Document Distribution and Access For Global Teams

We totally get it. Its 2015, you have a global supply chain, engineers are working in India, Romania, etc., project management is in Calgary, and the client is in Mexico. Situations like this are incredibly common and aren’t going away.

Document Distribution and Access For Global Teams

We totally get it. Its 2015, you have a global supply chain, engineers are working in India, Romania, etc., project management is in Calgary, and the client is in Mexico. Situations like this are incredibly common and aren’t going away. That’s why it’s high time to solve the problems relating to document distribution and access for global teams.

For global or regional project teams, having access to the right documents can mean the difference between sitting on your ass until the India team gets back into the office and then staying late – all because someone left an attachment off of an email. These situations happen all the time and they are super frustrating for engineers, partners, suppliers, document control, and clients. On top of that when one interaction or process gets out of control, everybody loses. Clients lose money, document controllers lose credibility, engineers lose sleep, and eventually someone starts to lose business.

Mastering Document Distribution and Access for Global Teams

Welcome to ProjecTools Mastering Document Distribution and Access for Global Teams Demo. Today, we’re going to do exactly this. We’re going to talk about how to master document distribution and access for global teams.

First, we need to talk about what is document distribution and access, here in our environment in 2016? What does failure at these things look like, and what you can do to remedy those failures, shortcomings, or whatever. Then, we’re going to take a look at how ProjecTools does this in our application.

Let’s get started. When you’re talking about document distribution, it’s how your organization delivers documents and revisions to partners, clients, subcontractors, engineering teams, marketing, HR, suppliers, buyers, a whole host of things. Every one of these people and groups that are receiving documents, they have an interest in that document, and they need to access it. They need to access the latest revision and they need to access it on demand. Those are really the three keys to excelling at document distribution and access for global teams.

What does it look like when there are problems? Some typical problems that we see are emails and file servers, generic or rudimentary systems to distribute documents, provide access to their teams. This is decent, it’s a step in the right direction from emails, or just thumb drives, maybe. These document distribution “systems” tend to have a bunch of folder structures and there’s no control over numbering. Each team kind of manages their own thing, in their own way. That creates a silo within that division group, and then confusion when anybody else tries to interact with that group, because there’s no standard. There’s no rhyme or reason. Say group A puts a revision in a sub folder and group B puts a latest revision right out there on top, on the highest level folder and then all the previous revisions down in a sub folder. Just the fact that it’s not standard and requires humans to access and catalogue, results in confusion. Pile on top of that human nature and the whole thing devolves into an inconsistent document storage mess.

There are some other problems, especially in the globalized world that we live in. We work a lot with oil and gas companies, so they have people that are offshore on rigs that need to go access documents. It’s really hard to get it to them because they’re out of the office. If they’re out of the office, how are they going to get into your file servers or your rudimentary systems? If it’s not an online system, these folks are usually out of luck, they have to wait for a helicopter to deliver a thumb drive, or wait on email from a document controller. Those aren’t great. It’s not self-service. Basically, they’re not accessing real-time information either, because there are transit times associated with those.

We also see a lot of problem relating to global teams relying on emails, spreadsheets, and file transfer protocols. These were great 20 years ago. They may have been passable for you in the past 20 years up until now, and it might even be what you’re using now, but it’s really not the best way. People forget, all the time, to add a captions to email, where they attach the wrong file to emails. Spreadsheets, in order to be correct, require one person to be running them. Even then, if you’re using something like Dropbox to manage your spreadsheets and to track that latest revision, have it accessible to all, sometimes it doesn’t save right. It’s like you have 30 different copies of the spreadsheet, and you really don’t know who’s done what to each, and it turns into a nightmare.

FTP, File Transfer Protocols, that’s really frustrating for folks. Usually that’s employed when people are geographically separated and you need to transmit documents. It’s just kind of a clunky process and it’s prone to failure. I know I’ve gone to transmit a file via FTP and have it crash half way through it. It’s sometimes a three hour cycle to transmit the file, and it’s either demoralizing, or it’s devastating to your reputation. It could even impact your career or advancement opportunities, if this unreliability gets projected on to you and your team. That is terribly unfortunate because you’re seen as unreliable.

