3D Standards—A Continuing Journey of Best Practices

KEVIN SMEDLEY: So, let me start off by just kind of explaining to me a little bit, that I have changed positions since I wrote this lecture. Previous where I was at was a manufacturer, a compressor manufacturer, Global, I'd been there almost six years, standardized all of it. Inventor, Vault, some AutoCAD, AutoCAD Electrical, a lot of changes, a lot of procedures, a lot of processes.

Since then, the last three weeks, I've been in a new position. I actually took a left turn, went over to the Revit, Navisworks, BIM, but there's no difference in standardization. How do you make it so things become consistent and such? I've been doing this quite a while. I think I'm 30 years into it now between managing different departments. I was an Autodesk reseller, manufacturing applications engineer for 16 years. Set up a lot of different companies. We're kind of convey some of that over, and how do we make people and companies work together? Keep the silos away, make sure everybody is working on the same map. How do we standardize what we're doing?

So today, is just my little schedule here, just wanted to bring the other one up that this afternoon at 3:45, Mr. Jason Hunt, who is also a colleague at FSL, he has an intelligent class that I'm helping him with. And that kind of spears towards the standards that we've set. He and I have put some methodologies in play over the years. And over here as Mike Ostrowski, which is the CAD manager, which is also assisting in the last six years.

So, when it comes down to it, I do have three areas of standards, communications, and consistency. Truly a motto of mine that I do, lectures about standards from a 3D perspective. How many people are doing Inventor of 90 plus percent? OK, that's not bad. At where we were at in the last six years, we were 95% Inventor. We're 5% AutoCAD, and then we have the controls group, which is AutoCAD Electrical, which we had started standardizing more on using its intelligence and coming into the Inventor world itself.

So we also talk about standards, ECOs, company organizations. Sustaining, sustaining is very important as to when you build up standards, you want to be able to sustain it.

So some of the learning objectives today, gain understanding, grasp the magnitude of standardization. How many people are CAD managers? Very good. Understand how design styles and templates. So that's where we get to eventually. Learn how to maintain consistency.

So here's my story, one of them. You can say the continuing journey started six years ago at AU. I have a colleague that I've known for seven years, he's out of Australia, Brisbane, he and I did the 3D Standards, New Thinking. Anybody here six years ago sit in that class? I know Carlos was there. Were you here six years ago? Thank you. So this is like a continuous journey. I tried, I was trying to get Mr. Allan Chalmers up on the screen on Skype, just showing him, but I can't get that working right now. We were talking with him, his daughter graduates high school tomorrow. So he could not make AU this year.

I'm going to throw some of the stuff in that we did then. I think it was a good class. Some people got some good things out of it. So Allan is part of this whole thing. So the intent of this conversation is to have you think. This is a real lot about thought. What do we need to look at? What areas do we need to touch, to deal with, in working, and making our groups, our companies, whether they be global, or one singular office, how do we get everybody to be consistent?

So this page right here was from six years ago. This is Allan's scribble that he pointed to me the day of our lecture, our first one. And so these are all the different areas that we were thinking of standardizing. You know standardizing, everybody thinks of the 2D. So we'll talk about that. So the definition of standards, right? And area of set guidelines for the way computer aided drafting, I don't like drafting, design work, I call ourselves designers, should appear to improve productivity. Because productivity is the key factor here. Interchanging CAD documents between different offices. How do we do that? Where I was at with FS-Elliot last, we globalized our standards over to Shanghai, China. Which is also expanding out into our Buffalo office, which is also, I think, on the horizon for that company is going to be an office in Saudi Arabia, and in India maybe. So what we've set in place is going to be an easy jump going out.

So striving for the best. Build your CAD standards with consistency, across the board be very consistent at what you're trying to achieve and what everybody needs to understand and learn. Integrate 3D standards, sketches, solids, surfaces, depending on what you do and how you design and the tools. How can we customize? How can we standardize the tools that we use within Inventor? Features and tools, how do we use them?

