Drawing signing and control 1

At a few hundred bucks a year, a Bluebeam license more than pays for itself in a couple of weeks of increased productivity if you have even a quasi-electronic workflow in your office.

Not sure how things work in NZ, but be careful with electronic signatures. Here in the states, some jurisdictions have very particular requirements for them when it comes to using them on engineered drawings. You may want to look into that before picking a solution.

You can electronically sign PDFs with the right Adobe options. It requires us to enter our password for the system to apply the e-signature.

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

Ben Loosli

KevinNZ,

How nasty and legal are your signatures. I have set up our SolidWorks PDM to apply user initials when they approve checking or final documentation. Obviously, I can manually type in someone else's initials and save the drawing as PDF if I need to fool people. For internal processes, you need to trust co-workers. For an external process, you may need better security.

--
JHG

I simply apply a watermark in Adobe Acrobat which is my stamp and signature. I know some companies will apply the stamp directly in Autocad, but I like to explicitly have a separate process for this. Whether my method has an acceptable level of security, I'm not sure. Realistically, I think anybody with minimal effort can manipulate a hard or digital plan if they wanted to.

I find that digital/electronic signatures/certificates are an area of engineering rules/laws that are very commonly not adhered to because the technical features/requirements seem quite complicated and poorly understood by both the rule writers at the state PE boards and by the engineers trying to sign drawings. Many engineers are doing their best to secure their signatures but may or may not be meeting the letter of the law as far as the technical requirements for the signatures/certificates.

...and move into the 21st century.

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Signatures on PDF's is so... 2020. Time to move on. Your drawings can be stored and revision-controlled by "Vault" software associated with your CAD software. Look into it from whatever publisher you use (Autodesk, Dassault, Siemens, etc). Often called "Product Data Management" software (it has other similar names depending on the publisher). Properly deployed, this software can control access, status, revisions, signing authority, and release of your drawings through the CAD software. And generate PDF's for the shop. Likewise it controls models in the same way, so model configuration control and release can be managed by the same system (if you use model-based definitions, for example).

Eng16080 said:

Realistically, I think anybody with minimal effort can manipulate a hard or digital plan if they wanted to.

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Exactly - which is why all these Board Rules for security are nonsense.

Stateside most companies traded signature blocks for PLM/PDM systems decades ago. The advantage not mentioned is that folks who arent CAD users can view a pdf or part qualities/attributes and approve as needed. Its common to have ERP systems fed via PLM/PDM so an approval from purchasing or other nontechnical dept might be based off PLM/PDM showing an assigned manufacturing dept or supplier, not an unnecessary print review.

IME the two important details technical regulators care about are maintaining a record of the original approval chain and having a current design control identified so that the impact of changes upstream/downstream are reviewed for older components. As mentioned previously, licensing boards overstepping into technical matters like print details are an overreach.