Digital Transformation for AutoCAD and Verticals Equals Document Hygiene

TIMOTHY SEAN HULBERT: Hello, and welcome to Digital Transformation for AutoCAD and Verticals Equals Document Hygiene. My name is Sean Hulbert. Before we proceed with the presentation, I'd like to draw your attention to our safe harbor statement. This slide is intended to inform you that certain statements made in this presentation are forward looking in nature. These statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties.

An example of a forward-looking statement could be, but not limited to, financial performance, expected product timelines, and future business strategies. And those risks and uncertainties could actually hold us off from doing these certain activities because of market conditions, competitive pressures, and changes in technologies. With all that, let's move on to the presentation.

We're going to start out with an introduction. I'll tell you a little bit about myself and why I think you should be listening to me today. I'll also talk a lot about understanding document maintenance.

In general, why is document maintenance important, and why do we need to set a good foundation with document maintenance to make sure that we have successful deliverables? And as we continue, we're going to go into the reasons for drawing hygiene. Why are we here today? Why do we need to keep our drawings clean? Why do we need to have a regularly scheduled activity to ensure that we maintain the highest quality in our drawings? And what do those detailed steps look like for the cleanup process?

And then we want to talk about-- obviously, this is a monotonous task that nobody is going to be wanting to do. So we want to talk about where can we change that paradigm and introduce automation into the equation. And then we'll just recap what we've talked about today.

So I'd like to set some expectations with you. We have a thorough understanding of what commands we can use inside AutoCAD and Civil 3D. And I'll cover my background here in just a little bit. But you're going to see me use AutoCAD and Civil 3D not quite interchangeably, but nearly interchangeably because Civil 3D is built on that AutoCAD platform.

We're going to also talk about what a regular maintenance schedule looks like and how can that be effective and efficient in our workflows. We're going to want to know, again, how to automate these processes so it saves time and reduces errors. And then we're going to have the skill set that we need to troubleshoot and look for problems as they are occurring or hopefully stop them before they do cause any pain.

We will not be cleaning drawings together today. We will be focusing on recommended workflows. And the reason that we will not be cleaning drawings today is that would be the most dull presentation that you were ever forced to sit through.

So a little bit about myself. Why are you interested in what I have to say? Well, I am a civil engineer located in the state of Oregon. Interestingly enough, I have my engineering stamp, but I do not have my bachelor's degree. I did it through experience and testing.

I've got 30 years experience in the industry. I've been an Autodesk product user for over 30 years. And I'll be celebrating my 10th year at Autodesk here this coming March.

My background consists of IT and CAD management, as well as civil design, specifically around civil infrastructure. And I've always been a person who was willing to introduce disruptive technology into the civil engineering community.

Starting out as a hand drafter, I was pretty terrible as a hand drafter and moved right into CAD pretty quickly because that was the disruptive technology of the day. Not too long after that, we were looking at GIS as another disruptive technology. And then we moved into laser scanning. And now we're moving into the cloud.

And so as I talk about the cloud, I've been working in the collaboration for Civil 3D environment now or BIM Collaborate Pro in ACC for over four years now. And I want to bring up the fact that I understand why drawing maintenance is important because I have seen what it does in the cloud.

So if we take all the other factors out of the equation, if you are in a cloud-based environment and it doesn't matter if it's OneDrive, it doesn't matter if it's one of our competitor's tools, it doesn't matter if it's ACC or BIM 360, good document maintenance and good drawing hygiene will set you up for success.

So let's talk about how do we implement success in our environments today. Well, one of the activities that we go through here at Autodesk is a Prosci change management training process. So they teach us how to leverage their ADKAR process, which is the Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement to make, accept, adopt, and implement change.

So if we take that equation and we break it down into how are we going to do our document management and our drawing hygiene activities, well, we've got to start out with-- we've got to have the awareness of why it's important. And then we want to understand, what's the desire? What's in it for the end users? Why do they have to clean their drawings?

Well, hopefully, as we talk about automation later in the conversation, they have to do it less and less. But there is an advantage that we can give the user desire to want to do this. We'll also talk about the knowledge. How can this happen? And then add the ability on top of that knowledge.

