Advice on going paperless? 3

[hygear]

I have been given the task of helping our department begin the process of going paperless (or nearly paperless) for engineering drawings. This is primarily driven by the fact that plotter/scanner rental, plotter supplies, and shipping drawings to our home office overseas is starting to get very expensive (we are spending close to $10,000/year for everything). We are planning on implementing a process where drawings will be generated by the CAD software, digitally approved and signed, and sent to the home office by secure file transfer. The problem we have is determining what to do for the following issues:

1. Currently we rent a plotter with large format scanner but we would like to get rid of it because support is lousy and its expensive to operate. Our plan was to purchase an inexpensive plotter for the rare occasions we will need to print a full size drawing. The issue is that we don't know what to do about a large format plotter.
2. Our Quality department currently uses paper drawings for inspection purposes and they are very reluctant to give this up, so I'm looking for ideas to help them do away with paper as much as possible without interfering with inspections.
3. Our younger engineers are content with doing drawing checks using 8.5"x11" or 11"x17" size paper, but the older engineers want everything printed full size (up to A0 in some case). Because of this, I'm looking for ideas to give the older engineers a paper-like experience for checking drawings without plotting everything in sight.

If anyone out there has ideas or tips for going paperless, I would be very happy to hear them.

 

[KENAT]

"3. Our younger engineers are content with doing drawing checks using 8.5"x11" or 11"x17" size paper, but the older engineers want everything printed full size (up to A0 in some case). Because of this, I'm looking for ideas to give the older engineers a paper-like experience for checking drawings without plotting everything in sight."

If you are producing A0/E size drawings I strongly recommend keeping the ability to at least print hard copy C size drawings. E size drawing scaled to C is normally legible. We actually increased our drawing font size from around .12" to .15" to facilitate legibility of drawings printed at smaller scale but E drawings on 11*17 are still a strain.

Also how anyone can seriously check all but the simplest drawing on 8.5*11 is beyond me. It's not just the scale of the drawing but if you need to add any written comments/corrections etc. then it's difficult to fit them in.

(Some might wonder what the younger, and presumably inexperienced, engineers are even doing checking drawings - if by checking you mean really detail drawing check.)

I have twin 26" monitors on my PC and still struggle to properly review drawings on the screen, if I'm seriously reviewing a drawing I print hard copy. However it has massively reduced the number of reference prints I run off as I can generally have any reference drawing or data sheet etc. on one screen at reasonable scale while working CAD on the other screen.

Our CAD system has a view & mark up utility for data review etc. but we don't make much use of it, maybe we should more.

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[SteelPE]

Funny, I just started a thread in another forum because a fabricator is refusing to accept hard copies of shop drawings. A standard program used in the structural industry, although I don't use it, is Bluebeam which allows for markups to be placed directly on drawings. The program allows for use on a tablet.... although ios requires an $9.99 purchase. I don't know if this helps you or not, but I thought I would let you know anyway.

 

[PEDARRIN2]

We print to PDF and use Brava or Adobe Pro.

We use this to review and mark up shop drawings.

It saves a lot of paper since we (whole project team) typically got 6 copies of the shop drawings to make sure everybody got a chance to review.

If somebody wants to print, they can print them whatever size they want.

 

[MikeHalloran]

Two decades ago my then employer ( a medical electronics manufacturer) went paperless.

Our paper consumption went up by a factor of five, maybe ten.

After the transition, our paper supplier was restocking the pallet loads of paper at the printers at least twice a week.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[glass99]

I think paperless is fairly straightforward. Everything is produced in CAD and stored and distributed in PDF. If someone needs a hardcopy for any reason such as checking, you maintain a $2000 inkjet large format plotter and they make a personal copy. If you need a large print run, you send it out to a print shop. You send back your $100,000 laser plotter. You scan pencil sketches and hardcopy markups if you need to keep them. You can create digital stamps which are equivalent of a shop drawing stamp which goes into the PDF.

One of my clients use Egnyte for their file storage/management/ distribution, and I think are happy with it.

 

[zdas04]

I have a Canon IPF5100 that can do C-size from a roll. I set up a Half-D and Half-C paper size, so if I need D or E size I can tell Acrobat to tile the drawing to that size. The results are amazing. I use a glue stick to hold them together and I have one that I use in classes that I've folded up, unfolded and hung on walls in over a dozen classrooms over the last few years. That printer does really professional photo printing too (I have a 3 m X .5 m panorama on my office wall that gets a lot of comments). Like KNAT says, simply printing on C-size is pretty good most of the time. C-size and a glue stick for $2k (plus a buck for the glue stick) is a pretty powerful package.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle of injustice Frédéric Bastiat

 

[MJB315]

The only two things in this world that do not disappoint are the Grand Canyon and Bluebeam Revu.

