The case for paperless office workflow 3

[milkshakelake]

I'll make the case for a paperless office workflow!

I've been using this setup for 2 years and haven't looked back. All of this hinges on having a display tablet, not to be confused with a regular drawing tablet because those suck. To be clear, I don't advocate paperless outside the office; I still use pen and paper for site visits and meetings. I'm also not describing a note taking device; that's covered in detail in the threads below, but can easily complement the workflow I'm presenting. Feel free to poke holes in any of this! It's just for fun.

There have been a few threads on the subject:

https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=497244

https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=499061

1. You get a clean workspace, which increases clarity of mind and productivity

This is my home office. Real office is similar, but with more monitors. I didn't clean it up; this is in the middle of work. Enough space for my protein shake, super cool rock, and cold water. Display tablet is on the right.

Before I went paperless and was working for someone else, the office looked something like this. It's not an exaggeration; the reality was worse. There were also bookcases, shelves, and repurposed furniture just to hold drawings and binders.

2. You don't have to look through millions of pieces of paper to find a calculation

Calculations are organized into electronic folders. It beats walking to a bookcase, finding the right binder, and flipping to the right page of calculations.

3. With a tablet display and Excel, it's faster and easier to make calculations

Instead of printing and annotating an engineering drawing for a calculation, you could take a screenshot and mark it up. This works seamlessly in Excel, which has built-in drawing tools.

You can incorporate markups like you would with paper calculations, along with math. Some advantages over paper include being able to easily modify numbers (and have them propagate through calculations), move things around like sketches, and work on an infinite canvas. Should you need it, you also have the power of VBA programming at your fingertips. This is better than paper.

I didn't make any attempt to make these look nice or easy to follow. But should it need to be submitted to an official, it can be made to look more professional. It's the same thing with paper.


4. You can incorporate results from other programs in the same file

This one is not a 100% slam dunk. Microsoft Office isn't quite there yet when it comes to integrating Word, Excel, and PDFs. But it is possible, though quite janky. But on paper? You have to print out the results and lose the order. In Excel, you can paste a PDF on a separate sheet, even multiple sheets, and it will retain the order. I've done 60 page long calculations by doing this in one Excel file. (If you're using SMath or something else, this argument falls apart a bit.)

5. Sketches? Yeaa boii

Some engineers like to have a notebook full of sketches, calculations, and random thoughts. Use OneNote or Krita. OneNote can save stuff in a hierarchical fashion and have different workbooks, chapters, and sheets. I personally don't work like this and I save everything to a specific place, but I created a quick notebook to demonstrate this.

As a plus, you can take a screenshot of anything you want to mark up, like a dimension or changes to a detail, and shoot it off to a client or coworker or employee. I have one remote drafter and 100% of our communications are done with paperless markups on pdf's. So the advantages go well and far beyond calculations. The caveat is with engineering drawings, even with a big display, you have to zoom in and out quite a bit. My work office has a fancier display tablet with programmable knobs and controls for that, which makes it less onerous.


6. You can carry your calculations everywhere

This is definitely not possible with paper, unless you scan and organize everything. I have my server hooked up to a Onedrive and Goodsync cloud mirror, which I can access with my phone. I can pull up Excel calculations and pdf's anywhere I go. It's been useful in a few cases where I was at a meeting and didn't have a certain calculation or drawing on hand, and didn't have to call back to the office to have it sent. It takes some practice and getting used to, but it doubles as a neat trick in a meeting.


Now, to address concerns!

Doesn't feel as good as paper
I agree, but it's pretty damn close. An engineer I know was forced to use a display tablet over a decade ago and she hated it. She tried my display and said it's so good, it's like night and day. The technology is refined, and will only get better.

It's not precise and/or it's clumsy
That's because your tablet is too small! I use a 24" tablet with 2K resolution. I tried Microsoft Surface and iPad, and those are too small to use effectively. I do NOT recommend going the laptop or handheld tablet route; I need a beastly, non-portable monster tablet. With a big enough display, you don't have to zoom in and out. If you have the desk space and budget, I recommend going even bigger. (It's just my two cents; some people have had success with laptops.)