I used to have, my staff, as you can sit there and have a meeting and just start picking something of Inventor. How do people use it? How different are people in using a one single feature? This feature has three options. Well somebody does it one way, somebody does it another. Is there a way to standardize that? 3D CAD standards is imperative to the company's processes and procedures. So standardizing those also. Anybody have a CAD committee in their company? Very good. I started one in 1993 with a company in Winston-Salem. I think it's huge. They help you standardize, you can't do it on your own. You have your ideas going forward.

So our benefits, hopefully when you leave today we'll have a better understanding of what 3D standards can provide. If you're new to leading CAD standards, look to apply a new journey of thinking. And if you're a veteran, old hat at CAD standards, look to apply a continuous journey. It's just the passion of this to get everybody working, to be efficient, to make money, the company in the end.

So 3D tools. You can see a lot of pictures that I have in here. I like some of the quotes from Mr. Einstein. I like some from John Wood and there's a bunch of different people. So Inventor has powerful tool sets to begin, from the basics of solids and surfaces. Anyone do surfacing? OK, not too many. I remember having to do surfacing for some companies back in the mechanical desktop days. That was more of a difficult time. More of a difficult time back then. So through mathematical components, iterating multiple shapes and sizes, how do we get there?

So just even in when we're talking about parts. How can we standardize 3D parts? OK, there's a number of things that we look at. So we're going to look at standardizing the part files. Now also, what I'm going to talk about brings in and a manufacturing world, DFM. If anybody knows what DFM is and the methodology, it's Designed For Manufacturing. That is essential in the manufacturing facility. But you have to understand the methods and incorporate some of these tools into that methodology that you're designing, not for you, but really how to get it manufactured. How to get it processed and fabricated. How well are we able to do that? How can we standardize parts, library components? How can we make them easy with parameters moving forward?

So all of these part components. OK, can we standardize on iProperties? Data in Inventor is extremely important. How do we convey that? How do we keep that going? Do we put iProperties in here with some iLogic Forms? And we can make sure that we can actually set that iLogic Form that needs to be filled out. There are CAD standards, CAD from orange. Yeah about data standards. We've done an iLogic Form, tied our custom iProperties into it. And that's the same for everybody on every sheet, whether it be an assembly, that we have different sections pouring off in that form. That form, you don't have to go to iProperties and search around everything. Here it is, fill it in. Every file, assemblies, parts, drawings, presentations.

Materials, how do you standardize on materials for your company? Do you just take the defaults, or do you have materials that you customize into Inventor, into that material database? That material database is strong. Information that you can get to it on the end, weight to total weight. If you do any simulation or FEA, then those again, that information is extremely important. So these little things I'm talking about are standards. And we can make them so everybody is not just on their own picking and choosing.

Now, I'll bring in the switch. And again, my passion for what I'm doing, I go into a company where I'm at now, it's in the construction industry, and they have read it. And it is 3D, but it's chaos. People haven't had any structure in this company. And so I'm going to go in and I have to assess what can I standardize? Where do I start? One guy, sitting three feet back to back to the other guy, emails him a Revit file. I said, oh shit, what the-- So there's a mentality also of, I'm going to do it my way. Well, you're going to do it your way, but with company ideas in place.

Many different pieces of this picture here. Colors, they're different. Work features, parameters, parameters, if we have a default template of a part file, or we have maybe a couple part files, where do we have that parameters set, we can have some custom parameters, we could have it tied to a spreadsheet, we can have it all passed to the correct areas.

So work features, iMates, how many people use iMates? Know what iMates are? So there is a small percentage of people, they can be some strong things that I have this iMate built into a common part, so I know when I bring it in I have changeability maybe through some iLogic. But I have that standard here that there's five sizes of it. And I have some iMates contained in it that it will snap to something else to be quicker. Don't have to so much use my constraints other than dragging it.