Another problem is numbering confusion, revision confusion, permission confusion, and disposition confusion. All around confusion. I kind of talked about this earlier, when teams manage things their own way and kind of just hope for the best, and think they can integrate different teams into their team and out, but if they’re not using the same conventions or using any level of control that means anything to another group, it’s all really just pointless.

Another thing is most application and systems, they really don’t provide document access. They provide a warehouse, but they don’t provide access. More than that, they don’t provide access with the context. With that document when you find it, you find the latest revs, you can see tasks that have been executed with this particular document. Access is permission based. There’s the meta-data that you need such as release dates, revision, revision purpose, and things like that, that really tell you where this document is in its life cycle, what’s been done to it, and who has done those things to it.

The last thing, and we hear this all the time, is that in order to find a robust system, that’s clever enough to handle your particular business, it costs an arm and a leg. I’m here to tell you that that’s not true. ProjecTools is very affordable. There are some other affordable systems out there, depending on what you’re looking for. If you’re still using emails, spreadsheets, and File Transfer Protocols to transmit documents, store documents, log and manage documents, there are way better options than that even, that don’t quite reach the standard of ProjecTools.

Let’s take a look at document access and how you guys can totally own the game and make your employees more happy, make your subcontractors, partners, your other teams, and your clients even more happy, and really make your clients believe in you; that you have robust systems in place and a level of control that other companies don’t have.

How to win. The first step is to get an online system that is going to centralize everything to eliminate all of the confusion associated with that. This really helps out with your offshore or out of country folks, by giving them instant access to the latest revision. This is pretty key here. You want to find a system that will make it very crystal clear what revision’s the latest. I know clients don’t like paying for wasted engineering work and things like that, but that’s what happens when people don’t have access to the latest rev. They end up working on superseded data that’s probably going to need to be redone.

More than that … Just an add on to that, if you don’t know what the latest rev is and you send that to a supplier or something and they build it, you’re going to be out hundreds of thousands of dollars probably, if not millions. Depending on the piece of equipment, if the engineering documents that they’re building from are not the latest provision, could have huge impact to the project and at least that PO.

The third thing is, if you want to win at document control, you’ve got to eliminate frustration. The way to do that is to get rid of your email, which has huge deficiencies and your FTP, which has connection errors, frustration, and so forth. You want to make your numbering standardize and that the meta-data is all there with your documents. You want task based workloads that remove all of the ambiguity from tasks, all the uncertainty as far as who should be doing what and when is it due. Thereby, eliminating a lot of the excuses that we hear all the time, as to why things aren’t done, are done incorrectly, or aren’t done on time.

I do want to tell you that you’re starting out strong here, by being with us today. You’re really interested in knowing how to win and you’ve kind of gotten there. You found an affordable system, ProjecTools, that is clever enough to handle the demands of engineering teams, legal teams, procurement, HSE, marketing, entertainment, construction. All kinds of groups use ProjecTools for all kinds of projects.

The greatest part about it … Well, I hesitate. One of the greatest things about it is that we can have you running and experiencing value in ten days, or your money back. We’ll come out there, get you set up, get your team trained, get you totally implemented, and if after three months, you guys aren’t satisfied and we are not delivering like we say we will, we’ll hand you your money back, if we can’t fix the problem. If you don’t want us to fix the problem, we’ll hand you your money back and we’ll never talk to you again. We’ve never really had to exercise that because we’re pretty good at what we do. I hope you take advantage of this and see what we can do for you.

Now, I’m going to get into ProjecTools application. I’m going to prove to you guys that ProjecTools gets suppliers, subs, clients, and partners all working in the same system, coherently, and that the application provides online access and role-based permissions, and that the application has search and segmenting tools that make grouping super quick and easy, and that we provide access to a clearly identified latest revision and the document history right there in one spot, for anybody who needs it and should be seeing it.

Now, let’s get into the application. Let me log out here. We’ll log in. You’ll notice that this is right from ProjecTools, that we’re logging in. This takes us to ProjecTools Application Homepage. You can do a lot of different things here, but the document distribution and access for most users, is going to be right here from this page.

