Company Cad Standards Paper or Digital file?

[hkaplan1227]

I've been working on Cad Standards and I was wondering. How many companies print there standards out and hand them to the Cad userss or do you just have digital version available somewhere on your servers? If digital, I'm sure they are right protected. Are there any pro's and cons to either?

In my case there was never any standards given out. I was thinking of getting to a point with it and giving it out and then adding to it. Rather then print out 40 manuals and then have to print out addedum's each time I add to it. I could just send an email out and tell the users there have been updates and they could go to the digital version

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance

[dgorsman]

Paper standards are obsolete nearly as soon as they are printed.  You can send out all the update notices you want, but that doesn't mean any given hardcopy is updated, fully or partially.  For example, many users will be of the mind

"I'm busy with more important things right now, I'll get to that later...",

followed by

"There's something I need to do, I'll look it up later when I have time...",

followed by

"You didn't say there was an update!" or "You should have been more obvious!"

When that hardcopy is inherited by a new user they usually assume it is accurate.  Even experienced users won't double check their copy against other copies or the master copy beyond one or two pages.

Multiply all of that by several applications across a couple of departments across multiple clients and all you will be doing is documentation updates.

Digital copies get around that.  Single source, no delays from printing, always current, no excuses for working to old standards (provided they are well organized).  Our own CAD settings standards are XML, so they can be transformed to HTML for viewing *and* directly read for information.  That gets away from the "double standard" of separately maintained data and documentation.

[pendean]

Whatever you decide for a document, you should also build your standards into your template files and your AutoCAD menus/profiles etc.

Best way to encourage your users to use your standards is to make it all transparent and the default in AutoCAD: no one is going out to hunt for your standards when they have a deadline to meet. No one. Then you end up with a mess all over again.