Sheet Metal how many people utilize the Sheet Metal product? I love Sheet Metal, it's great. They've added some new tools to it. But the k Factors. Here's where centralized and k Factors. I had a client, when I was in AE in northern Virginia, and they had k Factors from decades before in their machine setup. And they were not every day. They were a little bit different. So we had to customize those in, so their machines would still laser cut, mill, and all that information properly. So that was good. And then we put in some procedures for them to follow for doing flats. Now this is even back, that's probably 10 years So a little bit further back on that.

So on part components, here are the standards. Everybody knows this. The iProperties, the document standards. Considerations, no layers. How many people love AutoCAD?

[LAUGHING]

Now I will say I love AutoCAD. I learned on Version 2.61 30 years ago. AutoCAD is great. I was very fast at it. But Inventor just out does it, it's just fantastic.

I'll just throw this out, and Carlos, you may know this and remember this. What was the code name for Inventor before it was released in beta and alpha? Does anybody know that? Because it's been used around here a couple of times in AU. [INAUDIBLE], very good. If I had a gift, I would give it to you. But I don't, so smiley face.

[LAUGHING]

So those are, again, you go back and what there was, and then from the beginning and standardizing, and just not off-the-cuff information. These are incredibly important settings, with some adjustments. In the iProperties and customizing it, the iLogic Formula I had back there, and in document settings, four parts. What are defaults? The default units, inches, metric, whichever one, we know they're changeable, but what are our standards?

What is the material? It says generic. Maybe your default material is stainless. Maybe it's some PVC. But for the most part, that could be it. Now you can create multiple ones with multiple scenarios. Depends on how large you want to go. At the company where I just left, it's FS-Elliot, we were looking at, Jason, who's one of the guys with iLogic later this afternoon, creating actually one template for models, for parts, but has within it iLogic variations. Rather than having multiple templates, that we had one, but we had the intelligence within it. So thinking a little bit above board on that.

So also we can set the Bill of Materials. Bill of Materials are property based. What is our output of a Bill of Material? A parts list. And so you can come and put the headlines or the top tabbed features of what information is being dragged, customized or not.

So data information iProperties continued. Title boxes, 2D title boxes, we still deliver paper. Now I've written a paper, and a presentation that audit still hasn't gotten me to do here, it's called the paperless society. How many people are paperless in their company? OK, it's hard, and you have to influence people that change. So FS-Elliot is probably, in the engineering end, I would say 85% paperless. So we've influenced people over the last number years. Engineers, that here's the default area, here's the template that you go to, whether a PDF or a DWF. Or we're getting it out to the cloud a little bit more. As to somebody on the shop floor through the cloud, to be on the screen, and actually do some red-mark changes while it's being packaged.

So again, I'm kind of reiterating some stuff. So all this parameters box, how do we customize it until we get a start? Now it could be AOL, OAW, overall length, overall width. But we customize what that might be, and it's a variable.

So then there's assemblies. So on a part level again, what can you think that would be standard that everybody would use? It takes a lot of thinking to do that. And it comes out to understanding your user base. What does your user base have? If you have a CAD committee, then the committee is going to understand the people who are using Inventor, using the tool, and say eight of them do it this way and five of them do it that way. Well somewhere there is a medium that you can standardize that beginning spot.

So assembly, back to here. There is all the different tools up here, all of the points up here, differing, enable relationship redundancy, this is different. Does anybody have all these buttons checked? Why? Anybody? Why wouldn't you tell it the enable relationship redundancy analysis? It's because it's going to keep analyzing that information. Now years ago I had it on for companies. But we saw some of that deficit of hitting the information.

Used last occurrence orientation. That should be on. When I bring something in, when I bring that occurrence out, the next one I bring in I want to have the same XY, YZ orientation. So maybe that's a tool that I make up there and I put in. Display component names and relationships, there's a lot more information in the browser that you can pull out. You can standardize on somebody's system.

So the environment has many complexities, variations, and standards in which you can do. Even in your application options, which is one of our first default standard areas to implement, because it can go across the board. We know we can export it and import it across everywhere, and have some variations.

