Consider this – humanity generates whopping 215 Billion emails every day. More than half of these – 116 Billion are business emails. That amounts to 123 business emails sent and received per person per day! Roughly 25% emails go with attachments.

So the average mailbox is hit with 25-50 emails every day with documents, drawings, reports sent for reference or approval.

Engineering project teams often collaborate by exchanging files through emails. Engineer generates a drawing file, sends it to rest of the team and customer in an email. Customer then prints the drawing, marks it up by hand, requests for changes and sends a scanned copy back to the team.

And the team repeats this cycle for all drawings till they are approved!

But as a communication channel, email is already choked and it takes a long time for your emails to get noticed.

Not surprisingly then, delivery dates for these projects often keep getting dragged. Delayed review and approval of construction drawings always adds up to the project delay.

So why does it take so much time to get a drawing reviewed and approved on email?

Too much of manual efforts

First of all, there is too much manual work to do – emails, printing, scanning, documenting the changes and keeping track of all these changes in Excel. When people are kept busy by this book keeping, the actual work suffers.

Important work gets lost in heaps of emails

With average 50-100 business emails a day, it is difficult to prioritize and often important documents get overlooked and delayed.

Tracking change history becomes cumbersome

Engineering & construction drawings keep evolving as the project progresses. History of comments and changes is important when reviewing the latest version of the drawing. But tracking and reading this revision history is cumbersome when all comments are recorded in attachment files of scattered emails.

Distributed review

Sometimes files are emailed to people who are working separately. If they all review the file in parallel, they miss out on the comments being made by each other, leading to future rework and delays.

Solutions

The delays in document review and approval are basically born out of inability to work in a collaborative manner with emails.

Hence a collaborative tool structured on work practices of engineering and construction projects is needed as a solution. WorkPack is precisely the solution that makes review and approval of engineering drawings truly collaborative in nature.

Successful execution of engineering and construction projects with WorkPack is a testimonial of WorkPack’s abilities to make life easy for engineers, project managers and construction managers alike.