CAD Drawing Management

by John Shelby
(San Francisco, CA)

I work for a medium sized engineering firm and have been given the task of organizing a CAD drawing management system. Our current drawing organization is dismal to say the least.

We use external reference files quite a bit, which are stored on a general server that everyone in the office can access.

The problem we are having is basically trying to stay organized with our drawing hierarchy, so that we are wasting less time trying to find and reference drawings.

Is there a CAD drawing management system that you could recommend?


A. Good question. Staying organized with drawing and project files is crucial for time management.

We don't use an external drawing management system, so I can't recommend one, but we did write an article a while back about
AutoCAD Document Management.

Have a look at the above article which discusses a very basic way that we currently administer our CAD drawing structure.

If you come across any other CAD drawing management software or systems, please be sure to let us know how you found them to work for your firm.

RJ - Admin.

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Jul 27, 2010
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starstarstarstarstar 		Re: Managing CAD Documents
by: John

Thanks for the link. I'll be sure to check it out and have a look at it with management. Hopefully we'll be able to nail something down soon because it is chaotic right now and all this extra time spent trying to find drawings is starting to add up.

We have 16 CAD operators and everyone seems to have their own system for storing files. If someone gets sick or is away on holidays, it gets pretty crazy trying to figure out where the files are.

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