Why engineering document management is so critical in managing an organization’s equipment management process.

It is because managed documentation must be accurate. As changes are made to documents, the most up-to-date and complete information needs to be accessible for engineering, safety and maintenance teams. To ensure changes are properly managed, document version control is imperative. That is why part of an organization’s digital transformation strategy to improve safety, technician efficiency and ROI needs to be finding a collaboration tool for Autodesk Revit as a SharePoint alternative.

What is concurrent engineering and how does it relate to engineering document management?

• With concurrent engineering, a given document can be worked on under separate projects at the same time.
• Concurrent engineering allows for visibility to statuses, review states, and version comparisons.
• Meridian manages the relationships between checkouts – be it engineer, technician, safety or compliance assigned users – with an audit trail of users for document version control.

Why is concurrent engineering necessary for an organization?  

• Concurrent engineering facilitates agile projects, meaning continuous changes to critical capital assets.
• An engineering document management system that works with AutoCAD creates empowered engineers and designers with overall access to document management metadata.
• Concurrent engineering ensures that As-Builts are as accurate as possible, negating, for example, two years of redlines stacked up behind project or inconsistencies in As-builts at project handover because of field changes.

How can concurrent engineering help your organization?

• Comprehensive documentation possible
• Reporting for compliance and C-level easy
• Changes visible and apparent to all stakeholders

Consequences of ineffective engineering document management

Environmental health and safety managers

The goal of an environmental health and safety manager is to ensure the company can continue to operate through compliance with regulations, reporting to both internal and external stakeholders. If they do not have the information they need, any number of both public relations and company problems could occur, including accidents, injuries, harm to stock prices and reputations, and loss of operating permits.

Engineering managers

The engineering manager not only supervises employees but is also the chief problem solver. Without access to accurate documents for critical assets, decision making is more of a guess than a test, which costs time and money. If an engineer has access to a single "source of truth,” their job is not only easier but costs the organization significantly less time and money.

Reliability manager or reliability engineer.

The reliability manager’s primary goal is to identify and manage asset reliability and the risks that could adversely affect plant or business operations. An engineering document management system could be a vital player in their day-to-day processes by providing full visibility to project and asset documents and all the notes or changes attached. It enables them to approve workflows, and access archived projects and a portal for the reliability team to practice concurrent engineering, even with outside contractors.

Plant operations maintenance manager

By directly overseeing maintenance personnel and all the technicians involved, the primary responsibility of taking care of critical capital assets falls to this manager. They have the most searching and coordinating to do in cases of failure. A single source of truth, knowing that there is no redline stack in a back room to be uploaded, all vendor information intact and the ability to make notes for engineering at the time of need, is an invaluable asset for limiting costly downtime.

Concurrent engineering in use

By using the concurrent engineering functionality available in Accruent’s engineering information management software, users can track documents to ensure projects run in parallel and are error-free. Meridian also provides users real-time visibility to monitor revisions from different projects and ongoing maintenance. Project members associated with the same documents are notified automatically when a parallel project releases updated documents. This avoids unnecessary delays and shortens project turnaround times.