How to Organize Project Folders

I've only seen systems to that extent [databases] in multinational companies.

We are a small to medium sized company but have in excess of 2000 projects per year, as you can guess most of them very small projects. We designed our own database in Visual Studio 2010 Professional using an SQL database. We can keep track of every thing and produce reports to show which projects are at a standstill because of lack of information, for example. Try doing that without a database and I don't think you would succeed. We used to use Excel spreadsheets a long time ago but it didn't really provide any control over the projects and we always had a few jobs each year that fell through the net. Now I have a guy who is responsible for assigning jobs to different employees, checking on their progress and gernerating the invoices as soon as the job is completed. It works a treat, perhaps I'm tempting fate saying that!

Keep the system as simple as possible, make sure it suits the way that you work and that in itself will help a great deal. No one system is the answer for everyone.

Vault would be worth looking into. It does pretty good at version control. One file with a history of revisions/ progress. I work remotely, so with Vault+VPN, I can work on a local copy, update it to vault, and someone in the office can look at the same thing. I keep files checked out when in progress so no one can mess with them, but they can always open up the latest version read-only if they need to. Vault is not limited to dwg's as well. You can install an add-in for excel, pdf, etc.

I'd suggest also considering dwf's for your engineers to review. It can keep them (or others) from mucking up your nicely prepared cad file.

That does sound like what we need. I'm going to look into that today or tomorrow.

Have you looked at cloud file management systems at all? We use one here and it is absolutely fantastic. The system we have supports versioning (you can roll a drawing back to a previous version). There are many other safeguards put into place as well.

 

This is the way our system works:

Essentially you add a file into the vault and you are prompted to enter some properties, one being the file type. ALl the other properties are set up based on the file type. For example we have one type called drawing or plan, from there we can enter an engineering discipline (Architectural, Structural, Electrical , Mechanical etc), the next property prompts for more information regarding the drawing type for that discipline (Electrical Master, Electrical Site Master, Interior Simulations etc). You then enter a job number where it auto fills the the customer for us. We have about 40 different document types each having a separate set of properties that are entered based on the information we need to find the document.

 

When dealing with large jobs where we can have several hundreds of documents we can very quickly and easily narrow a search down to one or 2 documents based on these properties.

 

We have this further linked to our billing system and based on the number of hours in our quote and hours we have invoiced it gives a job completed percentage. It also picks up whether an invoice was sent as an extra to the scope of work (work we did but was not included in the original quote) and gives a percentage of how complete the job is based on this.

 

I was not here for our initial implementation of the system so I cannot say how smooth the initial transition was but I am becoming a major part of maintaining it.

 

There are many more features, and some of these may only be available in the system we use (and I am sure there are others out there that may work better for your specific company).

So, is this the same way that Vault works? I haven't had a chance to look into it yet so I have no idea how these work.

I think moving the files from folder to folder is not a good idea. Somebody forgets to do it or somebody misplaces a file and your system doesn't work.

This is my biggest fear. And it leaves a lot of room for error.

I've only seen systems to that extent in multinational companies.

I dont know what you consider large or small companies, but based on standards I have seen we would be small (11 employees) and as mentioned in my earlier post we have a very comprehensive system that works great for a company our size.

So, is this the same way that Vault works? I haven't had a chance to look into it yet so I have no idea how these work.

It is similar to vault (I have not had a great deal of experience with Autodesk Vault) but some with the Solidworks equivilant and from what I can tell the system we have is slightly more customizable and has a much broader scope than vault, although vault will likely be better at handling Autodesk specific file types (in terms of versioning etc) out of the box (we are currently working on having document versions linked so when one is rolled back another rolls back to the most relevant version ie think x-refs). I don't know if vault does stuff like this out of the box.

M-Files is the system we use here if you are interested. AS I had mentioned other software may work better for your company and my experience with other software is limited to co-op positions where I am sure I barely saw the tip of the iceberg.

I don't trust the "Cloud". Today you have access to all your drawings; tomorrow...who knows? You can find yourself locked out of your own files for some inexplicable reason.

