Last month (Document control takes a vacation?), I linked to an infographic produced by McLaren Software regarding the potential value of document control within a major capital project when something goes wrong (that infographic is now linked from a new McLaren blog, Document Control Unplugged, by the way – good to see another vendor start blogging).
I have just been sent a link to McLaren’s latest infographic, which underlines a point about audit trails and dispute resolution. In many traditionally-managed projects, disputes could arise regarding who was at fault for an error or oversight (specifying the wrong paint, for example); establishing the facts might involve a complex forensic investigation across multiple email servers and other systems. Hosting information in one central repository simplifies this investigation: there is a secure audit trail showing who did what and when. With the facts established, expensive litigation can then be avoided.
Update (23 August 2012) – McLaren is maintaining its once-a-month average for output of infographics, with one showing how concurrent engineering, enabled by document control, can allow multiple projects to run in parallel to reduce plant downtime and lost production in the operations and maintenance phase of a plant or facility.
2 comments
I think that when you have full control over the project you are to succeed and in order to have full control you need to have some help and I think that some software can give this control. I have chosen for myself a tool Comindware tracker which monitors not only the way the project runs, but how the team members work.
Author
I have written about Comindware a couple of times. It is, however, more of a generic solution, not AEC-specific. I would like to see its approach to semantic data applied to AEC projects.