When an EPC organisation, be it an owner, architect, contractor, or consultant, starts on a journey of digital transformation the first step is likely an EDMS or engineering document management system. The expectation is that this EDMS will help organise the company’s project documentation and data more efficiently, thereby leading to more productivity and savings down the line. However, not many know that the modern EDMS offers functions and features beyond document management and will impact not just the organisation data but its business line, its brand power, and its future growth. Today EPC companies are realising that EDMS can be a game-changer in competitive and time-sensitive infrastructure verticals and provide a clear advantage in terms of being able to deliver work on time and within the stipulated schedule – something which is more the exception than the rule in the EPC industry. They are also realising that EDMS works from the bottom up, from document management upwards to deliverable and project delivery management, until the ripple effect visibly impacts the project’s trajectory for the better.
Companies that invest in EDMS report faster document search speed, fewer human errors – such as accidentally using the wrong version of a drawing – and fewer duplicates, all of which contribute to the engineering team’s productivity and even morale as teams don’t have to worry about firefighting and rework and are able to prevent delays and conflict.
With EDMS, companies have a foolproof way to meet compliance, quality, and other regulations and this can help with trust and brand value. EDMS also changes the way teams interact with each other by moving away from the old siloed and isolated approach and instead allowing everybody involved in the project and (all the stakeholders) to work securely together in the same shared virtual environment. This changes the work culture in a fundamental way; the reliance on human effort decreases and managers are able to shift focus from reactive methods of project management to proactive or preventive ones.
So the benefits of EDMS are becoming well known across the industry. Today I will talk about some EDMS features that impact the way EPC organisations work.
Since the market for EDMS exploded there are many types and levels to choose from, but some basic features are common to every EDMS across brands, like the conversion of hard copies into digital files and the subsequent normalisation and standardisation of the digital data, as well as the elimination of many hours of tedious manual effort required for the creation, storage, updation, and sharing of data and documents during the project lifecycle. This digitisation of data not only offers the benefit of saved time and space, it allows users to get almost-instant access to the data via digital devices like computers, tablets, and smartphones. And following on from this comes the huge benefit of system-driven versioning instead of the old manual methods of maintaining document versions and revisions; and when you consider how many documents a typical project entails and how many versions and revisions of each document typically ensue during the project’s trajectory over time, the savings in the process of change and revision management when you adopt an EDMS is not small.
Now we come to the less common features which are present only in the more advanced EDMS.
Let’s start with built-in workflows. These are step by step, vertical-specific procedures for various project tasks like getting a client approval for a drawing or reviewing a drawing across disciplines. In most industries there are strict rules and regulations governing such tasks and with a modern EDMS those rules ie the step by step procedures can be configured for each customer and built right into the EDMS software by the software developer. Thus, once people start using the EDMS, everybody will automatically be following the best practices and regulations and protocols specific to that organisation, which makes it much easier to achieve quality in the final deliverable.
Another advanced feature is the audit trail feature. This is a mechanism in the software that automatically captures all the actions and interactions made to a document, including the person making those actions and interactions, and this creates a permanent record that can be easily ‘audited’ at a later stage. So managers can quickly zoom in on any deviation and trace it back to its source and take preventive or corrective actions as required.
Next, we have a very important feature in today’s complex digital environments, and that is the ability to integrate with other applications and platforms, like corporate email and spreadsheets and AutoCAD and ERP and project planning or scheduling applications like MSproject or Primavera. A good EDMS will ‘talk’ to all these other software and will have a centralised document database, so that a user can access a wide variety of files from within the EDMS itself without having to constantly switch back and forth between applications.
To conclude, the EDMS of today has features that go beyond mere document and data management, and these have, in fact, led to the rise of the idea of a ‘Single Source of Truth’. This idea of a single centralised source of ‘truth’ that is both reliable and accurate would have been unthinkable a few years ago but is rapidly becoming a must-have for all EPC project stakeholder organisations and since EDMS is a growing field, we can expect to see more and more innovative ideas and features in the future as well.