Importance of Design/Documentation Integration in Software Selection

Embedded Design/Documentation Speeds Up Engineering Process by 10X

For integration companies working on larger-sized projects, the design and documentation process is imperative. There is little room for error in a massive installation with multiple phases, potentially hundreds of individual SKUs, and multiple technicians on-site. While many integrators use design software solutions like AutoCAD, Bluebeam, and Visio, having those drawing solutions integrated into an end-to-end business management solution can make the engineering process as much as 5X to 10X faster.

Speaking on a panel discussion at CEDIA Expo, D-Tools CEO Randy Stearns says projects that are less than $50,000 likely do not need detailed documentation or engineered drawings, but larger solutions definitely do.

“If the projects being performed by your company are larger, $100,000+, then there is a need for project documentation, whether it's integrated into an all-in-one solution or separate,” he says.

“When the drawings are being done in a piece of software by one team, but then system design and proposals are being developed by another team using a different set of tools, then things are not necessarily in sync. It's hard to match that bill of materials to the drawing precisely,” he explains.

But with a software solution that has the drawing component embedded, it’s a different story. The process is synchronized and the technician in the field can work off the drawings or the BOM because they are in sync with each other. Chris Smith, principal at TheCoTeam, worked at several integration companies that focused almost exclusively on large six-figure projects that required a full deployment set of drawings and documentation.

“It was the only way that we could get our project management team installation, team rack, build team, programming team, and then ultimately our service team to know what was happening on a job. There was no other way to do that than without having a deployment set. It is also then circulated to the lighting designer, architect and GC,” he adds.

Stearns notes that implementing an embedded engineering solution is “always going to be faster… like 5X to 10X faster” than using a separate drawing solution like AutoCAD, Bluebeam or Visio, especially in businesses that have a single engineering team and process in place.

Revision Control Is Vital

One other often overlooked element of having an embedded drawing solution with your business management software is controlling the number of revisions.  

“As soon as a new rev of those doc sets come out, it needs to be deployed to lots of humans, both inside and outside of your office,” says Smith. “If you try to imagine doing rev control with a separate piece of software from your ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tool, purchasing tool, etc., it becomes very tricky.”

Smith recalls at one of his previous integration tenures the company had a separate ERP tool and did their drawings in CAD.

“It was unpleasant. It would've been great if it was fully integrated… but unfortunately it just wasn't,” he laments. ”In our case, we had shifted away from a Visio model to a CAD model to better align with architects, lighting designers, etc., because now our documents were natively deployed inside of their ecosystem. It made us a better partner. The flip side is that we ate the human capital costs to make that happen between our pieces of software.”