The express mode, how many files do I need just before when I want to do express. How many people do express mode? Because it really sucks. There's been problems over the years, but we have figured them out. And in our large compressors, we have thousands of parts. And so where do you want to start? Where do you want everybody to start that express mode for production purposes and generator and opening information?

So in the assembly BOMs are very, very important. The Digital Bills of Material, which relate to parts lists. So it's interesting, the company FS-Elliott starting to move to take data to the ERP system through a roadmap. Well, how are we going to standardize on what information of that BOM of parts and assemblies are actually going to go to the ERP system? Because the production control group sees it as what's on the paper. What's on that piece of paper? Is that the same as the digital Bill of Material? It's really not, it's a piece of paper. It's a parts list, which can be derived different. It can be laid out different than the digital, how much information is there. So you want to go through it-- The beer's coming, don't worry. And maybe that's why I can't speak. My wife's with me, and she was sick before we came. She got my daughter sick. We left her in Tennessee. And now I'm up here-- The parties last night were good.

So in this, all this structured information, all of these tools, we can customize them. Standard for everybody. And I will reiterate this over and over, the passion for it is to get everybody on the same page, that's understood. Within your department, within your company, because we expanded out of CAD design. CAD designs is the guts. But you've got engineers you've got to work with, whether they use Inventor or not. How do you get them to standardize? Because sometimes dynamic engineers, just some of the engineers, they don't want to follow rules. Well you've got to enforce those rules.

So here's the beer bucket. So three assemblies are more than just a bucket. And this comes to the methodology line. This comes to procedures that we could follow. We put things in place for simplification. How can we simplify data around, where it may seem to be more in files than we really want to do. But we want to derive as much as possible to get that end result. We can have multiple people working on a project or an assembly with simplification, and seeing those changes. That was a method that took us a year or so to really, really derive on what standards are within there, and how can we pull that out and get everybody working the same? There's source of distributed information, data information. How do we customize it? How do we standardize it? Level of Details, View Representations. How many people do these View Representations and Levels of Detail? Huge, what's the difference between one and the other?

[AUDIENCE CHATTER]

OK, correct. And so everybody said, well, I'm going to Level of Detail, I'm going to suppress that information. There was a webcast a few months ago by the Autodesk, the Inventor group, and they went through, actually defining that they would rather do, that the View Representations produce more and quicker, than actually the Level of Details. I was very surprised about that. But they said the backbone was some of that suppressed data can hold it, but can slow it down. So it was interesting, you might be able to find it out there. But that was an interesting thing. It is very good as leaders to watch a lot of these webcasts that the Inventor and Vault team do. They bring a lot of information to the table through webcasts. And it's going to spark your mind to go, OK, why is there a difference between the level of detail? Why are they telling me that really few representations are producing information faster than suppressing data out?

So what are the tools of suppression? You got to turn on, maybe do some updates, there may be a couple of extra steps in there.

So everybody can have the bucket of beer later.

So then we go to eating, pieces of the pie. Basic 3D modeling is all about parts and assemblies. What are the aspects of that? So because we just talk parts, basic assemblies, but what other tools and standards are you getting? How many plastics, plastic molds, a lot of sheet metal people in here. Electromechanical, do you have AutoCAD electrical in the house? If so, do you have it standardized on an AutoCAD intelligent level? But then once you standardize that, how do you step it out to actually doing the electromechanical with Inventor? We've been able to do that for a number of years. But you have to be able to step and get everything in place to make it effective.

Frame Generator, great tools, how do we standardize Frame Generator? Well that's going to bring in Content Center. How can we standardize what we do? Do we have a default frame, that might be a skid or something that we have all the time, and it actually has parameters in it? Is that a thought? Is it something we do over and over and over again? At FS-Elliott large compressors, we have skids. OK, are they all the same? No, but could you standardize on some variations? Put the parameters in there so somebody is way ahead of the game in producing that skit.

Multi-body parts, then put it out to the assembly. It's that design tools, that's a design feature, a design process, that may or may not be good.