Use paper and scan it!
Nah, this is superior. It saves the step where you print something out, mark it up, go back to scan it, and save it in the right place. Those seconds add up. Plus, electronically, everything has an infinite canvas and things can be moved around.

I don't want to pay for subscriptions!
Microsoft Office is the only subscription service used here that's different from a paper setup. Cloud services for carrying your calculations around are optional, and it can be self hosted with free open source apps like Nextcloud (it's a bit more advanced and needs Linux).

 

[Celt83]

I was very fortunate that my highschool technical drawing teacher had a passion for the legacy machines so we had access to a machine with the digitizer and one with a pen plotter which was fun to watch print but we had to schedule print jobs for assignments since they could take hours on that thing.

 

[milkshakelake]

@Brad805 The basic file structure for each project is something like this:

The folders themselves would be subdivided with dates, and unused items with 2022-00-00 to be initialized later (it functions kind of like a checklist when everything is 2022-00-00 "something here" at the beginning of a project):

Calc folder was shown in the beginning of the post. It generally has empty folders that get filled in (mainly to serve as a checklist). The folders in each calc may be subdivided as well:

In a calc folder with actual calculations, files that might change over the course of a project have the date in the filename (like xxxxxx 2022-11-17). I found that in most cases, putting it at the end of the filename will sort it better. In some cases where date is the primary objective (like with invoices), it's better at the beginning. Some judgment will be needed there. For files that definitely won't change over the course of any project, like the section profile of a member, it's better without the date. When modifying a calculation, we always put the old one in an Archive folder and new one with today's date.

I don't generally sort the calculations by the program used to make the calculation (except for ETABS and SAFE for good reason). Taking Enercalc for example, it could be used for beams, columns, etc and you'll end up with a million different types of calculations in one folder. That wouldn't follow the principles of using a physical binder. Regarding ETABS and SAFE, if it's used to design one component of a building like a single beam, it would still go into the beams/truss/stair beam folder and not the ETABS folder. The ETABS folder is reserved for gravity and lateral analysis FEM model only.

Regarding file naming, it's also important to label the components in an Excel file (I showed a screenshot in the original post) and have that correlate to a file name. Since this is internal to the calculations, it doesn't have to match the naming scheme on the actual drawings (because a drawing can have several W10x33 but the calculations will be different for each one, so I notate them as B1, B2, etc). It does help to specify the floor in the filename with columns/studs/walls. Finally, stair beams/headers/jambs: I have Excel sheets that have certain inputs (i.e. size of stairs, load, span of beam, length of landing, etc) that can almost completely define the size. So where it's possible, I put it in the filename. For example, it would be something like "3FL stair beam A25 B8.5 C4.5 D50 L100 2022-11-17".

Now getting the whole company to follow this is another story, but I've bludgeoned it into everyone's heads enough that it's consistent. Will need a bit of writing guidelines, reminding, and policing. Also, I saw that you're structural. This advice will be vastly different for other trades.

 

[Agent666]

My OCD is screaming out internally at you regarding the mix of all caps and title case folder titles.... What possesses someone to do such a thing

https://engineervsheep.com

 

[SWComposites]

FYI the XP-Pen Artist Pro 24 is currently 30% off at the XP-Pen store.

 

[milkshakelake]

@Agent666 That used to drive me up the wall. Several people work on the same project, so there's some mishmash. Not everyone is fluent with computers; some learned at an old age, so there are anomalies. As long as they follow the naming conventions (which was hard enough), I'll let the capitalization slide. I learned to pick my battles.

 

[TLHS]

Folders as a checklist is an interesting idea. I'm going to have to think about that. I like it, but I think I'd end up having problems if things are split up too much and I can't see as much in one place.

 

[milkshakelake]

@TLHS It doesn't replace actual checklists but it helps. Yeah, you have to find a system that works for you without splitting things up too much. I happen to have a lot of similar projects (with constant elements like architectural drawings, borings, paperwork, etc) where it makes sense this way. I also have to split up financial stuff from the project itself to hide the $$$ info from employees, which is a necessary headache.

