Electronic Drawing Conrol

J

Jamie

Good Afternoon Guys and Gals!:bigwave:

I feel like I've been in my own little world lately. I've completed the upgrade of my Quality System! Yaaahooooo! Since I've been living in our conference room. Yesterday I conducted a training session with the President, VP and our Management personnel and I'm hoping that someone might have some ideas that might help me out.

We get a lot of our Customer Drawings via e-mail. In our D & D procedure we've documented the process for handling and controlling these "electronic" drawings. Our Engineering Dept. uses a software, I think is called Solid Works. With it, they can open any drawings from the server and modify them. The procedure states they don't have "authority" to do that. But we all know that people tend to "not" follow them on occasion. So we have instilled a procedure where anyone receiving a drawing electronically MUST forward it to the System Admin. and delete it from their system. The System Admin. places the drawing on the server with permissions applied and no one as access to them. They have to request a copy from the Syst. Admin. which he'll stamp "Eng. Use Only". The system isn't working needless to say. The President came to me this morning and asked me to check around and see how other people are handling "Electronic Drawing Control" to see if there is a better way of doing this.

Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas or another method? Anything would be helpful. Thanks.

Can I go home and sleep now?:ko:

Jamie
 
D

D.Scott

Jamie

I am very surprised your software dosn't have a "red line" option. With this turned on in most programs it allows you to make all the changes you like but they show up as "red line" until they are approved and saved.

If this feature isn't available, I suggest you have your network guy/gal make the server directory read only. You can open a document, print it or whatever. You can't write to the server so you can never change the original file. You would need to pass whatever changes you made through the doc. administrator to get the new drawing uploaded.

Just food for thought.

Dave
 

CarolX

Trusted Information Resource
dabbling a little

Jamie,

Here's what we do...

We have begun to dable in this area, but so far, it really hasn't taken off too much.

I am going to address the bigger picture here. We do 99.9% of our work from customer drawings. We have no control over their revisions or maintaining their revisions. But frequently, we find errors or missing information. We issue a PCR (product change request - aka ECO) and make the changes on the copy we have. We have attempted in the past to get our customers to change their prints, but it's like :frust: :frust: :frust:

Dunno know if that will help, but my $.02 USD worth.

CarolX
 

Mike S.

Happy to be Alive
Trusted Information Resource
Yep!

D.Scott said:
If this feature isn't available, I suggest you have your network guy/gal make the server directory read only. You can open a document, print it or whatever. You can't write to the server so you can never change the original file. You would need to pass whatever changes you made through the doc. administrator to get the new drawing uploaded.
______________
This is how we do it as well. But, for it to work well, you have to make sure you get a true original version (before anyone makes a change). Sounds like you've insisted on this already -- let's hope it works. I'd hate to see your SA have to issue paper copies -- it only makes for more work and wasted time for the SA and the person who needs the doc. Let 'em get it off the server "read-only".

Mike S.
 
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