So non-native solids, people bring in Pro-E files, step files. Does anybody do that AnyCAD thing? Anybody do AnyCAD files? Yeah, that's big on Autodesk side. You can do it. I can bring in an NX file, a TF file. Do you share out? Do you use vendors? What's your libraries? Are you letting anybody just go out and get something and bringing it in? Those are standards.

So Model Based Definition, new to Inventor. Tolerancing, you know, OK now, we've got a group that we have to tolerance to the Nth degree. We have aerodynamicists, who are talking up here, but we still have to produce the information. The bottle-based definition. Has anybody touched this yet? It's halfway there, it's good. Andrew [INAUDIBLE] is doing a good job in producing that and get it going. But what are you going to standardize in Model Based Definition almost the first thing? What do you have to standardize? What does anybody know what to standardize in MBD? OK, how about that sucker right there, that PDF file? That's one of the first things that you really need to standardize because contained within that 3D PDF file, are Bills of Material, property data, information for the parts or just iProperty information to be dragged across. There's a lot of back office information there. And so you have to look at it. Do you standardize our company? We took two years and standardize on actually what the output is on paper. We have an SOP, a handbook, for tolerancing. And tolerancing, how is it laid out? Where are the dimensions? Where's the consistency of showing our dimensions? Are they, what are those dimensions? Ordinate dimensions or linear dimensions. Get standardized on what you're trying to show.

Standard MBD, ASME Y14.41 3D model-based definition. I think it's a great direction if you're into this level of tolerancing, fabrication.

So assembly components, 3D methodologies. I'm going to come back to that. Your standards become methods. Become methodologies, on the information. Is my voice getting better or worse?

My wife's going to tell me you can't drink cold beer tonight because then you can't talk anymore. The things we have to go through.

So again, methods, DFM, DFA for assemblies. Methodologies, I truly believe again, there's the passion for, we can standardize stuff and people are going to blow it up. But how do we consistently get them to process in a standard way also? Is everything a one-off? Generally not, even if you think so, it's generally not.

Methods of everything we do, whether we are walking, running, or drawing. I'm going to walk my two miles. Well on standards, I'm going to start in the same spot in my front door and I'm probably going to go the same direction. Is there going to be a variation in there that I turn on the second street rather than the third street? That's a possibility, so that's a variable in what my standard walking procedure would be.

Methods and techniques are not one and the same, but they do correlate together. So what, where, when, why, what do I derive? Where do I derive? When do I derive? And who do I derive or why do I derive? Deriving components is a standard procedure and process and method, that if you use it and get it to play, again, you can be efficient with multiple people working on a product or on a project for manufacturing.

So what are we doing in understanding , options settings, templates, because it's all got to come and be compacted somewhere. Is it going to be per everybody's system and you distribute it there? Are you going to use servers if you have the servers? Are you over multiple sites? All of this is the thinking in this conversation we're having this morning. I want to get everybody to think. You've been standardizing probably, but am I getting you to think a little bit further as to more that you can actually put into place?

So over the years it's been the cornerstone of standardizing is 2D flat drawings. It's still your deliverable probably. Whether it be it to the customer, or be to the shop floor. That piece of paper is still your deliverable, you still got to do it. So on that, on the paper do we create default views, X, Y, and Z. Is that proper to do, not proper do? A number of things we have to put together.

The deliverables today need to be produced quicker than ever before. How many sessions have you been in today that have said that? Every day, we need to be faster, more efficient. Well how do you get there? So we need to look at the tools that are here and the views, the details, the sections, the Bills of Material, the parts lists, what are standards that we can put in here?

Actually, there's a gentleman I know, he's out of Arizona, seven, eight years ago he did a session here. And it was about drawings. It was about standards and drawings. And he had all these view configurations. He had the Bill of Materials, but there were no parts or assemblies in it. It's a default. So then you can come and actually just have a block. Actually replace that data information in the view. So he was able to show efficiencies in that direction. Some of it was a little overboard, but for his company, they found an answer of that.