The most important part for me about any change management journey is the reinforcement. We are all humans in nature, and we are all very comfortable in going back into some old habits if it gets the job done. So that reinforcement activity is something that throughout history of education and upskilling, we often forgot. And now we realize how important that activity actually is. So let's start talking about understanding what document maintenance means.

Well, document maintenance refers to a process. It helps you preserve the integrity of your documents. Through regular updates, we can ensure that the documents are regularly reflecting any changes in information, policies, and procedures.

Keeping track of different versions of a document to know which is the most current and maintain a history of those changes is where version control comes into our equation. Storing those older or obsolete documents in a way that they can be retrieved if needed without cluttering the active document repositories is where the archiving part of conversation is very important.

And then we want to ensure that our documents are consistent in their form, their style, and the content within organizational standards. And that's where we look at our consistency checks. Managing who has access to the documents, access control, who can edit, view, delete those files, also very important part of our document maintenance procedures. Ensuring that the documents comply with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards is where the compliance activity enters the conversation.

So document management, it's a critical aspect of information management in any organization, contributing to efficiencies, regulatory compliance, and the preservation of valuable knowledge. So regularly updated documents ensure that the users have access to the accurate and reliable information, which is crucial for making informed decisions.

So we want to make sure that our information is accurate and reliable. The last thing we want is an old set of plans out on a project site and have somebody building something that is in the wrong place. We've all probably heard horror stories about that or even had it happen to us in the past.

So well-maintained documents are easier to find. They're easier to use. They're easier to save and work with. So that increases our efficiencies. Proper document maintenance helps to ensure our legal compliance and that we are limiting risk wherever practicable. If we can remove human error from the equation, that increases our likeliness of success and reduces our risks.

It helps preserve organizational knowledge. As we know today, we have multiple generations in the workforce. And as some of these generations move on to other opportunities or the lucky ones move into retirement, we need to make sure that we're preserving that historic knowledge that has been gained over time.

And consistent and well-made documents reflect professionalism and can enhance the reputation of your organization. Alternatively, it can negatively impact the reputation of your organization. If you become known as an organization who is not doing housekeeping within our document management procedures.

And then disaster recovery. We've all been there. We've heard the horror stories. We've seen it on TV.

Proper archiving, and backing up, and document management and maintenance processes help make sure that in the case of a disaster, recovery is much smoother and much less impactful in a negative way on our corporation. And then efficient document management can lead to cost savings simply by reducing the time to find information, reducing the time to access the data that we need, or even share the information that we're sharing out to subconsultants and our clients.

So why do we want to talk about drawing hygiene? Drawing hygiene is a major part of our regular document maintenance program if we are using CAD files regularly. This is the meat and potatoes of any design firm. This is where all of the nuts and bolts are put together or whatever saying that you want to overuse in the conversation.

But this is where we are creating our deliverables. And this is how the companies that we're working for are getting paid. So if we don't have good hygiene, we don't have efficient programs in place to help ensure that only necessary information is included in the documents that we're creating or the drawings that we're creating, that we're properly using dependencies coming from their proper locations, most specifically.

We want to make sure that the drawings are clean. There's unnecessary information in those drawings that have been removed. They're free of errors. We always want to make sure that the information that we are creating is easy to collaborate with others. We want to be looked at as a good steward of data and make sure that the data that we're sharing is clean, free from errors, organized, efficient, et cetera.

So why do we care? Improved speed. Clean drawings load faster, respond quicker to commands, and generally perform better. Reduce crashes. Minimizing errors and redundant data decreases the likeliness of the software crashing and freezing. So there's our enhanced software performance right there on the get go.

Efficient storage. As we maintain our drawings better, we're going to see that the size of these drawings are much smaller. So that helps not only in a server-based environment, but it helps exponentially in a cloud-based environment because not only are we storing the information, but we're waiting for that information to come to us when we're trying to access the data. Definitely increases the likeliness of failure when that information is moving down, the larger that data set is.

Fewer corruptions. Regular maintenance reduces the risk of corruption, ensuring data integrity. It's pretty simple around the error prevention conversation. It also simplifies troubleshooting.

