Ensuring compliance is a critical success factor in design projects. Pro006Aect teams must ensure that everybody in the process correctly follows the regulatory & quality standards down to the last detail, including all the industry, legal, and safety requirements applicable in that location. It seems straightforward, but the trouble is that compliance is measured through documentation. A lot of documentation! Every activity, from CAD design to managing drawings, follows a series of steps or protocols. These procedures are recorded via a set of documents, and that documentation is handed over at completion time. Maintaining this documentation across a process that is still largely driven by human effort and prone to human error is a huge ongoing challenge and the reason why engineering document control software is an absolute necessity in modern-day engineering projects.

As the engineering process continues to become digitized (outside of the actual design work involving drawing software like CAD, which has been relying on digital technology for decades now), companies realize that today’s EDMS’ do more than file management. They ensure that every person in the process has followed the required steps and that there is documentation aka ‘proof’ available which can be produced within minutes and without the last-minute panicked scrambling.

In other words, such systems can guarantee compliance and quality, two factors that directly contribute to successful payment-for-work-completed, which makes such systems an actual business asset to the project and the company. 

I’m not overstating the case. Consider how most project teams struggle, sooner or later, to ensure everyone follows all the regulations expected by their client/organization. Whether it’s checking that a document actually has content, it is not an ‘empty’ file, or making sure that those contents are up to date or crossing off every t and dotting every I in the (often complex!) regulations prescribed for that company/industry/project, anyone trying to ensure compliance and quality has a pretty big task in front of him/her. 

Fortunately, today’s software comes with automated controls built in. For instance, the contractor has to go through a workflow of steps, which means the document controller can easily track whether or not he is following the prescribed steps correctly. In doing so, the document controller can control the quality aspects of the document before sending that document to the review process. So if there is a missing Xref or empty files or some such problem, he would see it immediately and could fix it. 

I’ll give you an example: the system I worked with was set up to ensure compliance with PMBOK and Prince2 and other specific standards required by the client company. Basically, the system ensured that all the documents we produced went through a series of automated checks against our company’s pre-recorded requirements which were built into the software, and only after all those requirements were met did the system allow me to route the document forward through the chain. Once, I got alerted that a particular aspect of the document had somehow been missed, and it showed up in the checklist that has to be filled in before forwarding it to the next stage. I had to immediately stop and fix that issue before moving the deliverable forward. So, on completion of that deliverable, my bosses were very sure that all the required documents were available and correct, and we all knew there would be no unpleasant surprises during the handover.

In other words, using an engineering document control system is a business advantage because it is a foolproof and cost-effective way to eliminate wrong versions/revisions, streamlines the exchange of documents through the project lifecycle, and ensure 100% quality and compliance in engineering documentation.