First-- I'm not a salesman. I'm a building structural engineer and I've been using Bluebeam for six years. It's great for marking up shop drawings, making quick sketches and generally keeping the world from seeing my crummy handwriting. I try to do all my yellow marking in it. That way, I can save a soft copy for my records and tada! erase all my yellow highlighter marks in one click so its ready to go back to the contractor. No more copying redlines. Helps to have large (or duel monitors) of course, but that's a small price to pay.

If you're into Revit and other 3D modeling software, it's easy to make 3D PDFs...which you can then redline. Great to show coordination conflicts or discuss fussy steel connections with fabricators.

We are just starting to use their cloudbased Studio/Session features. So far, so good. Great for meetings and cross collaboration between offices. Great for site visits with an iPad. Simply take a photo and embed into a PDF of the job. No more "where was that again"'s.

I enjoy it so much-- I've purchased a copy for myself to use at home. Way cleaner than Adobe. Great program.

"We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." -WSC

 

[glass99]

MJB315: Agreed that Bluebeam is great. The only thing which makes it better is if you get a pen tablet so you can hand sketch into PDF.

When are they going to come out with 36" * 48" touch screens so we can markup an E size drawing?

 

[beej67]

Generally I conform to comments above - draft in your drafting software, print to PDF, PDFs become your record drawings.

On #2 and #3, my suggestion may sound tongue in cheek but it's really not:

Big. Ass. Monitors.

For your QC guys, consider piping a projection TV up onto a white board. You could project at double the plot size easily, and they could mark it up with a marker, and snap a photo of their redlines with their camera phone. This is also useful for meetings.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[hygear]

beej67: I forgot to mention we have a digital whiteboard so we can project the drawing on the whiteboard, mark it up on the whiteboard and save it to a pdf file. The only problem here is that only the young guys like using the digital whiteboard.

 

[glass99]

hygear: Sounds like you have the technology in place but not the politics. Switching from paper to digital is like messing with a chef's "mise en place". The question you really should be asking is "how do I get a bunch of old dudes to get jazzed about digital?". Any kind of change to long standing office procedures takes a big political push.

Also: I think that E size drawings (36*48") need to be retired. They are such a pain in the neck, especially digitally.

 

[TehMightyEngineer]

At our office we try to do as much as possible in 11x17. It's much easier for field drawings, much easier for printing, and generally better unless we specifically need to fit a lot details onto one page.

Maine EIT, Civil/Structural.

 

[DRWeig]

Ancillary note: Get a copy of Agent Ransack for searching your local machine or server. He's mighty fast and can read inside pdf, doc, xls, etc...

Best to you,

Goober Dave

Haven't see the forum policies? Do so now: Forum Policies

 

[drawoh]

hygear,

Have you considered getting a tabloid (11[×]17") printer? You can set up your title blocks for this size, and systematically use B[ ]sized drawings. Lots of fabrication shops have printers like this. I am considering getting one for me here at home!

If you plan to stick with A0/E[ ], I second KENAT's point about fonts. D and E[ ]drawings are fairly readable in B[ ]size if the fonts are 4mm or .15".

--
JHG

 

[brandonbw]

Multiple 1440p monitors or 4k monitors. I have been able to work fine tiling together 8.5x11's from my laser printer for when I need to look at paper, which is very rare. I have also designed full sets of plans from a netbook while flying, so maybe it depends on the individual how far they are willing to struggle getting something out. A younger person sometimes catches things that others don't, I know I did and that was from a computer screen not the full size prints for projects dealing with 100's of houses.

Digital whiteboard? I want one of those hovering behind me around jobsites.

B+W Engineering and Design
Los Angeles Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer

http://bwengr.com

 

[CELinOttawa]

I LOVE A3. The closest US equivalent is 11x17, but with A3 you can dual scale for A3 & A1 without having to do anything other than print to the different machine (plotter/printer) and grab the drawings.

I miss A3 a very great deal since my return to Canada. *pout*

 

[geesamand]

Resurrecting this thread slightly,

The vast majority of our content is digital already, but we have an impression that reading and reviewing drawings on a screen is harder for the reader than having a paper copy. I don't know about you, but I have reviewed my drawings on screen before printing them, printed them, and found all of my errors on the print copy. Something about the printed word I suspect.

If we go to big touch screens and digital reviewing software (like BlueBeam), will we still struggle with the fact that it's a screen view and not a printed word? Can anyone speak from experience?

 

[glass99]

geesamand - I think if you made your drawings by hand on paper, scanned them then checked them on your screen, you would see a bunch of errors you did not see on paper.

 

[zdas04]

glass99,
Are you saying that just changing media changes perspective? I have found that to be the case. Even something as simple as a post in eng-tips.com if I hit the preview button I will find mistakes that I didn't see in the edit pane. If I then print out the post (which I've done a few times with long posts) I find other errors. Not sure what physical concepts are at work here, but it seems to work.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. —Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist