Most prospective clients that talk to us about document management applications tell us that their current document management systems aren’t working. They often complain that document workflows aren’t enforced or optimized, contractors and partners are working outside of your systems. We hear that people are having trouble accessing current revisions and mistakes are made when you work from the incorrect revisions.

A side problem is that there isn’t a standard numbering system enforced and emails and spreadsheets which are produced internally by employees out of necessity and aren’t effective document management tools and there are huge hidden costs associated with those.

These folks have want to find an affordable document management system that makes sure teams are working from the right revisions, standardizes numbering, and pulls everybody into one system. The answer is an application that will get your team, suppliers, and clients working in one system to enforce and automate and optimize document workflow.

The right system has a few defining characteristics. First, a cloud-based application means you can have on demand access 24/7. You’ll have online access to quick and robust search tools so that you can find your documents quickly. Employees searching will have role-based permissions so that the right people are getting the right documents without sacrificing security. Further you want to have supplier document management meaning that your suppliers can upload the documents for their PO directly to the point, document control, and we’ll enforce the standard numbering and due dates.

Second, is to have a system that supports an optimized workflow for your industry (Oil & Gas, Capital Construction, IT, Legal, Pharmaceutical, etc.). The right tools are optimized for your industry out of the box with the appropriate review, approval, and release workflows allowing document controllers to keep the documents moving. The workflow is automated, the application has built in tasks and task management so that everybody’s data’s in one place and is recordable. Further, look for a system that allows engineers, commercial, legal, etc. to actually do markups, reviews, and approvals inside of the application so everything says organized, archived, and reportable.

The third thing that fixes your problem is easy access to the latest revision. Everybody can work from the correct document for revision through easy-to-navigate online permission based access that you set up, and also you’ll have an archived complete revision history.

The fourth defining characteristic is enforced standard numbering. You should be able to define the levels and lists or numbering that work for you. You can enforce a numbering system and eliminate disorganization and numbering system headaches. You can track other numbering systems, that means that your client, your suppliers may have different numbering systems, you can accommodate that within the software. Further you should be able to accommodate your clients by using their client numbering system while assimilating that with your own.

The fifth characteristic is having reports on clean data with accurate reporting.

You’re going to enforce revision control so that the revision workflow is done in the proper way, and it is the wisest use of your IT resources. ProjecTools doesn’t require expensive IT staff, servers, or maintenance and we’ll get not this a little bit later. ProjecTools was made for the EPC, Oil & Gas, Pharmaceutical, Legal, and Mining industries. We account for all the players beginning to end in one application in each of the industries mentioned. The system is an out-of-the-box project management tool that is built by project professionals for project professionals, we understand document management. It is the industry standard for each of our industries.

This mini white paper will detail some of the returns from using ProjecTools Documents. While this is not an exhaustive list of benefits, these are widely agreed upon by raving fans using ProjecTools Documents.

Poor Document Access. If your projects are like most, you have teams contributing from multiple locations. If each out-of-office team member has to rely on emails, FTP, thumb drives, or VPN to access documents – you are wasting massive amounts of time and money.

When compared to FTP and thumb drives, ProjecTools saves hours and days in just accessing documents. When compared to similar systems, however, ProjecTools was found to save 3-10 minutes per document access because the cloud based application is accessible anywhere and easy to navigate.

If you apply these 3-10 minutes saved to a single staff member being paid $1.00 per hour who accesses each of the 25,000 just one time we save you $1,250 – $4,165. At $10.00 per hour that’s $12,250 to $41,165 saved – for a single employee.  You probably pay your people more than $1.00 or $10.00 per hour, and you probably have more than one employee who needs your documents.  Do the math.  It’s okay, I’ll wait.

Don’t forget to multiply your total by the number of revisions for each document.

If your total isn’t at least twice the price of using ProjecTools, tell us.  We’ll give it to you at no charge until it is.

Fragmented Teams/Siloes. Most engineering and construction projects have multiple engineering disciplines, commercial groups, and management groups (PMs, HSE, etc.). Generally, these teams use their own processes and hope for the best. Integrating with other groups or providing transparency to management is too often an afterthought at best or seen as the workings of the devil at worst. This is what we call fragmented teams or siloes.

We are proud to tell you that we have solved that problem. A natural product of using ProjecTools documents is that documents from all stakeholders are in one location, trackable, and easy to find.

This simple phenomenon prevents costly miscommunications, misunderstandings, and mishaps such as sending the wrong revision to suppliers, misplacing markups, work packages falling behind schedule, etc.

Idle Teams/Unsure Teams. If any step in a process is ambiguous, that step will be incorrect or not taken at all. In the context of engineering and construction, if teams don’t have the right specs or drawings, they are either going to sit idle until they get what they need or proceed using incorrect or outdated information.

Obvious consequences of these are wasted time, money, materials, and setbacks. But there are deeper consequences still. Will these setbacks sink the project, hurt your reputation, or prevent you from winning repeat business in the future?

While it is hard to assign a concrete dollar amount to this, risk mitigation is a very important and often overlooked part of ROI. Fortunately, ProjecTools Documents mitigates the risk of inaction or misguided action due to lack of information. In ProjecTools all team members have instant access to the documents you need.

Teams Working From the Wrong Revision. We have all spent time working on documents and found out later that we were working from a superseded revision. It’s awesome to go back and redo the work, right?

And this is the best case scenario when teams don’t have real-time access to the latest revision. Among the worst case scenario is sending the wrong revision to a fabricator resulting in a $5 Million piece of scrap metal.

Solving the revision problem in one case saves some frustration and labor. Solving the revision problem in the latter case saves $5 Million, your reputation, and maybe even your job. Fortunately, ProjecTools Documents makes sure you can access the latest revisions.

Scores of Overworked Document Controllers.  A common misconception is that a more robust document control process mean you need more personnel to manage it.

ProjecTools users find that they don’t have to hire more document controllers until they experience a 5x influx of business. They also find that document controllers with the right tool perform vastly better.

Once scenario is paying $250,000 – $450,000/year for 2-3 document controllers and hearing them complain about workload and not having a system. The other scenario is paying less than $200,000/year for a good document controller and ProjecTools and hearing how much she loves her job.

Long story short – you can invest in a tool that offers control and savings, or you can roll the dice and hire a legion of people to do it manually and hope they figure it out.

Rule number one in managing a global project team is to keep teams informed. The changing project landscape if not communicated or improperly communicated will leave remote teams frustrated, confused, disinterested and ultimately producing sub-optimal work. The remedy is to keep remote teams engaged which requires transparency, over-communication, and on-demand access to the latest project information.

Since transparency and over-communication are organizational commitments that have no gold standard for execution, it makes sense to focus on on-demand access to the latest project information. Access to project data is a concrete, measurable objective that can be fixed in a matter of days or weeks.