Drawing Management Services

In addition to the regulatory requirement of mining and heavy industrial operations to maintain accurate up-to-date drawings that are readily accessible to authorised personnel,  there is a significant cost benefit to operations that maintain an accurate register of their drawings and importantly have easy, simple access for operations and maintenance personnel to search, view and print drawings.  When drawings are easy to search for, personnel are more likely to perform a search for drawings and therefore also more likely to use the correct and latest versions.  Personnel are then more inclined to as-build mark-up any details of a drawing that are incorrect if they know the marked-up revision will be updated into the register, which can be as simple as scanning the marked-up revision or performing an actual revision to the electronic CAD file.

Whilst it is generally accepted that electrical drawings and buried services (electricity, air, water, communications, sewerage, gas, etc. ) drawings should be maintained, Orana Engineering has observed clients benefit greatly from having a drawing register that accurately contains all drawings and provides direct access to these drawings.To list a few examples:

  • Maintenance personnel having ready access to drawings providing key equipment information during breakdown situations;
  • Drawings being readily available for prompt issue by site personnel to have an assembly urgently re-fabricated; and
  • Site project engineers being easily able to compile drawing sets for issue to vendors and engineering consultancies for design and quoting.
Watch this drawing management video on You Tube

Our Services

As the maintenance of drawings is not a core activity of our clients, it can be difficult for a client to have the processes and procedures in place to consistently and reliably maintain drawings. Often a site only has the workload and budget for one full time draftsperson and it is unlikely that the site will be able to engage the long term services of a design draftsperson who is proficient in all disciplines of Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation and Structural design.  There may also not be the engineering resources available as required to have designs peer reviewed and QA checked.  There is also the added risk that the management of a site's drawings rests with an individual rather than an organisation.

In recognising the above, Orana Engineering has developed the capabilities and resources to provide a complete engineering design drafting and drawing management service for the disciplines of Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation and Structural.  Our Drawing Management services includes:

  • Registration of Drawings;
  • Drawing Register Management; and 
  • Revision of Drawings.

Registration of Drawings

The standard of drawing management varies from site to site.  For sites that have their drawings accurately registered this process of registering drawings will not be required. Orana Engineering can if requested by the client perform a random audit to evaluate the state of a site's drawing register.

It is extremely important that the drawing register is accurate.  If it is not, users are less likely to use and therefore less likely to undertake the effort required to provide the feedback of accurate information (e.g. new drawings, as-built mark-ups, drawing revisions) required to maintain the drawing register. The registration of drawings, depending on the condition of a site's drawing register, can be an expensive undertaking, however if this initial foundation step is not performed thoroughly, the drawing management system will not stand the test of time.

Given the importance of this fundamental step, Orana Engineering has developed proven methodologies to effectively and efficiently determine the latest native (e.g. CAD, Excel) file and latest print (PDF, tiff, jpg, hardcopy, microfilm) to create a comprehensive registration of a site's drawings.  It is often found that the latest revision of a print file is a later revision then the latest revision of a native file.  Our processes methodically work through all the drawings to identify the latest revision of each.

The end result of this process is typically a DVD(s) containing:

  • An excel spreadsheet register that has the details (e.g. drawing number, title, revision, format, etc ) of the latest revisions of each native and print drawing;
  • Files of the latest revision of each native file; and 
  • Files of  the latest revision of every PDF file (Note: this is a complete set of the latest revision of every drawing for the site).

Together with the actual drawing files this register can then be uploaded into a document management software package.

Drawing Register Management

Having created the drawing register which is the initial step that identifies the latest revisions of each drawing, the register and the drawings need to be maintained to ensure the continued accuracy of the register.  This is typically performed using document management software packages.  For sites that have an existing document management software package implemented, Orana Engineering can utilise the client's existing system, otherwise Orana Engineering can provide a document management software package.

The long term success of a site's drawing management system can be directly attributed to the features of the document management software implemented.  Orana Engineering recommends that the features of document management software used for the management of drawings should include as a minimum:

  • Web-Based Access:  For authorised users to be able to access drawings from the internet;        
  • User Friendly Tools:  For users to easily search for drawings, ability to search using any combination of the document fields (e.g. drawing number, title, revision, format);       
  • Document Version Control:  With access to revisions of drawings previously registered;       
  • Access Security:  Authorised user access to native and PDF files, general user access to PDF files only. PDF drawings are hosted so that general users can easily view and print drawings without requiring a knowledge or access to CAD or other software packages;       
  • Document Check In / Out Control:  To prevent a drawing/s being modified by more than one party simultaneously; and        
  • Document Transmittal System:  To record the issue of drawings.

Revision of drawings

Over the life of an operation, many of the site's drawings will require revision which can be due to plant modifications or simply a drawing being updated with as-built information. It can be difficult for site to maintain an engineering design office with all the Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation and Control Systems Engineering discipline engineers and designers required to engineer and maintain drawings. Orana Engineering has the resources and capabilities to provide our clients with a complete engineering and design solution to perform any engineering design revisions, as-built revision and importantly maintain the register of the sites drawings.

Orana Engineering also has the resources and capabilities to provide Project Management, Clients Engineer and Engineering Design.