So there's also getting back to the application options. What are we going to have in here that allow people to produce more without having to think and maybe change that information?

First step to consistent standards are the options. 80% of these options can be set across the board. So again, the application options, I have a standard set that sit on a server. So I can distribute it. On deployments, we've upgraded to 2018, and we put our standards, 80% of it is there, so people don't have to take the defaults or go in and actually try and we'll get the feedback. The trial and error of that.

The options do not tie into any specific file and contains settings and features. So again, application options. Does anybody have application options that you distribute? It's a policy, so I can do things. And we'll talk about more of that. My template files, where are they going to be?

So settings and styles, are there dimensions styles, text styles? Yeah, kind of, maybe. Document settings containing standards for the specific types of files that are being generated. Again, the physical, we were going over this a little while ago.

Design Data Styles are controlled through the styles and most of the settings are there. So I was in another one yesterday and it brought up, didn't the design data and all your default installation settings under design data, there's about 26 gigabytes of data information between materials and such. How many people have that on a server centralized? OK, here's where I'm going to get you to think. If you have multiple offices, multiple people, I have a server, and I put all the standards up on the server. They are controlled by the administration, the CAD admin, the CAD manager. So if we decided on a change to our standards, then I'm able to change that data, I'm able to add new material in. I'm able to add it through one session and it gets distributed back out to everybody automatically.

So path structure, I don't do any letter folders. It's all UNC code. Back slash, back slash, server one. And direct them through there. So there's some IT help that we also have to have in doing that. But again, now we're centralizing our consistency throughout our department, throughout our company, or multiple sites. And where I'll give you the perspective is FS-Elliot, we have our other packaging facilities in Shanghai, China, they are exactly standardized as we are here in the states. That even through Vault with our replication, but all of the standards are off of their server and tied into our server. So if we change the master, it gets synced out to two different sites.

So China, as much as they'll bitch and moan about why are we doing it this way, you influence them to help get us things to be efficient. And it actually it's taking some time. There's more that they need to do, but any engineer can go and look at information and It's going to be consistent. So we're communicating these standards.

So templates. Templates, this conversation can go anywhere. Again, how many part templates do I use? Can I just do them in one? Are the drawings level? Do I use DWGs, do I use IDWs? Does anybody still use an IDW. All right. So we made that change three years ago or so, over to DWG proxy, just for sharing and more information out.

So what do you put in the templates, right? They're for parts and drawings and presentations. All of those templates, let's find as many commonalities as we can from that. Multiple templates containing preset model and or drawing-- thank you. I did something good.

Again, the property data in the title box. Do you have them just fill text out, or do we actually have you customize the iProperties of multiple parts and assemblies? So that's what you want to drag out. I don't want to type stuff in. But we're consistent with the templates, with the properties selections. FS-Elliot has a customized iProperties. And those customized iProperties can go out to additional tablets, or not tablets, but tables. Tables are able to do there. But again, where can we find the consistency of the standards that we're doing here.

No idea where I'm at on this. Maintaining consistency is extremely important as I've come to say. Design projects consist of a lot of information. There are many ways to maintain the CAD data standards. A department, an office, even global facilities, as I've been saying, we want to share that information.

CAD managers, administrators, strategize to capture the standards. And again, I came into FS-Elliott and I looked at templates. Everybody had their own template. Everybody had their own temple. There were two departments, everybody, where are your templates? Well, they're right here are my C Drive. And it's different than the other person who had it there. And that was one of the first things that I changed. I said all right, we're going to, screw you guys, we're going to put it all together and we're going to admin this level. Where I'm at now, my observations for three weeks, not really any different. People are just doing what they want to get the data to get the information out, get the project done.