The first place I want to look is the document distribution matrix. This is like a personal document register. I can see every document that I have permission to see, right here in this register. Let me take you through a couple of the things about this, that I just think is super awesome. It’s really our marquee tool here for document distribution. Real quick, I want to point out that you can search by latest revision or all revisions. You can make sure your teams always have access to the latest revision and the other documents proceeding that, so they build a good context of why that information is the way it is.

Also, I want to draw your attention up here to the document number. When you’re in this document distribution matrix, you can display and search by the document number, your standard document number. This will be … If my company owns this instance of the tool, this would be my document number, or the other document number if we’re working with a key partner on a particular project, we can add their document number in here as well, or the client document number.

Let’s go back here to standard number and let’s start searching around for some files. I want to show you how to group and segment very easily. Let’s take a look at PI. All right, just by typing in PI, I can see all the PNID’s for this project. I can see the document number. I can flip back and forth from the different document numbers here. I can also expand all of this, to see the routing and transmittal history. I can see commented files, so if I’ve sent out a routing and people have executed it inside of the system, or even outside of the system, I can see all of their markups here. It pulls up in a viewer, so I don’t have to download it and mess up my desktop space, or anything like that. I can still download it here, if I want to. I can actually see the revisions here in PDF form or your native form, you know, a lot of people have DWG’s, documents, excel files, CAD files, and so forth.

Let’s take a look at another segmenting tool here. If you want to get really specific, you can go down to document or use multiple levels of your document number. Here, I can see all of the drawings using these numbers, whatever these mean to my company. Talk about document access done right. Obviously you can define what your numbering levels are, but just by typing in a string that the document number contains, I can narrow down what I’m looking for, which might be the grid-drawing blocks for Deck AA. I can find that very easily.

Let’s clear that out. Let’s expand this, and I want to take your attention to the routing transmittal history. If you click on this, it brings up a screen that tells you where this document’s gone, who’s seen it, and when all of that back and forth happened. It’s a really useful feature to see. If you have questions or just want to see what’s being going on with a particular document, you can go on, and find it.

One of the last things that I want to show you is how you can and a lot of people manage contracts in our systems, so if you go find your project and you look for your project, you can sort by contract type. You can see here, that I’ve searched for all my inspection contracts here, and I have some MSAs for inspections. I can see all the information regarding that.

We’ve already talked about how an engineer can find their files. We can talk about how people administering contracts can find their files. This is also really useful for buyers, and suppliers even, or clients, if they want to come in, and see documents by PO.

If your engineers want to come in, or even your inspectors want to come in, and see all of the documents by system, they can do that as well. This is a very powerful tool for segmenting, and grouping your documents into something that’s useful for the individual user.

The last thing that I want to show you here, is that you can download sets of documents. If you want to pull up all of the standard files for a particular segment, you can download them. It’ll download straight to your desktop in a zip file and makes that really easy.

You can also search by rev purpose, rev date, and so forth, but you all are smart people, so you totally get the power of this and how clever filtering will improve your document distribution and access for your global teams. Let’s go take a look at something else.

Down here is the task manager. Most people would log into the application because they get a notifciation in their corporate inbox saying, “Hey, you got a task to complete in ProjecTools.” We can see that there are a lot of different tasks here. We have RFIs, engineering technical routings, flyer data routings, request for purchase, queries, notifications, and so forth.

Since this is talking about document distribution and access, let’s take a look at our distributions here. This is a very simple distribution that we’re going to look at. This is basically just letting somebody know that, “Hey, this document that concerns you, has been released, or a new revision has been released.” You can click on it, open it up in the viewer, whatever you need to do here. It’s basically an acknowledgement that you are aware that a new rev to this document is coming out. Cool.

Let’s go take a look at a more robust task. Probably one that’s a little bit more typical. Let’s take a look at an engineering technical routing. This has been sent out for review. This has been sent out for approval and I am the approver. I can see here that there are a bunch of other reviewers that have taken a look at this document and they have done things to it. I can open each of them up in here. I can view all of the original comments. This is going to pull it up in PDF format and I can see everybody’s markups, all layered on top of each other. As the approver, I can go, pick and choose, which ones I agree with, and add a disposition to each individual document.