I don't trust the "Cloud". Today you have access to all your drawings; tomorrow...who knows? You can find yourself locked out of your own files for some inexplicable reason.

They have options to also utilize on premise server equipment (this is what we have) rather than through cloud services, or you can create a hybrid system which we are potentially moving to. All field required documentation (site audit, inspection reports etc) will be pushed into a cloud where it can be used on site and then pushed back to our servers after it is complete.

I don't trust the "Cloud". Today you have access to all your drawings; tomorrow...who knows? You can find yourself locked out of your own files for some inexplicable reason.

I have the same concern. If there is no internet connection and everything was in the cloud, then no work could be done.

Not to mention the fact that you don't know know could be viewing the [sensitive] data in the cloud.

They have options to also utilize on premise server equipment (this is what we have) rather than through cloud services, or you can create a hybrid system which we are potentially moving to. All field required documentation (site audit, inspection reports etc) will be pushed into a cloud where it can be used on site and then pushed back to our servers after it is complete.

Why do you need to do that though? You said above you're a company with 11 employees. Can those going on site simply not print out the required documents before they go there etc? That is what we do with more people and it works fine.

Why do you need to do that though? You said above you're a company with 11 employees. Can those going on site simply not print out the required documents before they go there etc? That is what we do with more people and it works fine.

One of the benefits our company deals with is an ability to produce a fast return. We have had some projects with a 2 or even 1 day turn around. Doing our audits electronically with near instant access to the information is what gives us an edge when it comes to these situations. It gives us the ability to go out, do an audit at a location several hours from us and be working on that same project with all the information that same day.

We have also had situations where the owner has committed themselves to an unrealistic deadline and we have had the ability to meet these deadline making the client exceptionally happy.

One of the benefits our company deals with is an ability to produce a fast return. We have had some projects with a 2 or even 1 day turn around. Doing our audits electronically with near instant access to the information is what gives us an edge when it comes to these situations. It gives us the ability to go out, do an audit at a location several hours from us and be working on that same project with all the information that same day.

 

We have also had situations where the owner has committed themselves to an unrealistic deadline and we have had the ability to meet these deadline making the client exceptionally happy.

TBF that sounds impressive. As others have mentioned though is your service reliable? Have you ever experienced down time?

We had one server crash (which turned out to be a hardware malfunction and we had to rebuild our server, not an issue with the service itself). We have actually implemented additional safety nets on our hardware as well as the software end since then). Like I had mentioned we currently do not use the cloud services for our paperless audits yet (we email them back an forth which is not ideally what we want to do), but we are trying to push that a bit.

We had one server crash (which turned out to be a hardware malfunction and we had to rebuild our server, not an issue with the service itself). We have actually implemented additional safety nets on our hardware as well as the software end since then). Like I had mentioned we currently do not use the cloud services for our paperless audits yet (we email them back an forth which is not ideally what we want to do), but we are trying to push that a bit.

Ah, OK. I thought you were using the cloud already to get through the audits, bot just aiming to. What backups are you using? Server backups and the like?

We do a weekly backup on our server every Saturday evening on to our backup server (we have our M-Files server set up as a virtual server inside our main server at the moment). We have a daily M-Files backup that updates only files that have been added/modified at the end of each day (this over rides any files in the weekly backup). Twice a year we also preform a system back-up check. M-Files will create a backup of the entire server, preform a system backup, repair and defragment then send us a report with any findings and recommendations. They will repair any issues that arise with our approval and over ride the back up if any issues were found and repaired.

Sounds like a good system, and that you are a well informed member of the maintenance team.

Sounds like a good system, and that you are a well informed member of the maintenance team.

I like to think so! People have actually considered the weekly update overkill with a daily update as well, but it is still something we want to do as an alternative safety measure.

I'll put a plug in for a proper system of document managment software. You don't have to be multi-national to reap the rewards. Autodesk's Vault will probably do what you require (I'm assuming you are already using Autodesk software?), but for other reasons we chose to use Adept Synergis document management system and have been extremely satisfied with it.