Cleaner drawings are easier to audit. It takes less time to audit them, and it makes it simpler to identify and fix any issues that may occur. We are all humans. There are going to be things that happen to the information that we're working on in the design files that we're working with. If we can make the process to fix them faster, that increases our overall effectiveness as designers.

Consistency. This is a big one. We want to make sure that those drawings are clean, well maintained, and all the users on the project are using the same information, and we reduce any discrepancies. That also makes our interoperability much smoother. So when we're crossing platforms, sharing with others who may not have the same type of software that we have, so we're converting data, if we're removing any of these issues inside our drawings, maintaining good drawing hygiene, we are better collaborators.

Faster edits. I've already said this a little bit. But we're simplifying and cleaning the drawings. They're much easier and faster to edit.

It saves time in the design process, and we may be talking about 10 or 20 seconds. We are going to be talking later in the conversation about 100, 150 seconds. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but extrapolate that time over the life of a project, and it actually starts to add up quicker than you might imagine.

Again, professionalism. We want to maintain high drawing standards because we want to be viewed in our community as good data stewards. Adherence and compliance to regulatory standards. This is one of those that as we see the introduction of ISO 19650 in more and more of our projects, there are very strict guidelines that we must follow to ensure that we are maintaining good document maintenance programs, which means a good drawing hygiene program.

And then long-term project health. Most of us are not working on projects that start today and end tomorrow. Most of the projects that I'm working on with my customers have a very long life cycle. So as we are becoming better data stewards, we can also increase the likeliness that as we need to migrate the data forward, we will have more success migrating it forward and run into less roadblocks during that process.

So why should we care? It's pretty simple. A data set with 1,500 drawings in it, time to open up, average 75 seconds, which is not bad. That's not the worst I've seen. I've seen in excess of 4 or 5 minutes on average with data sets this size.

But this is one that I actually ran through an analytics tool. I provided some of the analytics-- I provided some or extracted some of the information-- pardon me-- from the documents that we had, the drawings that we had. And then we went through the cleaning process as a proof of concept to prove the story that I'm telling.

And so these 1,500 drawings, the customer was pretty confident that they had a fairly decent and robust document management program. Our intent was not to prove them wrong. Our intent was to help build on that foundation.

They thought they had a great tool in place. They thought they had a great process in place. We came in, and we showed them where there are some areas that we can make some improvements to further that process and make them better data management participants.

And so this was one of those scenarios where we said, OK, well, we know you have a process in place. Let's just go ahead and take a peek at the drawings and see what we find out. So 1,500 drawings, 75 seconds on average to open. 150 seconds, 2.5 minutes to audit these drawings. That was definitely a surprise, not something that I expected during this particular proof of concept.

After cleaning the drawings-- now, we only clean them once. This was only a one-time process. We did not cycle them through a series of cleaning.

The next time that we looked at the data set, the data was much cleaner. I was unable to get a hold of that to share with you. But proof's in the pudding. 1,500 drawings down to 20 seconds to open, down to 15 seconds to audit.

So, oftentimes, I'll hear a user say, oh, it takes forever to audit my drawings. The first time it can. And we have empathy. We definitely understand where you're coming from and are doing a lot. And we'll talk about that later. And that's why we had to have our safe harbor statement. We're doing a lot to improve this process here even at Autodesk from the development side.

But that is future looking. And we need to solve this problem today. So this is a great example of basically cutting the time to open the drawings almost in a quarter and cutting the time to audit the drawings down by a factor of 10. Now, extrapolate that over 1,500 drawings, and you can see where I was headed. These numbers get very large, very quick.

What are the contributing factors? What causes poor hygiene? The life cycle of a project. Like I said, some of our projects have been going on for a very long time. So what was the originating CAD version that the project started in?

In our example here, we see that we've got CAD versions going all the way back to 2007. I was going to count how many versions that was, and I think it's four. But for AutoCAD, it might be four. For Civil 3D, it's much more versions than just that. And so as we start to look at the history of where this information came from, we start to understand how we can make improvements.

