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Drawing Control Procedures

This note is intended to introduce the basic concepts for implementing Drawing Control Procedures. It is intended to be read in the context of installing Trix Organizer™ drawing management software but this is not a requirement.

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Successful deployment of a drawing management system requires more than just the installation of drawing management software. Without effective Drawing Control Procedures the quality of any drawing archive will deteriorate and users will no longer trust the quality and validity of the drawings in it. When this happens they will revert to using individual workarounds to address the quality issues. It's a short step from this back to the sort of drawing control anarchy which preceded the installation of the system.

Change happens

Engineering archives are never static. The frequency of change and the number of documents that change in any one year will vary based on your environment. An engineering design office is constantly revising the majority of its drawings; A building management company may change only a tiny fraction of their repository. But both need to have procedures in place to ensure that changes are recorded so that the archive stays current and trusted.

Begin with your document workflow

Start by looking at your organization’s document workflow diagram and asking what procedures are associated with each stage of the workflow. If you don’t have one, call us and ask for a copy of our basic Workflow Diagram. It captures each stage in the life cycle of an engineering document and is a good place to start.

Make sense, not bureaucracy

Emailing an un-announced 150-page Document Control Procedures Manual to your staff is unlikely to result in a successful adoption. Before you start writing consult with all your user types so you understand how they use their documents. Establish only key procedures first and test that they work before addressing minutae. Then adapt and flesh out as you test. Start with a one or two page Manual if you can. Start with drawings and later move on to include operations manuals and other forms of documentation.

Doesn't have to be 100%

Just as the manual doesn't have to be comprehensive to be effective, your archive does not have to be perfect to be useful. Some corrections and changes to drawings will inevitably lag behind what users see in equipment or structures. The redlining, notes and warning flag capabilities built into the Trix Organizer software will enable you to highlight documents that, while not completely up to date, are nevertheless useful. It's better to see a drawing that warns you that it is out of date or otherwise incomplete than not to see any drawing at all.

The Document Controller

You can't do document control without a Document or Drawing Controller. In large, rapidly changing environments this can be a full time occupation. But even where the pace of change is slower and the work only part time, someone has to be officially recognized as the controller. Their responsibilities can be purely procedural (following rules set down in the manual) or managerial (checking for approvals, deciding on user rights, arbitrating when conflicts occur, etc.). Whatever the extent of the role, it must be clearly backed by senior management so the individual has the necessary authority to support the Document Control Procedures.

No need to reinvent the wheel

Trix Systems recommends Document Control Procedures as part of every Trix Organizer installation. We can also create your Procedure Manuals for you. We customize Templates that we have created over the more than 20 years that we have be consulting on and installing drawing management software. Both the Trix Organizer software and our Procedures follow ISO recommendations and specifications for engineering document management.

More information

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