Down here are the three documents that need to be reviewed. I’m going to draw your attention to the numbering here. The top one is our standard document numbering, here at ProjecTools. The second line is our other document number, and the third line is our client document number. This makes it very easy to integrate your key partners and your clients into the review and approval process. You can speak their language. You don’t have to have them guessing or trying to learn your document numbering system. Let’s face it, what client is ever going to learn your document numbering system? Moreover, if they do, are they going to be happy about it? Hell no. It’s a great tool to really cater to those groups, get them on board, win them over, wow them, and make them huge fans of yours.

Let’s take a look at this particular document here. Right away, I have some … Some red text is jumping off the page at me. I can see who made this particular notation. I can see who made this notation and all these notations. This is the PM, project manager. I can make my own notations here, like some arrows, boxes, text fields, and some sticky notes. Just typical stuff that is really helpful when you’re doing these things. I can also see the review history over here. The document manager said to see the notes here. This guy, Mark, said that, “Item ID is not matching up. See his markup.” It looks like the item ID’s here aren’t matching these ones. The PM Manager said that he added the missing items. He’ll get this fixed but let’s move this document forward to the next revision.

It looks like the project manager said, “Here’s the missing items. Don’t worry about it. Let’s move this forward. It shouldn’t hold us back.” Following with the approver, sorry the PM’s wishes, we can add a disposition of, “Approved as Noted, Item ID’s not matching up, see markup. Revise and Resubmit. Cool.

You can save those. You can go in and do all these for the different documents that you have. Add your dispositions here. Add any comments overall and then, add a disposition for this thing. Is it Approved as Noted? Is it Rejected? Is it Approved, and so forth? Now, when you approve this and submit it, it’s going to go back to the document controllers for processing. They can either get the engineer to merge all the changes onto one and issue a new rev for review and approval, or send it out to the client, whatever the case may be here.

When it comes to document distribution and access, here at ProjecTools, we are of the school of thought that, “The internet is key to working together.” This is an online application, so your users, whether they’d be off an oil rig in Korea, if you have inspectors in Australia on site, if you have buyers in Aberdeen, whatever the case may be, everybody can log in to one application and do all their work. They can take part in review and approvals, so distribution. Then, they can have that self-service access that is just so hard to find with a lot of other applications and apps, such as email distributions and folder structures, onsite servers, or Dropbox, and it just takes all the mess out of that and gives everybody all the meta-data they need, to see where a document’s at and basically get the latest revision, so they can be in the know, and work together coherently.

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Document Management Boot Camp

This is your chance to see how the industry leading companies that manage engineering-centric projects are dominating the document management game.

When teams are spread across the globe using their own document workflows to manage documents locally

Document Management Boot Camp

This is your chance to see how the industry leading companies that manage engineering-centric projects are dominating the document management game.

When teams are spread across the globe using their own document workflows to manage documents locally, other project teams have difficulty interfacing and sometimes can’t even access the documents they need. If this sounds familiar – join ProjecTools Document Management Boot Camp to see how you can be the hero.

See how industry leading Oil & Gas, EPC, and Capital Construction companies are creating a competitive advantage through masterful document management. Join the boot camp to get in shape to compete with the industry leaders.

Document Management Boot Camp

Welcome to ProjectTools Document Management Boot Camp. Today we’re going to be talking about some of the main problems that document controllers face, some of the main mistakes document controllers make, some factors in the industry that make document control really hard, and then we’re going to talk about how to whip that whole thing into shape, and get you guys moving in the right direction, help you get your teams pulling together in the same direction, impressing your clients, and doing a lot of things that document control has the power to do, but often times doesn’t quite make it there. Let’s get started and let’s talk about some document management problems.

