Introduction

Many projects uses contractors to produce engineering documents and drawings. The contractor may be responsible for only engineering, or have broader role (e.g. an "EPC contractor"  handling engineering, procurement and construction). Another option is that the Project Owner has their own engineering department that is responsible for the whole or parts of the engineering work. 

Anyway, the project owner need to have a plan for how to manage all these documents. 

Prerequisites

As a minimum the project need to have in place:

• A document management procedure: It describes how documents should be managed, document types, responsibilities, approval and review process, documentation requirements and reporting
• Align requirements with the Operations team - which documentation is required for managing and operating the facility after project is complete
• A team responsible for managing documents according to the document management procedure

Document Plan

When implementing our document management software for different types of clients, there are different approaches, but a shared start point is to get in place a document plan.

The document plan lists all the documents the contractor and project owner plans to prepare based on the requirements / experience. This plan is then reviewed by the project owner, including resources who knows what is required for operations.

To ensure effectice utilization of Omega 365 and access to valuable insights, it is essential to follow these minimum steps:

1. Create a Comprehensive Document Plan: Begin by developing a thorough document plan that lists all the documents intended to be produced, along with their corresponding timelines (e.g. when the document is planned to be issued for review and for use/construction). The plan is produced by the engineering department or contractor and should be reviewed by key stakeholders in the project team, including resources in the Operations department.
   For more advanced reporting, like actual progress vs planned progress, and progress curve, add estimated efforts on each document: These effort estimates reflect the actual workload required for developing each document. Without considering the varying effort levels, the progress curve would not accurately represent the project's real progress and could undermine it's value as a performance measurement tool.
2. Import the Document Plan into Omega 365: Once the document plan is finalized, seamlessly import it into Omega 365. This step facilitates the integration of project data and allows the software to leverage the plan's information for generating insightful reports.
3. Access Informative Reports: With the document plan integrated, Omega 365 empowers you with a range of useful reports. These reports provides essential information, including expected workloads, anticipated delivery schedules, and comparisons between actual progress and the original planned progress.

A document plan can function as a great basis for following-up document deliveries 

In this video you can learn more about document plans and follow-up:

Identify which documents require review

An efficiently and well designed engineering document or drawing that doesn't require any review can undoubtedly lead to significant time and cost savings throughout the project lifecycle. By eliminating the need for review, several time-consuming and resource-intensive steps can be avoided, resulting in a more streamlined and cost-effective process.

When a document doesn't require review, it directly translates to

1. Simplified Distribution: There is no need for someone to distribute it for review to the project owner or other stakeholders, reducing administrative overhead and ensuring immediate availability to the necessary parties.
2. Minimized Document Control: Without the need for reviews, a document controller's involvement in checking formalities and managing revision cycles becomes unnecessary, freeing up their time for other essential tasks.
3. Efficient Content Development: Engineers can focus solely on creating the content without the need to review or incorporate feedback, leading to faster document preparation.
4. Reduced Feedback Loops: With no review process, there's no back-and-forth exchange of documents for revisions, reducing delays and improving document turnaround time.

By cutting down the number of documents sent for project owner review, while maintaining the necessary quality standards, the project can realize substantial cost and time savings. This streamlined approach optimizes project resources, enhances productivity, and ensures that project milestones are achieved more efficiently.

However, it's crucial to emphasize that while reducing the review process can lead to significant benefits, certain critical documents or designs may still require thorough review to maintain safety, compliance, and quality standards. Striking the right balance between minimizing unnecessary reviews and ensuring the necessary checks and balances are in place remains a key consideration for successful and cost-effective project execution.

We have clients of us, which define a KPI, e.g. 20% of documents should be sent for review. The project will then carefully have to select the critical 20% that are important to review. For the other, they trust the engineering contractor's work.
In a massive project consisting of 100,000 documents, let's consider a scenario where only 20,000 documents require review. This leaves 80,000 documents that can avoid the time-consuming 14-day round trip involving controllers and engineers. Such a streamlined approach would significantly reduce costs and save valuable resources.

In Omega 365 you can mark documents with "Review Required". If it is not considered requiring review, the contractor can issue the completed ("Issued for Construction" or "Issued for Use") document directly to the construction, and keep the project in the loop, with distributing to them for information.

Efficient submittal of information

When the documents are ready to be sent from engineering and reviewed by the Client (you in this case), they can be submitted using our web app: Document Deliveries. Alternatively an API based interface can be used to further streamline the process. In the latter case, a connector has to be setup, it pushes documents from their system into Omega 365, using this API. Some of our clients have their own APIs which are designed to be independent from the receiving system.

API can be used to transmit documents from the engineering contractor to the client and from the client to the contractor.

Another alternative is that the Client has established a general API for transmitting information to the client, and that Omega 365 connects to that system to exchange information with other parties.

However, we have found that using a simple user interface, allowing contractors to easily upload their documents, can be highly efficient and cost-effective also compared to establishing an API. It is important to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio in each situation, considering that as the number of submitted documents increases, the potential benefits of an API-based solution become more apparent.

Learn more about how one can deliver documents in this video:

Validating the documents submitted

When implementing our document management solutions to a wide range of project owners in different industries, we have experienced different approaches to how to process documents submitted by contractor.

• All documents submitted by contractors are checked by the project owner's document controllers for formal errors (e.g. incorrect title, issues with front page, missing attachments) before they are distributed internally in the organization
• Documents are checked by Omega 365 Document Analysis feature - which checks for certain formal errors (like incorrect title compared to document plan, not valid document number or revision number, incorrect information in the headers)
• Documents are automatically distributed according to the distribution list without any checks

Please note that validating method can be adjusted to each contractor and changed over time, i.e. if they deliver low quality DC can check every delivery and when quality increases the checks can be turned off

Automate the distribution of documents

The distribution is the key for efficient document management. How can we ensure that the right people can access and get notified about the important updates, most efficiently? 

A traditional approach for handling and processing documents, without automation, requires a lot of human processing and interaction.

An automated process can ensure a highly efficient distribution process

These are the main features related to distribution in Omega 365:

• Use of distribution groups
  • A distribution group is a set of users and/or org units that the documents will be distributed to, including their role (check, approve, review, edit)
  • Distribution group(s) can be automatically assigned to documents based on rules (e.g. all documents where the discipline is Electro, should automatically be distributed to the Electro engineers distribution group)
  • When a distribution group is updated (e.g. persons added/removed, role changed), it will automatically be applied to the document 
• Individual setup of distribution per document
  • One can add persons, with roles, and org units to the document. This can be combined with use of distribution groups.
• Automatic distribution for review 
  • The review process can be started automatically depending how the release code is configured
• Releasing of document
  • For a document to be distrributed to an org unit, it must be released first. Example: "Engineering" submits a drawing, which is issued for construction. You, the project owner, must release this document, before it is distributed to "Construction". Note that it is also possible to configure it to be auto released, meaning that it is released automatically, and "Construction" gets the document immediately.
• When document reviews are completed, the result is distributed back to the originator, without any additional manual work.

For more information about how to setup distribution, see this video: