Organizing Drawings

[pjmac]

I have been given the task of organizing all of the old drawings and cataloging them. Since this is my first CAD job and i am the only/first CAD operator I do not know if there is a way most companies do this or if it is company specific?

 

Any tips of advice would be great. Thanks

[tzframpton]

Can you be a little more specific about "organizing and cataloging old drawings"? A for instance would be nice of what the old drawings are, and what you mean by cataloging them. I would more than glad to help out as I am the organizational standards "guy" at my company.

[pjmac]

I currently have all the drawings in respective folders for different projects and applications. What i have been asked to do was go back and attach drawing numbers to each drawing and then create a list of the numbers and where to find that drawing. What i am asking the masses is if there is standard number or identifiers for different types of drawings. I manly have mechanical drawings but also have architectural, P&ID, electrical, and assemblies.

[tzframpton]

I see. Well, for one, I think it would be far too much effort to "go back" and revitalize jobs that are done with. I would simply start from here on out with new standards.

 

The best thing I've found is by using the Sheet Set Manager (aka: SSM), you can organize everything in Windows Explorer with descriptive text due to how the SSM functions. Each DWG file becomes a sheet, with a discipline naming convention and you can even set it up to have the sheet title along with the sheet number in the DWG file, all managed by the SSM. This makes life much easier when scanning through a directory in Windows Explorer when you're hunting for a particular CAD drawing.

[DANIEL]

Here's our I'd organize them, first by project, then by discipline then by drawing number.

[pjmac]

Thank you for the advice. I am going to look into the Sheet Set Manager. And hopefully my bosses don't ask me to go back and apply drawing numbers to the old drawings.

[DANIEL]

the old drawings arn't numbered in some way?

[Jack_O'neill]

Most of the places I've worked have used a database of some sort, excel spreadsheet, access, etc. where all the information you mentioned can be stored and sorted. The customer name, project number, sales orders, etc... plus the location of the files, both physical and electronic. You could add the project manager's name, drafter, engineer, salesman, all that stuff. Especially if you use Access or something similar, you can write queries to find all projects by a particular customer, or project manager, or salesman, etc. If you include a price and cost column, you could sort by dollar amounts. And don't forget dates and locations.

 

There are lots of ways to do it. To make it easy, you probably need to come up with some conventions for naming projects, numbering them and so forth. You'll need the same information in the same order each time. For instance, if you use the project name and its date, you would want a project named Smith and Jones Elementary School completed on 5-15-01 to be named in such a way as to allow the computer to sort it the same way as a job named Wallace and Grommit Shopping Center that was completed on 9-9-10. For example, if Smithjones051501 is the job number, Wallacegrommit090910 would be the number for that job. If someone entered it as Wallace&Grommit9-9-01 would not sort the same way...see what I mean?

 

I went through this with an employer long ago. They needed a way to sort various parts made of copper tubing. That commodity is sold by diameter and wall thickness. Taking 3/8" diameter tube with .028 wall thickness as an example, the following all describe the same tube:

 

3/8" x 0.028

3/8 x .028

.375 x 0.028

 

and so forth. Any combination of fractions and decimals that could be thought of had been used. We had 10 or 15 descriptions of the same items and could not figure out why we couldn't keep the inventory straight. Same stuff would get entered in three or four times because no one could remember how it was supposed to be and couldn't find it. Same thing will happen to you if you don't make and enforce naming conventions.

[pjmac]

the old drawings arn't numbered in some way?

 

When i started there was no system set-up to number or organizing the drawings. I did the best i could while trying to start out as a new draftsmen.

 

Jack_O'neill - that ideally is what i wan to try and do. Seems like a lot of work that i have to try and squeeze in.

[DANIEL]

When i started there was no system set-up to number or organizing the drawings. I did the best i could while trying to start out as a new draftsmen.

 

Jack_O'neill - that ideally is what i wan to try and do. Seems like a lot of work that i have to try and squeeze in.

 

if they have no drawing number or anything good luck, your in for some time spent if you want to organize that lol, you'd have to go through each drawing to determine where to put it ..... they do indeed seem to be in need of your talents lol.

[Jack_O'neill]

When i started there was no system set-up to number or organizing the drawings. I did the best i could while trying to start out as a new draftsmen.

 

Jack_O'neill - that ideally is what i wan to try and do. Seems like a lot of work that i have to try and squeeze in.

 

Take a moment every so often to jot down in a notebook what you want this system to do. The trouble with ideas is that you rarely get the all of it at once, and at first blush it's nearly impossible to tell a good one from a bad one. Make notes as you think of them while you're doing other things. Something will pop into your head, and if you don't write it down right then, you'll have a devil of a time remembering what it was later.

 

When you get an outline of a system you think will work, try it for a few days. Use some old stuff and some newer projects too. Try to break it. Find the ways that others could circumvent it. Make it so that it's harder to not use the system than it is to use it.

 

Once you think you have the numbering system worked out, make it bigger. I've never seen anyone who designed a system like this that allowed enough digits the first time through. If 10 characters seems like enough, make it 15.

 

If you see a column in the data you collect that is always the same, then question the need to collect it. One of my employers had a system similar to what I described to you above, but one of the columns was "file extension". As far as I know, they never used anything except Autocad, and never saved anything but dwg files. Yet a report would come out every week via email to everyone in the office about what fields weren't filled in this database. It took me a year to get the managers and IT to agree that there was no purpose in making everyone put ".dwg" in that column, and another 6 months to get them to quit sending out that stupid report.

[pjmac]

Thank you all for your advice. I will consider it all before i present something to my supervisor.

[cadvision]

Check out Practical Programs (www.practicalprogram.com) DvTDM for drawing management. I would guess you already have a company drafting standard and drawing number system.

 

CSoft (www.csoft.com) have a little archive program called EDA.

 

EDA is a personal drawing archive. An archive is a database that holds references to drawings, thumbnails and attributes. EDA adds to Consistent Software range of products a missing link an effective archiving solution. The main features of EDA are: User Interface simplicity, Personal use, Flexibility, Modern Technology. EDA collects and organizes drawings.

[BIGAL]

We run a indexed Access database commercial product that stores lots of info about a project, name, No, who, also billing details. At simplest start with excel from today our jobs are year first then a number 2011042 we have paper copies from old days not electronic from 1960 on various indexes.

 

Back to your task does the old jobs have a title block and do they have attributes ? If the answer is yes start there and search here for block to excel stuff you would just script 100's of drawings. Output as its vauge shoud include directory path and dwg name you could then do on a massive scale a renaming of all dwgs. You can do scripts at operating system level. rename old.dwg new.dwg = Bat file.

 

!!!! important if you do last suggestion do on copies not originals.

 

a example of how not to index drawings I think it was called development\final\stage x\shaer wall\part 1\johns\version it was not in \development where do I look next, it took 2 hours to find.

[pjmac]

So i have started putting this together and have a question. I am creating hyperlinks for all the drawings that will open them in their respective programs. The .dwg files open no problem in AutoCAD 2012 but the Inventor files (.ipt, .idw, and .ipn) will not open.

 

As anyone else had this problem?

 

also was not sure if i should start a new thread or not.

 

Thanks