For starters, a lot of people are using file servers, generic, or rudimentary systems, and this causes silos and confusion. This causes teams that are disconnected from each other and teams that are disconnected from information, so people tend to do their own thing and operate in this vacuum, and not think about other things that are going on, other designs, other work that people might be doing, and how they can leverage other people’s work. It ruins the team environment when people operate as silos. You want to get away from things like file servers, generic, or rudimentary systems.

Another problem is off shore or out of country, so if you have teams on the other side of the world, unfortunately that means they’re usually out of touch. They’re out of touch with other team mates, they’re out of touch with documents and information, and they’re out there operating. It’s like that silo affect we talked about, but it’s even more amplified if they don’t have the technological means to get in touch and plug into the process.

Another problem is global teams usually rely on email spreadsheets and file transfer protocols. These are great technologies. These are not great technologies for document control. If I am emailed an important document, for example, I can send that anywhere. I can forward that to your competitors. I wouldn’t do that but I can. It’s not a secure or reliable way to deliver things. Attachments get too big and emails fail. Email servers go down all the time. It’s getting better but it’s still not an effective way to deliver documents and manage documents. Spreadsheets very similar, that’s a way to keep track of things, a spreadsheet is just a workbook. It’s a blank slate. You can do a tonne of different things and they’re really good for what they do, but they’re not so good at managing document control, and they’re a lot of affordable systems that will displace spreadsheets and do a way better job. Think about that moving forward.

The final thing on that list there is FTP, that’s File Transfer Protocol, and this is a way to transmit documents securely. It’s a hassle. It’s really an old way of doing things. It takes a long time. It uses a lot of bandwidth especially with large documents. It’s a really pain for folks. They get half way through and then they fail all the time. You want to move away from that.

The fourth thing here is numbering confusion, revision confusion, permission confusion, disposition confusion et cetera. You can see that’s a lot of confusions, but I’m going to go through every one of them because they’re very important. Numbering confusion, if folks don’t know how your numbering works at your company, or with the company they’re working with, they’re going to be confused. If you can, step one, standardize your numbering so everybody’s working off the same thing, or two, take it even a step further and link your document numbers to the document numbers that your external team members are familiar with, a partner or a client per se, and display your documents and have like a self-service thing where they can go find the documents using their nomenclature, you’re going to really impress those people, and they’re not going to be confused.

The next thing is revision confusion. This one hurts. If somebody doesn’t know which revision is the latest and they need to work on a document, they’re going to pick the latest one they can find whether it is the latest approved revision or not. If they’re confused they’re going to work on it and they’re going to waste a bunch of time. Unfortunately this usually gets billed to the client, this time spent on the document. It’s not adding a lot of value to your clients, that’s for sure. That’s a situation you want to avoid.

Permission confusions as well. Folks that have … If they don’t know why they don’t have access to something, or they think they should have access to something, or they have access to too many documents, it either gets cluttering or they’re confused, or angry that they can’t find things.

The next thing is disposition confusion. This one’s a real killer. It’s a silent killer, too. Nobody talks about it, but I shout it loud from the roof tops. Disposition confusion comes in when somebody sends an email and you ask them to review something and then they reply back, “Looks good.” That’s not very clear. If you have a system that has some work flows and requires dispositions, there’s really only three you need; approved, approved as noted, rejected. If you can get rid of disposition confusion, you avoid situations like walking down the hall and having somebody hand you a stack of papers and saying, “Here, I looked over these. They look pretty good.” What does that mean? Absolutely nothing is the answer to that question. You want to avoid all that.

The next thing here is you can’t provide document access with context. This is a huge problem. Say you work in engineering, we have a lot of oil and gas clients here at ProjectTools in EPC and capital construction and so forth, so we have a lot of engineers using our document control system and they access documents. If they wouldn’t have any context with the document such as clearly identified latest rev, any tasks that were associated with the documents, or review and approval cycles, and then if they didn’t have all of the mark-ups that led to the latest rev, they don’t have all that they need to really understand the document and where it started, how it progressed, and where it’s at now, and why it’s at where it’s at. You want to solve that context problem going forward.

