Construction managers don’t really fight engineering drawings (don’t let the title mislead you). But they often battle with problems arising from document / drawing management.

Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) are the typical stages of an infrastructure projects. During the final construction phase of an EPC project, certain construction specific issues usually come to the fore. Different kinds of difficulties pop up owing to varying reasons.

Our company – Premat Solutions – builds document / drawing management software for EPC projects. Solving a different range of document / drawing management related problems has given us insights into issues that our customers face, why they arise and how they can be prevented.

Large number of large sheets of paper

Many people on site work with minimum of A3 sheet size for drawings. Progress of construction results in multiple redline mark-ups on the drawings. The marked up drawings then somehow need to be made electronic and transmitted back to the engineering design office. This manual process takes a lot of time, effort and requires a great deal of organization of the drawing. A picture is worth thousand words.

There is a solution to this mess however. Capturing documents, drawings and the mark-up on them electronically so that it can be easily stored, retrieved and shared using an electronic document management system greatly reduces manual efforts and time.

Working on superseded drawings

Sometimes a construction engineer picks up an old revision of a drawing without realizing it is not from master set or current set and starts working on it. Latest revision of the same drawing can be significantly different and then there is a lot of risk of rework, higher costs and delays.

Document controllers use ‘Superseded’ stamps on the old drawings to highlight they should not be used. But relying on manual stamping is prone to slippage and rework.

In some projects we introduced with electronic watermarks on superseded drawings to answer this problem. So whenever a superseded drawing is opened even by mistake, it’s clearly marked obsolete.

Signaling revision change

Electronic stamps or watermark still only answer a part of the problem. Imagine that an engineer printed an approved drawing from the later master set of drawings. And later it was revised by engineering team in office.

Now unless that engineer goes back to the same electronic document, she will not know it’s been superseded. This is a trickier problem that we addressed using real time notifications which are triggered through a document distribution matrix as soon as a file is revised.

Poor internet connectivity on construction site

We have seen this to be a commonly occurring problem with Solar EPC Contractors. Solar Power Plants are usually located in vast, arid and remote areas – making it very difficult to access high speed internet. With slow internet connections it becomes difficult for construction team to access latest drawings and update punch list items.

WorkPack leverages mobility of devices to answer this issue. WorkPack App, synchronizes selected important documents and drawings on users mobile device – smart phone or tablet. Even slower internet connections are gradually able to sync the files in the background. So when you are on site and need to check latest revision of a layout, it should be available on your mobile device without needing a download.

What More?

These are some issues we encountered when consulting our customers who manage construction part of EPC projects. Veterans of the industry must have seen a lot more problems. How did you resolve them? Leave a comment below to share your experience.