Are the projects consistent? I haven't seen that word in the new world I'm at. They're still putting buildings up, but in the end, the project managers need to understand what we consistently want to provide. How do we do that? How do we collaborate with other companies through BIM? Anybody do BIM? Do you like it? We did A360. BIM is just A360 with some extra tools, right? But, that works out and then you get everybody using Navisworks and how do we standard. Those are processes and procedures that I haven't seen consistency on when I've been through coordination meetings. I just sit there and watch other companies. They try, but then everybody is just clashing and getting together. But I'll leave that to decide.

Typical everyday processes and workflows can be sustained through SOPs, Standard Operating Procedures. Everybody have those in their company? Here's how you enforce all these rules. Now, how difficult is it to sit and write SOPs? How many SOPs do you have? I got one of their sustaining leads in our group, that kind of gave him this responsibility. We had a team together, but he was mainly writing them. So on a an author's level he was consistent on how his writing was, but the information that we had to put into the SOPs.

We're talking about a model-based definition just a little bit ago. We have a handbook of four phases that took almost two years to derive and create, of consistency and how we show it. So when a CAD designer has to go and do and layout that information and dimension it, they go to the SOP and they can see the examples of how we lay those out dimensionally, how we symbolically put information there. And that way we stay consist.

So maintaining, strategizing, looking at the first as an improvement project. So here's where, if you are like me, I've got to go do it again, you want to, do you just go in and say we're going to change? I listen to this guy at AU and I think we're going to put it all up on the server, we're going to change everything we do. That's not going to go well. That's not going to go well. So I talk about, we look at the first as improvements. Get that mentality, that psychology of, we're going to make these small improvements. And you're going to start to influence some of these changes. At FS-Elliot I came in, and again, I made some improvements of where templates are. We made improvements of how the templates were put together. And then it was probably about 18 to 20 months into working there, I used the word change. Previously to that there were improvements influencing some of the information that we were changing, how we were putting it together on the admin level. So you had users actually doing work rather than fooling with all the other things that we're trying to get and deal with.

Oh, very important is to--

If I can push this button here.

--work closely with your IT department. Do you have an IT department? Do you work closely with them or are they a pain in the ass?

[AUDIENCE CHATTER]

Because they don't understand any of this. But if you're working with them, I need some space on the server, I need some permission rights. You influence them, and they're going to help you more because then they don't have to do it. I'm fully in, I understand SQL. I have the server, I had test servers. So over my years of the experiences there, they did not know that. They had to learn a little bit of SQL. One of our developers put into some of the other stuff that we're doing. But they gave me the freedom. If I needed something, we were running out of space on a server to where our backups were going or information was. And they said, well that's a cost factor, how much space do you need? So I had to go do some analysis of how much space to grow over five years. So I went home and I sat and I realized, I probably need five terabyte. And they said, are you sure? And I said, drive space is easy. Drive space is easy.

Here, we'll change this on a consistent level of how each individual, their workstation, is everybody's workstation the same? They should be. They should be similar. I mean they'd be bought differently in different levels. But still, there should be some consistency there. We, four years ago, changed every computer, no matter how old it was, to a solid state drive, local. Huge improvements, just on that hardware. How much did that hardware cost? That was, I don't know, $3,000, $4,000. But the efficiencies that we gained from that is we didn't have to buy some computers. So that was a different standard of our users and how we did things. Our computers in China, we also bought those four years ago. Three and a half years ago. And put solid state drives in those ones so they can produce it. They cost a little bit more, so the IT group and the Shanghai folks with money weren't really happy with me, because they never paid for software in their life.

We had to influence that change. We had to get them to understand just really what we're trying to do here. So you can also see the set, the configurations. So in setting the configurations, you can see how I have my standards. Back slash, back slash, servers, CADs, softwares where's the stuff? Here is the administration that you are doing, but you're getting some input from CAD managers, team leaders, some engineers, but all of that is tied down. If I need to change something or the company needs to change some standardization, some workflow, some processes, I'm going to a central location. And once you get there, it makes upgrading, migration, deployments, so much easier.

