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

Whether your business is a major corporate 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 signs 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 constrains; designers rarely develop their initial ideas in a 3D modelling tool because the tool can inhibit them. So they will favour 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 need 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 staff do 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:

• Project specific:
  • File naming
  • Checking and approval
  • Extranet upload
• Transmittal:
  • Content assembly
  • Transmittal document creation
• Mobile:
  • Search
  • Approval
  • Editing
  • Mark-up
• Legacy projects:
  • Leave where they are but the search finds them
  • 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.

Document management is not what it used to be
Document management is no longer the expensive and highly constrained environment that only the huge corporates can use. Excitech DOCS is fast, flexible and can be changed by you to meet your needs as the business evolves because it is based on the versatile, popular and modern M-Files platform. It will not only save you save you time and money, it won’t cost you a fortune either; many of our customers are businesses with around 20 staff who are now reaping the benefits of better documentation processes that don’t inhibit their creativity.

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

Author

Symetri