How many of you are still the primary drafter at your company?

I just want to get a feel for how many of us CAD managers are still the primary person doing the drafting, or at least the go-to person for anything that is complex or needs to be done quickly. After reading through a few of Robert Green's newsletters, I've come to understand that he feels that the CAD manager shouldn't be doing much, if any, drafting at all. Instead they should be delegating it to the other CAD members.

Thoughts? Opinions? Horror stories?

Well, that would be nice. Too bad I am the lone Manager and Draftsman one in the same. It does make for some interesting conversations between the manager and draftsman.

I would have to think it depends on the number of operators being managed as well as the skill level of the draftsmen.

Well, that would be nice. Too bad I am the lone Manager and Draftsman one in the same. It does make for some interesting conversations between the manager and draftsman.

Same here, only the owner/head engineer has taken on some of the CAD Manager's duties. We now have a checklist for "quality control," which is done as the final step in the process. At that point in the process, of course, there is no time for triple checking every little cosmetic detail and initialing every item on a list. The "quality control" needs to happen at every step, but that's just my opinion based on 20 years of experience.

Well, that would be nice. Too bad I am the lone Manager and Draftsman one in the same. It does make for some interesting conversations between the manager and draftsman.

Exactly the same situation here. Meet you at the water cooler!

Exactly the same situation here. Meet you at the water cooler!

My CAD Manager is an a** don't even let me take breaks. He is watching me as I type this.

I have 2 full time drafters and 3 that do it part time. I am the only one that is dedicated to several companies we do bussiness for and do all their drawings no one else even knows how ( this really makes it tough if I am sick or want to go on vacation). I also do anything that needs a rush. Everything else the other drafters do. Plus I do all the spread sheets( their are quite a few, my boss keeps wanting more) that we use and create and mantain our dynamic blocks (we have just started using dynamic blocks in the past year and I am still not finished yet. I am a regional Cad Manager so if another company needs something I am the girl they call on. Wow when I wright it down I see I really need a vacation:shock: but no time. I now really need to get back to work.

OOPS, I really should learn to spell.

I have around 15 people, 9 of which are full time cadders , working at 5 sites, and the others do cad work about 10% of the time. We run AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Lt and eight other CAD systems for a host of different clients. I run the whole show (CAD forms about 60% of our workload) but at the same time get called in to either do a complicated job or sort out the problems of the others when they get stuck. I do all of the programming and customization and set the internal CAD Standards. I have a very good team and spend a lot of time on training, coaching and encouragement. In the long run it pays off. What also helps is if I ask somebody to do something and they say it can't be done, I just move them over and show them how to do it.

Honestly said I miss not being fully active in CAD and don't really think I could let go completely. A CAD Managers role varies from company to company and I don't think anyone can draw a general for everyone. If it works well in your company why change it, tweak it and improve it yes, but not a lot more. Keep an open mind and be willing to learn from others - that's my motto.

The CAD manager's role (mine) is not working well here. I feel I'm in a lose-lose situation because too much is being expected of me and any reason that I come up with, even with factual evidence, to explain why I can't do everything that they are asking, just makes me look like I'm complaining. In all honesty, I'm considering stepping down and letting someone else take over as manager.

I'm a one man show. I'm the manager, draftsman, IT guy, purchaser, janitor...and everything else!

After reading through a few of Robert Green's newsletters, I've come to understand that he feels that the CAD manager shouldn't be doing much, if any, drafting at all. Instead they should be delegating it to the other CAD members.

 

Thoughts? Opinions? Horror stories?

As Jack, I also am a one man shop.

I think Mr. Green's opinion is silly. Now I don't think that a Cad manager should necessarily be the go to guy for all things complex or urgent, but I believe he/she certainly needs to remain current and sharp (and ahead of the curve) with the "drafting" needs of his/her lackeys. On an ongoing basis the manager needs to experience any pain points that the drafters may suffer due to the policies and decisions that are imposed.

The company I recently left had 7 CAD operators total, including me being the CAD Manager. Everyone listened to me and it was great, even my supervisor. They knew that I was passionate about AutoCAD and executing a good set of procedures (most of which I learned on this board). Now I'm down to only 4 drafters total at my new company, but have been far too busy to step into the CAD Manager role yet. They all are waiting patiently, lol....

but have been far too busy to step into the CAD Manager role yet.

Do they still expect you to perform management functions, or are you strictly a draftsman?

I too am passionate about my work, and the procedures, but it seems like every time I try to implement a new procedure to help reduce time and increase accuracy I get a response similar to "you're trying to make it so we operate like a big company, but we're just a small one." Here, they like to focus on telling you want NOT to do, rather than telling what they WANT you to do or how they want it done. After three plus years here, I FINALLY got an answer about what drill sizes we can get and what they want to use for a specific fastener size.

The easy fix is to create a network shared set of Tool Palettes, as well as an Enterprise CUI. That way on most things, the quality control works for them so they don't have to remember anything.

Out of curiosity, what issues are you having with Quality Control? And Q.C. isn't about large company/small company, it's about keeping things accurate and simple. If I open a job made four years ago, I want the layers, colors, plot styles, etc to be exactly the same. It's just common sense.

The big problem that we're having is that there isn't enough time to go through every little detail of a drawing to make sure that whoever drew it did it right. When an error surfaces, no one has time to problem solve and figure out why it happened in the first place and what steps we can take to avoid it in the future. Sometimes I don't find out about a problem until a few months after the product has been shipped.

The process goes something like this:

1. I get a request for new work or a change to be made.
   
2. I schedule the work and assign a CAD person to it.
   
3. Said CAD person completes the work and submits the drawings for my review.
   
4. I review the drawings mainly for how the information is being presented (i.e. are dimensions easy to read, are dimensions missing, were standards followed (I know about the standards checker in ACAD and I use that too), are viewports plotting correctly, etc.). If there are any glaring errors as to how it's being built, I'll catch those too.
   