[AUDIENCE CHATTER]

OK, so he says, this is his question, he's stating that they actually have an automatic sync to drive letters, and not UNC [? cut ins. ?] That's a choice. Can that choice be broken? Can that synchronize, that upgrade that every time they go in it's got to produce that information? Can it get broken? It can. Can IT, and in my case here, can they throw policies in to break all this? Absolutely, because they did it. They put IT policies in that said, you're not allowed to do that. And I said, yes, we are, change it.

Maintaining the consistency. Documents are the front door key to CAD administration. Standardizing what we need to store the documents in central management. The same thing I have been saying over and over. Our country has a standard, don't we? Isn't that our standard? It's just like walking. I told the story of walking, you walk out the front door, you go to the right. You go to first street, the second street. And we're going to get there.

This one gives some variations over the centuries too. All right, we'll try and stick to it.

Store the documentation, central document, all deployment configurations. So as an administrator, as a CAD manager, whatever your title is, whatever you're doing here, document everything you do. It will take a while to do it. OK, I have a document that I posted up on this session. It's from last year I actually did it. It's my standard document, and I dumbed it down, but I have everything documented in there. What my templates are, what my licensing numbers are, what my tools, and it's a very thick, 48-page supplement. But every year that I upgrade, I change a couple pieces of information. IT, if there's problems, know where to go and what to do. A CAD manager, a new team lead, they can look in that documentation and know where to go.

So when I left the company three or four weeks ago, he knows that he can go and read some stuff. IT knows what has been done in process. Again, here's your consistency of being standard, and making more people happy with what they're doing.

SOP formats, that's a whole different thing.

Updating and distributing. So again, deployments, put all of this together, because hopefully when you do upgrades, you're testing it before you go out. I know everybody can't do it. I mean, I had two test servers at one point, three computers, because I was on beta 2019, I was doing 18 and 17 and 16. But how do you do that? You set the strategy to be able to implement quickly. And in our case, three facilities around the world, we had to get it done between a Friday evening and a Monday morning. And the Monday morning was really Sunday afternoon in China. And that was not easy. So you have to do installations on installation strategies. So if you have a documentation of what is all in play, instructions for installations, configurations, configurations are there. Do we have a package that just grabs them and pulls them in? Makes things quicker and easier.

So I don't know if you can see that in the cartoons here, people like these cartoons? "The latest release sounds great." This is the upper right one. "It has loads of terrific, new features. I'll regret not having to use them or learn them. Training is also important." SOPs.

So in some of my conclusions here. Point of view, I got a lot of point of views, right? A lot of things in my 30 years that I have influenced people on, made some people more efficient as it would be. The intent of this conversation today is to make you think in a manner that brings both freedom of design and the efficiencies to production. OK, I don't know if you're one of the people who actually model, or you're part of that product, but you still admin, so you have both sides. Sometimes I wasn't producing the information, but I know the software. I know its capabilities. I know methodologies that we can put into play. Influence.

Methods of administrating strategies as standards has several, numerous companies sustaining benefits. So six or nine, which one are you going to choose?

Consistent actions, so some actions you can actually take from this class. Think of ways to improve the CAD environment, whether it's a single, in one room with three people, there are still things you can do to be more efficient. Remove repetitive steps of modeling, standards. But what do I do? Content center, libraries, maintain those. Have a team for them. I had a content center team that we took 20 months, but we customize content center for tube and pipe, fasteners, put our part numbers in it. But now when we have to add and subtract, or migrate up, it's pretty quick, pretty easy. But you also grew the wealth of information and knowledge that these three, four people gained in doing that.

Look at adding intelligence to the models and drawings. Parameters, iLogic, how many people do iLogic or know iLogic? That's pretty good. Are you going to Jason's class? Because I got a demo I'm going to screw up in there. I wasn't going well this morning.

Add more data to temples both 3D and 2D. 2D is the deliverable we still have to get out.

And then there are the benefits. So as you leave today, do the following, think of ways to improve--

Hey, I was just there.

Remove--

It's a copy, right? Didn't pay attention. Maybe that last line, more data to--