> As our company continues to grow we are increasingly in need of a
> good, solid engineering document control system.
I'd be interested in hearing about this myself, if only to see one
case of a good system. Given what I've seen, and a couple of my own
efforts I'd say it's damn near impossible without someone keeping up
with it full-time. Where you make compliance into everyone's
responsibility, it automatically becomes no one's responsibility.
Moreover if it adds to someone's administrative burden without
showing an almost immediate benefit, it gets neglected and ignored.
Most of the 'systems' I've run into are far too complicated and so
inflexible that they they don't adapt very well to changes in
philosophy and emphasis. They're also hard enough to explain to a new
hire that mistakes occur and stuff gets misplaced.
The three biggest mistakes engineers make is to save everything,
create overly complicated procedures and identification systems and
fail to clean up and organize files when a job is over. So when you
do a system, you need to decide why you have a control system, what
exactly you want to control and why.
Emphasize process before you start writing up procedures. If you
start putting together a procedure based on what would have prevented
the most recent misfiled correspondence crisis, you're likely to miss
the next crisis which will occur for entirely different reasons. If
it takes a 5 page procedure and 2 hours of orientation to explain
your drawing number system you're begging for problems. Don't mistake
flexibility for ambiguity.
I've found that it makes a lot more sense to number things
sequentially and do the categorizations in software as needed. It's
almost impossible to misfile sequentially numbered file folders or
drawings because there's nothing to remember and mistakes are
obvious. Classification schemes should be carefully reviewed for
sources of ambiguity--you don't want to have one thing fit two
categories. And give some serious thought to how the system will be
used in another 10 or 15 years. Decide what needs to be in a job file
when the job is finished--what needs to be saved and why.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania
1864)
http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw/
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