5. I submit the drawings to the project manager for his review to make sure that the product details are per what the customer is expecting.
   
6. Project manager hands the drawings off to the production lead to make sure the drawings can be used to build the product, although this step doesn't always happen.
   
7. CAD makes any changes needed, then creates a PDF for the customer to review.
   
8. Customer sends the PDF back with their comments and approvals.
   
9. CAD makes any changes and then prints a master set of the drawings.
   

After all that is done, if the build team encounters an error in the drawings or runs into a problem with something not fitting together properly they blame the CAD department. Their first instinct is to point the finger at us. The person who drew it is blamed for not drawing it properly, then I'm blamed for not catching an obscure detail regarding construction and told that I'm focusing too much on how "pretty" the drawings are rather than how it can be built even though there isn't anything on the drawings that would lead anyone to believe that it couldn't be done or that a problem may arise.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm just b!#@$ing, but I'm just really annoyed with how everything gets pushed onto my shoulders when no one else is willing to come together as a team and figure out a solution.

I know exactly where you are coming from. To anyone that responds that you are making drawings to "pretty" can take a huge step back. A clean drawing is a good drawing. Also, the more detail that can be shown visually and/or textually is extremely important. Drawings SHOULD be pretty, and clean, and accurate, and legible, and everything else between. Ask them if they complain to the fabricators about too "pretty" of a weld, or too "pretty" of a bended flange, or too "pretty" of a polished stainless steel surface. You have got to be kidding me.... the nerve.

Anyways, what I did to correct certain things was create Tool Palettes and add custom commands and macros. For instance, I had a Tool Palette named '1/8" Tools'. In that TP, I had a macro to start three different types of common MLeaders, one with either an arrow, a dot, or a loop. But they all executed on the "M-Anno-Dim-096" layer, and all initiated on the exclusive preset MLeader Style. I just made custom icons in Photoshop to make it look all pretty. That way, if they (the other CAD monkey's) were working in a 1/8" scale, they would work off that palette. Problem solved. Another thing, if they wanted a new Viewport, I made a macro where you clicked the "New Viewport" button I made it created a Viewport on the "G-Anno-Nplt" layer.

There are a ton of things you can do to automate that process. You just gotta get creative in your approach. It took me years to come up with a really good system and I still find myself creating new things.

Supercad, it almost sounds like you are working for the dinosaur curtainwall company that I was at a couple years ago, only they have the opposite problem. "Pretty" is all they worried about. Were the fonts the right size, did you line up all the dimensions properly, etc. The content could be completely wrong, but if it was finished on time and looked good, then all was well. And the thing that got me was that they had all sorts of tools to automatically do the stuff that they checked so closely, but somewhere along the line someone in the hierarchy would decide that it had to be just a little different than the tool would do it, or than the "sacred" templates had set up. The templates and many of the lisp routines were set up to cause you to fail. For example, they has a lisp routine that would automatically draw and place dimensions on the curtainwall elevations by filling in the blanks in a dialog box. This tool would only create evenly spaced openings both horizontally and vertically, but it was a simple matter to then stretch them around and make them the sizes the architect wanted. Really easy, saved a lot of time, but it made the dimension text the wrong size. It was supposed to be .125, and this routine made it .093. Most of the time, they would never notice if the openings were the wrong size, but if you forgot to change the text size, woe be unto you. I suggested simply changing the lisp to make it the right size, and this error would go away forever. Oh no, you couldn't do that, they'd paid a programmer many thousands of dollars to write these lisps, and they were not to messed with. I then promptly saved a copy of the lisp to my hard drive, fixed the text size and went on my way. About 6 months later, they noticed that the "wrong text size" box wasn't getting checked on my review sheets any more so they had the IT guy go over my machine after work one day and I got a very stern talking to about having "rogue" programs on my machine. After that, the IT guy that found it came to my cubicle and "walked me through" removing this illegal software. Well, that just made me more determined, so I let it ride a couple of weeks (they had a short attention span), then copied it again, not to my hard drive this time, but to my personal directory on the network drive. Fixed it again, and they never bothered me about it again. This all happened about 6 months after I started there, and I worked there 4 more years after that.

Couple of weeks after that episode, I got invited out for some beers with some of the other guys in the department, they filled me in on how it works. You are not going to believe this, but if I'm lyin' I'm dyin' as the old saying goes....they told me that you have to let them find an error occasionally to avoid being a target. If your check sheets are too good, they get suspicious and you'll get on thier bad side. Yes, I said it right....if you do too good a job, it raises suspicion. So, I'd go along there for a month or so using the tools I'd modified to prevent those errors, then switch to the ones set up to cause failure for a page or two. Let them find that, fix it, and go on.

I could tell you at least a dozen more like that, as the company was full of self defeating policies like that. It was a way of life for them, and ran all through everything they did. Even the health plan was so convoluted that many of the employees who had choices otherwise would take them. The spending account card is a good example. The plan required you to get your maintenance drugs from a particular mail in pharmacy or pay a much higher copay. Yet that pharmacy was not on the list of "approved" vendors, so you'd have all this nonsense to go through everytime you bought a round of meds. You'd never hear a word from them though if you went outside the plan and paid the higher copay.

It never ceases to amaze me that this place stays in business, but they do.

We have four engineers. But two of us handle 99% of the workload. One of them is about as useful as a $50,000 paperweight, and the other one is about to transition to operations manager. Oh, and the other guys that handles work-load with me is actually the Director, so I guess yeah, I'm currently doing most of the drafting. Hmmm.....