How to keep a current set of drawings; current

[Sam Parish]

Hi,

I work for a small practice and we're trying to organise an ArchiCAD template as well as a folder system for organising issued drawings. At the moment, we have an issued folder in which we put newly issued drawings in folders named with the date and who they are to. This is great for figuring out when you sent which drawings and to who but when it comes to making sure a current issue is maintained it is a nightmare.

Say we do a detailed design set of fifty drawings and need to update one, I will issue that one and put it in its own folder. If I want to then keep the full set as current I then need to re-publish the full set of 50 drawings which can take a long time if it decides to update all of the drawings.

ATM we're leaving it as a manual system, if you update a drawing you have to remember at lunch / end of the day to update the full set. Is there a better that people use to do this? Can you set a publisher set to run a the end of the day automatically?

[Erwin Edel]

Re-publishing 'old' layouts is not an option for us, since there might be small changes made to the model that might not merit a changed issue of some section or floor plan etc. There might even be undocumented changes still in progress, but not in the scope of a current changed layout (something on ground floor being worked on, but we're sending out a different floor plan).

We don't have an 'automatic' solution, just one of small bits of work v.s. huge amount of work: whenever we issue a new set, we keep our folder labelled 'current set' up to date by swapping out the few files that are published in explorer / finder. This keeps the workload low, as having to piece together a current issue from nothing is a fair bit more work.

Basically our PLN is a dynamic file and cannot be seen as a current issue.

Every officially documented changed set is published to PDF, DWG and if needed IFC and then saved as a PLA.

[Anonymous]

please Watch the ARCHICAD 23 world premiere,
If the model is modified, the 2D drawing is updated very quickly, and ARCHICAD 23 does not now redraw the entire view.

[Sam Parish]

Already watched it and very much looking forward to it coming out 🙂

[Sam Parish]

Thanks, Erwin,

Do you save your current set of drawings as individual PDFs? We were considering this option rather than compiling into a single PDF as a set of individual PDFs can be updated significantly more easily and as you noted, you can make sure that only drawings that have been checked and issued are published to the current set.

[Erwin Edel]

Yes, we only publish our details as an A3 booklet. Since these are 2D static drawings, there is a much smaller risk of publishing something that has been changed that shouldn't be changed.

So all live model layouts (plan, section, elevation, schedules, etc) are seperate PDF/DWG etc files.

We publish these to their own folder with date of issue and then copy the files to our separate 'current issue' folder and delete the files not needed.

We've setup an automatic file name in publisher like such: ProjectNumber_DrawingID_DateOfIssueYYMMDD, so like 'B814_WP-01_190723.PDF'. Very easy to identify the latest version of the layout this way. The Date Of Issue is a custom field we've set up for issue scheme, since the system date doesn't allow much control.

You could automate a seperate publisher set to publish to a current issue folder, but hitting the publish button twice will take more time than copying some files around.

[Anonymous]

Really what you're looking for is an 'erp'/ documentation control program (eg. deltek PIM or aconex) . Every time you issue it updates and keeps track of revisions. There are many programs that tie into your resourcing, finances and contacts but I'm sure there are smaller versions for doc control only.
The main thing is you maintain checkpoints as you issue drawings to avoid overwriting previous information. Always think data security - what are the chances of losing information / do I have a backup?
Eg. Output to check folder -> copy + paste to issued folder when ready with date of issue -> transmit. + drive backups.
Tip. If you publish individual files with auto revisions appended you can easily search for latest versions of drawings dated by issue.

[Da3dalus]

I recently had to write up a new workflow for this. Since we are all still dependent on PDF's, it's clear that the post-ArchiCAD PDF workflow is an important part.

We generally use Bluebeam for PDF management (a few old-timers still use Acrobat, but it doesn't cause any problems). We generally Publish documents as individual PDF's, rather than multipage, since we have to Combine them with consultant drawings anyway. Scabbing engineering sheets onto a multipage PDF results in messy Bookmarks. Every time we Issue a Revision, we Replace those pages in a copy of the Master PDF Set, with the new date and Revision number. This is both located on our file server (which is available to everyone through our project management web site), and saved to a Bluebeam Studio Project.

This is also tied together with our ASI/PR/CCD/Addenda process, so it all gets done at once.

Yes, there is a lot of manual syncing that goes into this. However, that provides a chance to do some QA/QC, and we're trying to integrate it into the same process. In many cases, an Admin person can do it, and our folks have a good eye for catching stupid PDF export mistakes, typos, and continuity errors.