The last thing on this page is you can’t provide online document access to global teams or make it easy to find the latest rev. This is a huge problem in document management and we’ve kind of been talking about it with the file servers, the generic and rudimentary systems that cause silos and confusion, but you want to have an online place where people can go and find exactly what they need very quickly and not get really confused by seeing a bunch of five million documents that don’t pertain to them and all that clutter. You’ve got to segment it and make it easy.

Let’s go to Document Management Problems Two. For example people always wonder “where are all the mark-ups and the comments?” This goes back to context and we talked about that a little bit. Folks need to know things like who touched the document, am I looking at the latest approved revision, I can’t find things. This is why numbering and information logging and document management itself is so important. You’ve got have standardized routing numbers, correspondence numbers, your client document numbers linked in, so the different people that are interacting with your documents and your data can find them. We work a lot with procurement groups as well, and they tell us that their in house documents are perfect, but their supplier documents are a mess because they’re still using emails and spreadsheets, and suppliers and clients end up submitting things to them in emails and managed or documented with a spreadsheet, and it gets really confusing and it’s not a very good process, so that’s something you want to move on from as well. We’ll get to how to move on from all these in just a minute.

The last problem here that we’re going to talk about is over automation. Some document management folks, they try to automate everything, and that’s not the way to do it. You just want to automate key processes and repeatable processes, but still be able to hone those processes as they make sense. We’ll get to that a little bit more, but what you don’t want to see is over automation, whereas there are rules for everything and document controllers are trying to automate their jobs. You still need human interaction with the data. You need logic to apply the correct process to specific documents and pieces of information, so try to automate everything. It’s, one, a never ending target because you’ll never get there, and two, you’re going to have to break the rules all the time, and that’s going to lead to a lot of manual effort as well. That’s why dynamic document management workflows are super important.

We’ll get into how to fix these things right now actually. This is where boot camp begins. The first thing you need to do is eliminate silos and confusion from your system. Get rid of files servers, get rid of Dropbox as a management tool. You can still use it as file storage if you need to. It’s a good tool for what it is, but it’s not a document control tool, that’s for sure. Get rid of rudimentary systems. If you’re relying on couriers, or filing cabinets, or emails to distribute, manage documents and execute review and approval work flows, that’s the wrong way to do it. You want to get a system that will support you and enforce your process as it’s defined.

The next thing you want to do is allow your teams to be in touch. You want to have your documents in the cloud for people to access. The world’s flat now. We can accept that. Say your client’s in Aberdeen, and your project management’s in Houston, your key supplier’s in Korea, and they’re assembling everything in Singapore. That’s not uncommon, so you have to accommodate all these teams that are spread out throughout the world. One way people accommodate that is through emails, FTP, and spreadsheet management tools. Don’t accept those. You want to have a system that’s going to integrate them, so they have to log in, they have to have a unique username, so you can track the things that they’re doing in the system and interaction they’re having with your documents and your information. Don’t accept emails and FTPs because it’s not a very repeatable or accountable process.

The next thing you want to do is standardize your numbering, your revision structures, your dispositions. What I’m going to say here is any is better than none, meaning that a lot of people don’t standardize their numbering because nobody can agree on how the numbering should be standardized. If you’re a cog in this wheel, play ball and adopt any numbering system as long as it’s standardized because it’s going to set you so far ahead. Don’t worry about the details. Any shortcomings in your numbering are going to rear their head after a while and everybody’s going to see, so even if you’re right, concede and get a standard numbering system because if everybody’s using their own thing, people are operating in silos and hoping for the best and trying to cobble things together, either at the end of the project or at the end of whatever cycle, to hand things over. It’s not a good way to do it. The same thing with revision structures and dispositions. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what you call them as long as you have them and they’re standardized.

The next thing is providing document access with context. When users access the documents they need to find the latest revs, the task associated with them, and the commented files, and any useful metadata that’s going to help them do their jobs and understand the document, where it came from, and where it’s supposed to go, and those types of things.