Now, I always make sure to point out that this is not something that users are doing wrong. This is just an enhancement to a workflow. This is just going to make their lives easier.

We're not pointing at people saying bad, bad, bad. We're saying that if you want things to work better, here's a really easy, sometimes monotonous workflow that you can use to make your life easier. And the goal is is to get your job done on time and get home on time, I think, at the end of the day.

What else can contribute to these factors? Well, the last saved version. If I go back one slide here, you'll see that we've got-- I don't know. We've got 20 different versions of AutoCAD and Civil 3D that we're looking at and an unknown application. If I'm not mistaken, that's a Revit export. So it's nothing that we need to worry about right now.

But we look forward in the same data set, and we're still seeing a variety of product that it was last saved in, going all the way back to-- I believe it was 2013 on this list. Oop, nope, excuse me, Map 2009. So on the same data set, we're seeing that the last time these drawings were saved, it was-- no, could that have been an introduction of a different file in the similar format? Was this data set 100% the same?

No, there have been some changes made to the data set, so we understand that there could be probably a 2% or 3% discrepancy in some of the information we're sharing. But it was a very small discrepancy. And so to see this number of product inside our analysis, it was also an area that gave us pause. Now, we were encouraged that a majority was in the 2018 DWG format, which is a positive. But we're still concerned that we're still seeing things as old as 2019 map even in that 2018 DWG format.

Other contributing factors, audit errors. Audit errors are not our friends. We have set this particular analysis tool up with a filter on it, so we set our own KPIs based on years of experience.

And the team that built the analytics tool has probably combined nearly 70 years of experience in AutoCAD files. So they were able to take that experience, take analytics that we've learned from our customer error reports and other data that we've kind of scrubbed the world and the internet for to help us make some intelligent decisions on what these KPIs are.

Now, they're flexible, obviously, because in some scenarios, and we'll see this in a few minutes, that you may have a exorbitant number of Civil 3D objects inside your drawing. Well, you might also be working on a very large surface, let's say, for an airport environment. So you would be expected to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of COGO points in a drawing.

Now, are there ways to manage that? Well, of course. And my colleague Lou Holland will be presenting a presentation on how to manage large data sets this year at Autodesk University.

The other things that we want to talk about are some of those AutoCAD elements. Now, you see here my primary Civil objects. We're not too far out of the equation. Everything looks green there.

So we're in the positive KPIs. The audit errors, definitely-- in my opinion, any audit error needs to go away. We have our KPIs set. I think anything under 5 is green, 5 to 10 is orange, and anything above that really got to be concerned about.

But layers, we're often guilty of having entirely too many layers in our drawings. Line types, the same thing. Oftentimes, we get complacent in the amount of information that is left over from the templates that we start with. And we're going to spend a little time on templates here later in the conversation as well.

But materials, I have seen drawings with too many materials, with 65,000 materials, and if you wanted to know how many too many is, go from 30 megabytes down to 2 megabytes. So just by removing those unnecessary materials, which the AutoCAD and Civil 3D users were not using anyways, drastically reduced the size of that file, thereby all sorts of efficiencies are coming that user's way now.

And then we'll talk about on the next slide here-- well, I skipped over, excuse me, textiles. Again, it's just one of those things that the more bloat in the drawing, the longer the drawing takes to open, the slower the drawing takes to save, the larger the drawing gets. It's a vicious cycle here, and we're going to stop it.

My buddy, RegApps. So what is a registered application? It's a leftover piece of code that's in a drawing that is no longer necessary.

Over the years, we have not done the best job of making sure that these did not come through our drawings. And so one thing that I should have shown on the slide, and I will make sure is in the companion deck, is our XREFREGAPPCTL is a command inside Civil 3D and AutoCAD. If you set that command to 1, you will no longer inherit RegApps from X references that you are consuming.

That's been the biggest spreader of registered apps is X references. And so if you set that variable XREFREGAPPCTL, set that to 1, you will no longer inherit those RegApps. And you will be a much better data steward.

So the RegApps definitely cause a problem. We're going to talk about how to address this when we move to the cleanup scenario. But as you can see, 130,000 is quite a few. It's not the biggest number I've seen, but it is creeping up there.

