made a revision it was a fairly involved process and a new "paper" copy was properly documented in our log. Now, with AutoCad we are getting a folder full of names. When a drawing is first made it is assigned a catalog number and properly entered in a book. But... revisions are ever so easy, and likely the revised copy has a name change to reflect the change (pump1 rev1.dwg) but that is the end of it. So it is not ever reflected in our catalog and if it was would make for a very cumbersome list.
So, what works for other machine shops where we get both customers drawings and contract out drafting needs.
Thanks
Ralph





RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
So basically its:
Month Folder>Customer Name>Drawing(s)
We put the years on CD, such as 1 or 2 CDs for 2001, etc. But it's a pain to cross-reference a drawing. I have been thinking of maybe organizing them in Excel or something.
I have heard of some companies saving the drawings in jpg files to quickly search them without ACAD.
Flores
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
The master files are living files where constant changes are made.
The sheet files have the borders and annotations associated to the sheet. This would be revision numbers, general notes, etc...
When we issue a file, we plot it out and scan each plot and attach a transmittal which comes from a database. The database contains information about each sheet. After filling in the fields we hit enter and a form spits out in a transmittal form.
Electronically
We use pack & go and zip all the files and label the zip file with the issue date.
And finally store the zip file in a "ISSUED FILES" folder.
.
There's other middle steps related to checking and quality control but these are the cliff notes.
.
Hope that sheds some light.
Rich
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
I made up a Access (actually in the process of) data base. Made a form to reflect what we had in our catalog and this is working very well for the "paper" copies. It is the electronic copies that I am having troubles with, and thus the request to see what others do. Anyway in my Access database form I can shell out to a drawing viewer. So when a user finds a drawing, by clicking a command button the drawing opens. I looked long and hard for a suitable viewer, VoloView from AutoDesk would work (its free) but then I would be limited to only AutoCad files. I found a very nice viewer from http://www.slickwin.com called Slick!
This is a very reasonably priced viewer (150$$ US) with the advantage that it will open, view, print, red line a large number of drawing formats. A lot of our customers send scanned drawings in a tiff format and Slick will open them, and many more.
In our case it does not help but Slick also has a "data base feature" if the only drawing files we had to index were electronic this would be all we needed.
Regards
Ralph
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
As far as using Excel to organize files like I had mentioned earlier, Access would have been a better way. It's a bad habit I have (using spreadsheet software to handle databases).
http://www.oasys-software.com/product/dm/columbus/
Flores
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
The thread turned into "what do you use to view drawings", important enough, but my question was more in line with "how do you name various versions, revisions etc." ( or so I intended.)
So, for the time being, will keep up the "shoe box" approch. Dump it all into a folder and hope to be able to find it later.
Thanks again.
Ralph
RE: Keeping track of drawings.. What works?
http://www.flash.net/~jmosier/FileNotes/
I have been using it for a last 2 weeks, and it has made finding drawings and sorting revisions a lot easier. Usually I only keep the latest revision on the server and previous ood version are stored on CD. I use myorganizer to store comments and a directory list of each CD so I can easily find which CD the file I am looking for is on.
http://www.kingofmath.com/Freeware/myorganizer/