The next thing is you want to make it super simple to find the latest approved revision. It should be very clear because you don’t want to waste money, especially in this economy. We have a lot of folks in oil and gas and it might have been okay at one point to work on the wrong thing and bill the client because it’s billable hours, but we’re finding a sweeping shift in that industry where they’re saying, “No more.” We need to optimize our process and own it, and add so much value to the client that we’re their only choice, or add so much value that they end up being the only choice for the client because it might not be economical to go with anybody else. Things to think about as we go through boot camp here.

The next slide here on boot camp is you want to have a system that automatically collects your mark-ups and revisions. Whatever your review and approval work flows look like for different pieces of information, if you’re executing them via email, stop. Get a system that collects mark-ups and revisions and allows people, ideally they’d be able to execute the task in your application and there are a lot of good software systems out there that do that, but you’ve got to make sure that you have a system that will do it.

The next thing here is have a history to log all of the lifecycle of a document basically. Spreadsheets here that have to be updated manually, they don’t cut it. You want a system that will read what’s happening to a document and log it. If you just use spreadsheets, things are always going to be left out, people are going to forget, people aren’t going to buy in, they’re not going to update it, things are going to get missed, the spreadsheet’s going to get duplicated, and then you’re not going to know which revision is the latest. It’s a huge self-perpetuating problem, so have a system that collects your history and spreadsheets don’t cut it.

The next thing here is control the revision. By having a singular centralized place to house all of your document revisions you as document controllers can control the revision that people see, so nobody’s going to be working on the wrong revision, or be confused about which revision we’re on for a particular document or a set of documents.

The next thing is integrate clients, partners, and key suppliers, and subs into your system. It should be mandatory. If you’re working on the project, there should be a no emailing attachments rule. Obviously it’s very hard to follow and it’s very hard to get your clients to play ball, but if you have a good system and you can present data to them in the correct way, in a way that they’re used to seeing, in a way that makes them comfortable, you run a chance of actually getting clients to use your system, but it’s really up to you to communicate the value of your system. After a couple of projects, probably, where you use your good, optimized boot camp system, they’re going to understand that when they participate in your process, in your system, the handover package that they get at the end of the project is going to be far superior to anything that is cobbled together via email spreadsheets and so forth.

The next thing here is good applications have granular permissions, sub-codify and use them. That’s pretty much it right there. You want to develop rules for how you’re going to give your teams permissions to view documents and what they can do to the documents, but they need to be standard for different groups, they need to make sense, they need to be logical, and they need to be employed almost religiously, or religiously, take your pick.

The next thing here is integrating your suppliers. We’ve talked about that enough. The last thing that you need to take away from boot camp is you need to use a system that respects and enforces your workflow. What’s really bizarre about project work and document management is that your engineering talent or whatever you’re in, your legal talent, whatever you get hired for, whatever you think you get hired for, is not actually the only reason clients hire you. It’s because they believe in your process, in your workflow, they believe that you can complete work in a reliable, coherent, time driven, consistent, standard way, and you’re going to produce good quality products at a reasonable price. The way you do that is your workflow, whatever you call it, your processes, so own that. You as a company, you exist, and you win business because your processes allow you to complete work efficiently and with quality. You want to use a system that respects that and can work with you, play nice so to speak.

Over here we have an example of a workflow. It’s a very simple workflow. Obviously there are trees that branch off from this and so forth, but a simple Squad Check Workflow Imagedrawing like this for document management, so everybody can be on the same page of how a document flows through a revision cycle. That’s a great place to start. Being able to produce this or something similar and then replicate it in the system, and then evaluate it after the fact, after you have your system in place, you’re going to be in a much better position because everybody is going to be on the same page and your system’s going to be enforcing the process that makes your business unique and competitively viable.

You might be asking yourself now, “Hey, what’s going to get me there? You keep talking about using the system.” I’ll be the first to admit that there are a tonne of document management systems out there, an absolute tonne of them. There are some even really good ones out there. ProjectTools is one of the good ones. We have a document management application, it gets teams working in your system, it’s project based, it allows online access, it has role based permission, so people see the right things, what they’re supposed to see, and they see it with consistency. Then they have access to the clearly identified latest rev in the document history, so they have the context of where the document came from and where it’s going and so forth, and who’s worked on it. All those great things that make document control so valuable, we do that. By the way, if you can achieve these four things with a document control system, that’s kind of the gold standard. If you can achieve these four things, you’ll be, probably, in the ninety, ninety fifth percentile of document control organizations.