The other part of the equation is that some of these RegApps are all the way back to DCA, and that was the predecessor to Softdesk, which was the predecessor to Land Desktop, which is the predecessor to Civil 3D. So we really want to get this stuff, this baggage that we've been carrying around for the last 25 years-- we want this out of our files, and we want it now.

Civil 3D Terrains. We can get careless sometimes when we're creating terrains. If we're not paying attention-- this is kind of a worst case scenario that I found. So I wanted to share it with you because it was quite interesting. As you can see, there's very few triangles and points in some of these surfaces that have maximum triangle lengths of 50,000 feet.

The issues that were happening inside these drawings once we did a little investigation is that it was some COGO points that had gotten moved around by accident, and they were out lost in space and still left inside the surface. So it was an easily rectifiable problem. But as you can imagine, these drawings started to open very slowly. It took a long time to get into some of these drawings, even though there's not a lot of points, we were covering 600 million square feet.

So it was just the impact of the size of the area that we were trying to look at was drastically impacting performance. And we have seen this a number of times. And so the reason I like to talk about terrains is that we want to make sure that we're managing that data, again, document maintenance, but document management. We want to make sure that we're managing that data in the right way.

So if we can use things like data clipping to help improve the performance-- oh, we always should be using things like our data shortcuts when working with big surfaces and working with Civil 3D objects, in general, in my opinion. But there's also some opportunities inside Civil 3D where we can consume a surface with just the reference only instead of adding the geometry.

And, again, that'll be also included in the handout as a discussion. But I just want to bring that to your attention because if you store the surface without the geometry, there are some side effects. There's some negative impacts. If you lose that surface, you no longer have the ability to promote it, to bring it back in if the reference gets broken.

You also cannot clash against that surface in that particular drawing if it's only referenced. But your drawings should be 70% smaller, in many cases, at least 20%, in many cases up to 70% smaller, again, improving your overall performance and experience in product.

So we've talked about what document maintenance is. We've talked a little bit about what document management looks like as part of the document maintenance or as document maintenance as part of document management. And then we've talked about drawing and why do we need to have a drawing maintenance program. Now, let's talk about how to get these drawings clean.

We want to start with a clean template. When we go back to look at the previous version this project was started in. I would bet 10 to 1 that it was because somebody didn't update their template with a recommended workflow. And what does that mean?

Well, it just means that back in the day when we went from AutoCAD 2001 to AutoCAD 2002-- yes, I'm trying to go back 20 years-- we would open that drawing up. We would save it in the new version. And we would move right along with our day, not understanding that we were not giving the tool the opportunity to fix any issues that had occurred between versions.

Fast forward to 2024, and that problem grew exponentially. So over the last few years, we've been sharing our better workflows to get your template set up. If you have a good template, you have a good foundation to start with, you should expect success.

And so what I'd like to do is I always like to start with the out-of-the-box template that ships with Civil 3D. And this is coming from practices. And this is what I recommend for my customers as well. I actually go into the process of removing-- and I will show you this process here in a slide or two. But I actually go in the process of purging out all of the styles that are in the out-of-the-box template.

And then I come over-- I purge all the information that's unnecessary out of that drawing. So we'll see the purge process here as well. But as part of that cleaning process, we want to start with a very small foundation. We want to build on top of that. But we want to start with something that we know is solid.

And so the next step that I like to do is I go over into my Design Center, and I start migrating over my layers and my blocks and any line types that are important for that template. And somebody is going to say, you were just talking about purging all this stuff out. I said, yes, I was. And that's why I'm telling you to purge it out is because when I build my template for you, it's going to be very complete. It's going to be robust.

Can we break it out and use reference templates in conjunction? Absolutely. But we're still talking about a very robust template to solve a lot of challenges and design scenarios. And so we'll bring all that information into our template.

Our next step is going to be go over to our Import tab. And we're going to import from our current template any of the Civil 3D styles and settings that we want to include. And that way, it gives Civil 3D the ability to make sure that all of these settings and styles that come across, any changes that have been made in product should be dealt with through the import process.