 

[Andries]

Hi All,

This thread is very interesting to me, a 77 year old museum piece. Yes, this surely the way to go. I suppose that you all have systems in place for archiving your calculations and keeping them up to date by configuration control (I'm from the aero industry where this is crucial).
Regards,
Andries

 

[milkshakelake]

@Andries Agreed, it's important to be well organized and archive things. At some point, the design might change back to an older iteration.

 

[structSU10]

It would be hard to go back, everyone in the design team loves it (engineers and drafters). It's not perfect, we seem to have all sorts of issues with permissions in sessions, and no more layers is annoying, and not being able to edit others markups to correct or amend equally annoying sometimes. But the ability to tag people and control status makes it a really clear process that's much better than some bastardised email/server/teams/document management system approach we were struggling with before.

The layers issue noted - did they eliminate the ability to put things on different layers everywhere or is that only in studio? I have been looking at blue beam for a while and struggle on the pricing. Does enterprise with a good number of seats help mitigate the large price per license?

 

[Lomarandil]

StructSU10 -- Layers still are a feature for regular bluebeam use, just not in sessions.

 

[Agent666]

Does enterprise with a good number of seats help mitigate the large price per license?

We currently just have a series of perpetual licences from version 2016 to 2021 with no maintenamce, so have yet to cross into the subscription territory. But that's coming with sessions being turned off after March if you're not on a current version.

I guess in terms of cost you have to consider the lost opportunity cost. You spend more money to actually be more efficient. Bluebeam is a product that achieves this for us for the most part. You got to view these thing as the cost of doing business.

If I interviewed somewhere and they said they didn't have bluebeam because of the cost, I'd hazard a guess they spend more time and money hidden in lower productivity workflows, multiply that by many employees and its a no brainer. Time spent doing something else is more opportunity to make money.

https://engineervsheep.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Back in 1977 we installed our first CAD system. It had a CalComp plotter:

Now this cost approximately $50,000 (in 1977 dollars), and this was one of the cheaper options. Flat-bed plotters, which were also used at the time, could run over $100,000. And having to keep the pens working was almost a full time job. Every night we had to remove them and place them in a special canister which keep the nibs moist so that they wouldn't dry out. And then the next morning, put the pens back, test them to make sure they worked and if needed, we had to clean them and refill them with ink. And these pens were not cheap, $25 or so and if you plotted on Mylar, they wore out pretty fast, and then you had the cost of the Mylar. Even regular velum wasn't cheap. So we didn't make any more plots than we needed.

Then in the early 80's, HP decided to get in the plotter business and their first models were in the $14,000 dollar range, and ran much faster and used cheaper pens that worked longer because of how they were 'capped' when not in use.

Then eventually people like Xerox started to produce large size electrostatic printers and the cost per plot dropped again.

While it's true that being able to send images and documents over the net has reduced the need for sometimes having a physical copy, the fact that we've made the production of paper documents so cheap is the biggest barrier to having a true 'paperless office'. If it cost a buck a sheet, I can assure you, we would have gone truly paperless years ago.

And lets not forget the copy machine, it also contributed to our storm of paper. If we had never gotten past the mimeograph, our desks would have stayed fairly clean and tidy.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[milkshakelake]

@JohnRBaker I started in a company with a ~$20,000 laser plotter and downsized to a ~$700 inkjet HP plotter (the laser one's annual maintenance was the same cost as the inkjet). It's interesting to see the history of these things. We did have a pen style plotter but used it only for novelty.

The impetus to move to paperless wasn't about cost, though. It actually costs a lot more! Servers, tablets, scanners, and cloud services cost more than paper and printers. The benefit is having a clean and organized office, which leaves more room for productivity and makes stuff easier to get. It's also faster in my opinion; I worked with paper for a decade. I didn't even mention the environmental angle, because I have a feeling that all these electronics and power use are on parity, or worse, than paper when it comes to the earth.