Dave,
There are lots of ideas. Once you have a system you will wonder how you survived without it. Our system is about ten years old and home brewed. We looked at many and came to the conclusion that one that matched our 'system' was better than changing to another system.
It took us about five years to convert from pencil to CAD with document control. Part of that was scanning 250,000 drawings as well as generating 10,000 new CAD and 10,000 revisions each year. Our print room generates nearly 400,000 square feet of paper each year.
Our proven savings is in excess of $1M per year. Cost spread over time to implement including all CAD costs and Oce print machine $1.3M. Early years were costly but we were losing on average one CAD file each day before document management.
Tell us more and maybe we can make better suggestions.
thanks for your reply. all our drawings are done on Visio (2005 i think) we currently have no way of keeping a secure record of drawing approval I.e engineering, Quality and Customer approval so we need some way of tracking that as well as current issue status I.e A,B,C Etc and if it is draft or not. along with this we would like to track the ECN's for a drawing + who has printed it any ideas? we are looking at using access
First you must secure on a server that is backed up daily all of your released drawings. Access to them must be read only except to the Document Manager. All drawings should be released to a close out queue and daily moved to the secure area of the server.
A viewer is a requirement. I don't know what will do Visio. Talk to the Informative Grpahics guy's.
You might get away with Access but I think something a bit more powerful would be better.
Look at Cyco's products for something off the shelf.
If you don't have manual or paper based systems that work and people that will follow them, then a computer based system won't help. So make sure you have a working system to duplicate.
