Design documents are not an ends unto themselves. Whether you are drafting in AutoCAD, architecting in Revit, modelling in Inventor or (god forbid) designing in something not made by Autodesk, the design itself does not stand alone.
Every design artefact goes through some type of workflow. It may be as simple as attaching a DWF to an email for approval by a client or something as involved as checking in a part to be released as an assembly which ultimately flows through every DMS, ERP, BPM, SFA, PLM and TLA in your organisation.
These workflows and lifecycles of a Design can be the linchpin to the success or failure of a business. You may have the smartest engineers and the most adept designers but if they are unable to communicate their Designs with each other - and the rest of the business - in a timely and efficient way, they are of little use.
For a Design to flow through an organisation there needs to be good systems integration. The key to good systems integration is making the process as efficient and transparent as possible. A designer shouldn’t need to be an Accountant to make their design appear in a billing system and a salesperson shouldn’t need to be an Engineer to find the latest version of an assembly that they can sell.
“I can’t get timely quotes out to our clients because it takes a week for our designs to get into our billing system.”
“I keep redesigning the wheel because our document management system is a mess.”
“I won’t use the corporate project management system because it gets in the way of me doing my work.”
A bad user experience, or poorly configured system integration, can bring an organisation to its knees. Sometimes something as trivial as a user needing to perform a manual entering of a part number can lead to mistakes and huge costs down stream.
If you’re still managing drawing registries in excel files, sharing documents via mapped drives and doing sales quotes on the back of napkins your business will still function, but things can be done smarter and better.
Sometimes a small integration like automatically publishing a DWF to SharePoint, a bill of materials to SAP or a URL to an Oracle database can make all the difference.
Conclusion
Out of the box, Autodesk products offer many points of integration via file format compatibility, built in workflows, Cloud services and programming APIs. Unfortunately not every organisation runs the same way and there are thousands of different business systems in use. Knowing how to utilize these integration points for your business becomes the key to success.
Are your design documents an island?
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