What is the problem?
- Superseding documents is a real pain – a great difficulty. Manually clicking and deleting files: it’s very time consuming and error prone. What if you miss an important drawing? It’s very, very easy when you get 20-30 new drawings every two days to sort through. In 3 months you’ll have a couple of hundred drawings which have to be reviewed. Who’s gonna pay for that?
Why is it a problem?
- Essentially it’s because people want to transfer any risk associated with a project cocking up onto you. So they’ll send you, say, 700 drawings all at once. Multiple revisions of the same document. And they’ll get you to sort it all out.
What is the solution?
- I wrote a program which takes care of everything. Saves you time and a lot of headaches. It’s literally amazing.
What does it do?
I’m using terms you may not be familiar with it, so first please take a moment to understand it: Definitions: (i) current project folder – this is the folder on your computer where you keep only the latest drawings for a particular project. (ii) Downloaded drawings folder – this is the folder where you download any “new” drawings received from a transmittal.
What does the program do?
- Automatically updates your current project directory with the latest revisions which you have downloaded.
- Cleans your downloaded drawings folder, and your current project folder, of any obsolete drawings.
- Identifies which drawings are new and which ones are to be superseded.
So what’s the point of all this?
It allows our guys to focus on what they do best: getting good drawings to you. In other words, you’ll get more value for your dollar with us, because we don’t need to spend a lot of time sifting and updating drawings.
Demo:
Please see below for a demo. Programming this had its challenges. I chose VBA because it allows users to see and tweak what is going on. This might have been more challenging if I used WPF to do the same project.
I hope you enjoy it!
Ben
