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.

 

[glass99]

zdas: exactly right, just changing the your perspective a little bit gives you a "fresh set of eyes". Its the craziest thing. I would love to see something more scientific on this if it exists.

 

[jgailla]

https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/Journals/Reading.htm

"definitive conclusions cannot be drawn." My personal experience is that mistakes persist to a noticeably higher degree when reviewing on the screen rather than paper. I have also noticed this in other people. Our secretary brought up the point that we are digital immigrants instead of digital natives, but I suspect the problem will remain.

 

[glass99]

jgailla: interesting study.

One comparison for me is flipping between drawings in paper vs PDF. If you have a general plan on sheet 5 and a details on sheet 105, 107, and 112, paper tends to be easier. If you have lots of hatching/detail, the graphics card has a little regeneration time, plus you have to zoom back into your spot on the drawings.

What do you guys think about reviewing 3D CAD models rather than PDF/paper? I have been getting more of that lately.

 

[berkshire]

One thing I got surprised by.
I went to a customers office to review a drawing I had done for him, I walked into his office to find that he had the drawing piped from his computer to a 60" HDTV flat screen TV. Whilst this was not a touch screen TV, you could very definitely see the things that you missed in 8.5X11 format and the definition was very good too. I am now considering getting a large screen TV for a extra monitor.
B.E.


You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

 

[geesamand]

Yes, you guys are discussing the crux of my question.

When I was doing drawings regularly, I would self-check my drawings before making my first print. My goal was to catch all errors that I could on screen before handing a print over to my boss for checking. No matter what technique or effort I took to self-check on screen I would find the vast majority of my mistakes immediately after printing to paper. And the mistakes absolutely jumped out at me from the paper.

I personally suspect that it's the change in media that causes my brain to re-process it. Just like writing what you hear makes you remember it better. Maybe changing the CAD color scheme or font would have the same effect, I don't know. But if we don't crack this nut then going paperless on our job engineering could have significant design accuracy costs.

David

 

[KENAT]

As I said above, despite trying to do it methodically as I would on paper, I seem to miss a lot more on the screen. Although I have 26" monitors I still have to zoom in & out quite a bit on all but B size drawings and I think that's part of the issue of missing things.

As to checking 3D models as part of MBD I really don't know how people manage it. I'm not saying it can't be done but seems very difficult. In a drawing it's all laid out there for you, multi page drawings get a bit trickier but often not too bad on a well laid out drawing. However, with MBD having to dig in to different pre saved views and orientations etc. seems like a recipe for missing things.

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(probably not aimed specifically at you)
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[tickle]

I tend to only produce documents, but I find that if I have written something and then go to check it on screen that I have "author memory" and it seems my brain struggles to adapt in to checking mode and I have written complete tosh. I am reasonable at checking the formatting on screen. Luckily, we tend to have independent checkers and they pick up the errors.

 

[Longinthetooth]

Not quite on topic, but we had a problem with a piece of plant that never performed to full capacity. It took 3 years to discover that some internal parts had been wrongly assembled. The maufacturer had provided A3 drawings, and some details were so small that they had been misinterpreted. Our vice president asked us to work out how much this had cost us in lost production. When we reached $30 million and counting, He told us to stop- He didnt want to know.
Large format drawings have their place. There is real world outside the design/drawing office.

 

[ajack1]

Longinthetooth you should have viewed it on a screen that way you could zoom in and read the small detail. Here endeth todays $30 million saving tip on the advantages of going paperless.

 

[Longinthetooth]

Ajack, I take your point, but working in inside a tower 120 ft in the air in confined spaces (in the middle of a Canadian winter) is not an ideal environment for a laptop. They tend not to like getting dropped and banged around. Paper is very forgiving. My story happened back in 2000. There are probably tougher laptops available now which could be used, if you can get the management to spring for them. I still think that, in that type of environment, large scale paper is better.

Regards,

 

[ajack1]

It was very much meant as a tongue in cheek comment, but with modern technology it is hard to believe someone could not have opened the file on some device if the instructions were not clear, especially for something that was going to cost $30 million. As with most things there is no one size fits all solution.

 

[Longinthetooth]

Ajack, I agree with your last sentence. I guess that was my point.

Regards,

 

[moltenmetal]

Paper is still the appropriate medium for the shop floor. You can transfer some documentation to tablets or the like, but paper drawings plus eraseable pens and highlighters are a killer technology. Sure the source files and filing are all going to be digital, but the printed copies are what the people building your design are going to use.

I agree that there's something magical about reviewing on paper. My brain just doesn't seem to take what I see on the screen quite as seriously.

We try to keep everything legible at 11x17. We rarely need to resort to D size, but when we do, we have an inkjet plotter.

 

[GerryBertier]

There is no excuse for engineers to not have their laptop or computer hooked up to 2 1920x1200 monitors to make PDF review easy.

For whatever reason, its hard to convince the IT guys to spend the extra $150 each for decently sized (and high resolution) monitors when they are most definitely worth it.

I bought a 24" monitor in 2008 for $300 with 1920x1200. Still working at home today.

 

[glass99]

What kind of graphics cards do you all use?

 

[LionelHutz]

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...

Just to note, the new versions of Windows have a half-decent searching ability where you can use AND, OR etc as well. However, Microsoft stupidly doesn't enable the indexer service on server OS's automatically. But, once it's enabled you can use Windows Explorer to search file names and content inside documents. You can see a highlighted preview using the content view and preview the document with the preview window. You can get up to date search results from a server with a terabyte of data in seconds.

 

[RHTPE]

I heartily agree with both glass99 & zdas04.

I can stare at the screen for hours and never see the faux pas that seems to jump off the paper as soon as I plot the drawing and look at it.

This may stem from starting in the construction industry as a drafter in 1969 (AutoCAD - WTF is that?), diving into CAD at AutoCAD v1.6, obtaining my first P.E. license in 1990, my BSCE in 1992 and now working about 90% on the screen.

Much of my career was in manual drafting and real, paper drawings.

I think there's something about the change in media that helps to spot errors, at least for me. I continue to recommend that anyone producing drawings plot the drawing and look at carefully the next day.

When it comes to reference drawings, paper is far better than PDFs. Flipping back & forth between plan & section/details is so much quicker with paper.


Ralph
Structures Consulting
Northeast USA