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Apparently, not your typical TITLE BLOCK question...

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TZellers

TZellers

Mechanical
Feb 25, 2004
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I did a search ten pages deep, but did not find a question/answer to what I'm looking for.

My company has been awarded an order for our industrial equipment where the customer wants all 2D drawings with their title block and border.

This has caused some consternation in our Engineering department as it comes across with the customer's logo, name and all. I failed to realize the concern and would appreciate comments/replies to my question: Which is the appropriate way to handle this:

(1) Refuse to use the customer title block altogether and use our standard
(2) Insert their title block outside our title block (?!)
(3) Use their title block.

Thanks,
TZ
 
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"He who pays the piper picks the tune."

Use their title block. If it's in the contract to use their block and the contract has been accepted then it's a bit late to worry about it now, someone should have addressed this before accepting the job.

If there are Intellectual Property rights issues that you're worried about handing over then get legal involved. Maybe adding a note to all the drawings above and beyond their title block addressing this will suffice. I've seen vaguely similar done after companies merged, simplistically all the older drawings were stamped with a note covering the fact the fact the new company owned the IP or something like that.

At a previous employer we occasionally did contract design jobs where we had to use the customers title block. As I recall since they were paying for the development then they effectively owned the IP anyway so that wasn't an issue.

Only take option 1 if you're willing to lose the work, and future work. Don't take option 2, that sounds like a mess.

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​
 
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Does your company and your customer have CAGE Codes? If not, you can still do the following but it gets messier.

The title block will most likely contain their CAGE Code. But, you can create a note just above the title block, although I think the spec also states in the Revision History block, that the DESIGN AUTHORITY is your CAGE Code.

Or you could just make a note stating that the original design authority was your company and then you transferred the authority to your customer upon project completion.

--Scott
 
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Option 2 is standard industry practice. But if the customer insists on just their title block then do what they want or don't do the job. Just beware of any "gotchas" in their title block that could come back to haunt you.
 
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We do as your customer and require any drawings to be on our format. This has not presented any big problems, as contractually we own the resulting data. In addition to requiring our format be used, we also require that the actual CAD files be a deliverable.
The biggest problem with this policy is having some really, relly bad drawings on our format. I DO NOT want to have to train every vendor in proper drafting, so we live with it, unless it is severe enough to cause manufacturing issues in the future should we decide to have another vendor fabricate the design.

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]
 
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Thak for the input and I appreciate the contractual side of it. For future reference and perhaps more philosophical in nature, how do you treat this request in the future?

I failed to appreciate the intellectual property considerations initially and therefore would like to understand what is generally acceptable for the next time...

Thanks,
TZ
 
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How to treat it in future, I'd guess the most important thing is establishing who owns the IP/future rights to the product/drawings etc. Once this is established then you go from there.

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​
 
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Is the product you are selling already designed? ("awarded an order for our industrial equipment")

Yet they want drawings with their titleblock?

Sounds like the IP is your company's.
They may be reselling your company's products and their customer wants to see the drawings.

I would do option 2.
Hopefully your design is not on E-size paper.
I would take my company drawings and create their titleblock on the next larger sheet and put our sheet right on top of theirs. I have done this when I did airbag designs for the auto industry. I just created a 2-D dumb drawing sheet and imported it into the larger titelblock file. This preserves your CAD design and drawing and only gives them the 2-d data, even if you send them 'their' file.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli
 
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In our situation, the contracts are for tooling designs and associative databases. Any IP is contractually ours. If a vendor did what Ben suggests with us and sent us cartoon drawings and models of little value, they would not be a qualified vendor for very long and may not be paid since the agreed upon deliverables had not been met. We are paying them to develop this IP and consider it ours, and they know this going into the project. If they want to keep the IP rights, they will have to find other customers.

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]
 
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If using their title block effectively gives them the IP, does it also make them responsible if there are any problems with the design?
 
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We had a similar occurence which we got through our system by using their titleblock and part numbers with their own sign off area and seperate area for our sign off. Our sign off region said "Designed by Our Company" and was just added on the left side of our customers main titleblock region. Not sure if this correct but that got us through a similar situation. See attachment
 
 http://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=76c8a10d-0f85-486b-932f-888881fedbe9&file=double_tb.JPG
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