A little bit more about ProjectTools, the features. There’s a distribution matrix. This is role based permissions of the latest rev. We have task based access, so somebody gets a notification to go and complete a task, and in the task we couple documents with review and approval, basically, so people can log in, see the task, access the documents they need to review and/or approve, and they can do their mark-ups online and save it, and then send it on to the next person or the approver, and then the approver can see all of those mark-ups at one time in context and then make the decision of whether it’s approved or not.

The system also supports consistent numbering for your company internally as well as your partners and your clients. It has segmenting, searching and filtering that is far superior to anything I’ve seen on the market, so your engineering staff or whoever is accessing your documents can narrow down what they’re searching for, group items, and export them, make packages, whatever they need to do. It makes it super simple, super quick, and super effective. Finally there’s an online viewer, so if you need to incorporate people who might be out in the field, might not have one of the expensive desk tops with all of the expensive CAD software loaded on them, they can still participate in your view and approval workflows, even though they don’t have the specialty software that might be needed to mark-up the native files so to speak.

Now I’m going to show you how to solve the document access problems, and here’s a meme of a guy that says, “If you can go ahead and stop calling SharePoint document management software, that’d be great.” By the way, earlier I searched document management memes on the internet, and I was not disappointed. I highly recommend it. I had a good fifteen minute look and laugh around Google. Now I’m going to show you the application, show you how we get suppliers, clients, and partners et cetera working on your system, how we give them online access, and how we maintain role based permissions, and give people the latest rev.

Here’s ProjectTools homepage. I’ve logged in from ProjectTools website, so this is a web based application, and right off the bat here I’m going to show you the document distribution matrix. This is basically like a user’s personal document management register, or document register. Every file that I have permission to see within the system is going to show up here, and I can do a lot of things with it. I can expand to view all of the data, I can see the latest revision, the standard or the PDF or the native, whatever that is, CAD document et cetera. I can see all revisions of all these documents, so I can see how these have progressed.

I can also see the commented files in the mark-ups, so I can see what people have done and what they’ve commented on the particular document, and really get a grasp of the lifecycle. I can also view the rounding and transmittal history here, see who it’s been sent to and so forth. We can see transmittals, these are usually external, and routings are usually squad check type situations. I can, like I said, use all these filters to group whatever I need by project, by PO, by system, by contract, by rev release date, rev purpose and so forth, and I can download them or export them. I can do a tonne of things here and it’s very convenient for people to have easy access to the latest rev through ProjectTools distribution matrix.

The next thing I’m going to show you is the task manager here. I’m going to open up a task. This is a very typical review and approval task that went out to a bunch of reviewers here, and we can see what their progress is, when they’re supposed to return it. I can see all of the documents here, I can see the book files that are coupled with that particular document. I’m going to open this up here. Here’s a very simple inspection form that’s out for review and approval. We have the standard mark-up tools here, you have clouds, arrows, text boxes, sticky notes, and so forth. It also supports multi-layer documents like CAD files, and you can see all the book files in here. You can see the review history, and then finally you can select an approval code and enter any notes, along with your mark-ups for the document, and it’ll be automatically saved in the system, and available for other reviewers or the approver to view in real time. It’s a very neat system and it supports workflows very well.

Finally down here at the end we can see there’s some general comments and in order to submit a task I have to put a disposition here. You’ll notice that we have approved, approved as noted, and rejected. There is no confusing dispositions, so everything is going to be clear and concise, and it’s going to go back to document control, and they’re going to know how to process this particular item.

That’s all I’m going to show you in the application right now. If you want to see more, request a demo on our website and I’d be glad to take you through a more personalized demo that shows you the back end, how to make this document management system work really well for your company, but take a look at what we have here, and the demo is really supposed to show you the end user experience, and how you can get different groups plugged into your team via an online system and really pulling them in the same direction and working quickly, more efficiently, more effectively and so forth.

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