So we're going to reduce the pain of getting that data moved over. We're not recreating this template from scratch. We're still leveraging information we currently have, but we're bringing it forward in a much smoother and a much more concise manner.

So we talked about purge. You've heard me talk about purge. And this might seem like it's too basic. But like I said, you would be very surprised at the number of people who will share that, yes, we have a very robust drawing maintenance. We purge our drawings all the time.

Well, do you use -Purge? Well, what's -Purge? And so bringing it all the way back to that, I always like to say, hey, if you don't need it in your drawing today, get rid of it. You just saw me show you the Design Center.

If I need a layer back in my drawing, I can go open my template up and bring it back in a matter of seconds. But if I have to carry around 1,600 layers in my drawing every day, all day for the next three years of this particular project, I am losing time. I am not being as efficient as I can.

Now, are we talking about a handful of seconds here and there? Yes. But, again, they add up, especially as we talk over the life cycle of a project and the amount of time that a drawing set of 1,500 drawings might be opened. And so like I said before, when we got rid of those materials, we went from 30 megs to 2 meg, how much time do you think that saved?

And then RegApps. Excuse me. Here's the elements that you can purge. It'll also show you the elements you cannot purge.

So you cannot purge a block that has a block in it. You cannot purge a layer that's inside a block. But once you've purged that block, it opens that list back up. So in some cases, you may have to purge a couple different times.

Now, let's move to our buddy RegApps. The only way to get rid of RegApps is from the -Purge option. That's why when somebody says they have a great cleaning process, but they don't know what -Purge is, it's like, well, I applaud the leveraging of Purge. But here, let's add another tool to your tool belt to make sure that you are having the most success possible and that the drawings that you're working with are as clean as practicable.

They're not going to be perfect. You can clean drawings to where there's no audit errors, in most cases. You're not ever going to get rid of all the RegApps.

So as long as we try to keep that number, in my opinion, under 100, I think it's OK. I creep up to 5 if the users have a lot of third-party plug-ins or applications that they've built on top using our APIs inside Civil 3D or AutoCAD. That number can increase a little bit.

We approach it with a spectrum. But when we see 65,000 RegApps or 139,000, I think is what we saw earlier, that's definitely a reason to pause and to start having that conversation about drawing maintenance.

Audit and Recovery. So when the audit routine is done, it's going to tell you how many audit errors it found and how many it corrected. I highly recommend we run Purge and -Purge before the audit because I like to make sure that we get rid of anything that doesn't need to be audited. So if we have 139,000 RegApps, why audit them? Let's get rid of them and then audit.

I think that there may be two different sides of that fence. I think people might have different opinions on that particular topic. So just sharing my opinion with you or what I've seen work for most of my customers.

The concern here with audit is that you can lose information. So if we think back a few years ago, there was a situation where Civil 3D when you would audit it, it would remove elevation points from a feature line, which was very problematic. I don't know if any of my users can imagine what that could do to your design project, but it could blow it up pretty quickly. And it could create some very frustrated end users.

So we really want to make sure that we pay attention to what we're auditing. And even when we introduce automation, we're going to be able to get reports based on what we've run our drawings through, just to make sure that we are being mindful of data that may have been removed.

And then as we continue down this dark, narrow path, there are times where the drawing needs to be recovered because something has impacted the drawing negatively. I highly recommend that when the situation happens that you leverage the Autodesk support channels to make sure that you're sharing this information with us. If you do get a customer error report pop up, please send it in. You may not get immediate feedback on it, but we do collect that information.

And we do get a lot of good analytics out of the information when our users are running into problems. And if there is a service pack needed or an update needed, you will likely get that email in reply. I've actually seen it happen to me, so I was very pleasantly surprised.

So the recovery function, it goes into the DWG, the DWS, or the DWT file. And it will try to restore that drawing. Again, information can be lost when this happens. So make sure that you're making copies, keeping versions of your files, doing whatever your process is to make sure that you're not losing data or you're minimalizing that data loss.

And last but not least, when we're in the cleanup process, because we talked about dragging all those styles into our template, here's that purged conversation that I wanted to have with you. And this is where I start my template building is I purge everything out of my template to start with.

Then I bring the stuff that I built back in because I'm very happy with the layers and the blocks and all those wonderful settings that I've made inside my Civil 3D template. And I don't want to have to repeat that. But I want to allow Civil 3D to go ahead and import that data and do the right thing.

Now, I'm back into my production. I'm working day to day. I'm a designer that's working on surfaces. My whole thing is I grade. I'm the master of grading. I don't need pipe networks in my drawings that I'm doing my grading modeling in.

So I'm going to purge out my pipe networks. I probably don't need all my COGO point styles or my alignment styles either. So if I don't need them, I'm not going to carry them around day to day. I don't need the extra baggage that I carry around every day and would be very happy to get rid of that as well.

So if you don't need it, don't carry it with you. Is it hard to bring back in? Not at all. It's a very easy process. And I almost guarantee that you're going to have a much better experience if you don't carry it around with you than if you worry about, how do I bring it back if I need it? It's super simple.

Right here, Import Purge. And there's our reference templates as well. Not going to go into the detail of the reference templates, but do know that that is available for you.

Couple other tools that we'll talk about-- because Civil 3D is built on top of Map 3D, you have the MAPCLEAN tool. So this is where the AutoCAD conversation kind of pauses. And this is where we focus on what Map 3D and Civil 3D can do.

Now, the MAPCLEAN tool can get very robust. And it is very powerful. So, again, you want to pay close attention to what actions you're applying and what tolerances you're setting when leveraging the MAPCLEAN tool. But if you're a user of a lot of GIS information, this tool really comes in handy to help eliminate duplicate information and help us get the data that we brought into our drawings into a more Civil 3D or AutoCAD friendly environment.

OVERKILL, another tool that you want to have in your toolbox. So this is just me filling out that tool belt that you're going to use as you're working day to day. If we get overlapping information-- sometimes when we're working with alignments, and profiles, and feature lines, and polylines, things start to stack up on top of each other. It starts to become overwhelming sometimes.

So we have a couple options. We can use our display cycling settings inside Civil 3D and AutoCAD, or we can use tools like OVERKILL. Now, OVERKILL, you're asking it to actually get rid of information. So, again, just be mindful of the process you're performing and the actual actions that you're asking to happen.

And last but not least, hopefully, you don't ever see this. Hopefully, this never occurs to you and you get to move throughout your career with never running into a corrupt drawing. But I've seen a few of them in my time, and so I always want to make sure that you know that if things go completely south, here is a process that you can try to bring those drawings back.

Now, you may end up losing some information. You will likely lose information. The somber tone of my voice here is that it's not a workflow that I like to share. But I think, again, when all else fails, sometimes we just have to get a bigger hammer.

So have a plan. What does this plan look like? Well, you want to have a regular maintenance plan that includes those purge and audit of unnecessary items, auditing for errors, and recovering the corrupt files.

Minimizing redundancies and simplifying the geometry is an efficient data management process. Consistent layer naming and layer cleanup. That's our layer management. We want to just make sure that we keep things simple. Let's leverage that KISS acronym. Keep it simple, silly, right? We can go both ways on that one.

Dynamic blocks instead of regular blocks to limit the number of blocks that are needed inside a drawing and increase flexibility. Managing our X references and data references and our other dependencies wisely. If you don't need them, get rid of them. Don't drag them around just because you think you might need to reload it one day. It's really not doing you any favors, especially in a cloud environment.

Keep the drawings small, and avoid excessive detailing. That seems pretty obvious, but I think it needs to be said. And that's a size management activity that you're going to experience. Include metadata where it's practicable. Don't put metadata in the file name.

There's no reason to make the file name be 300 characters long. You can't make it that long anyway. So let's keep it simple again. And then automate those repetitive tasks. And we're going to talk about that here in just a second.

And then continue to allow your maintenance plan to evolve. It is not a once and done. You want to continually learn from what Autodesk is doing, from what other industry experts are doing, but you also want to make sure that your users are continuing to evolve with your document.

And then how often? I like to make the analogy it's like our check engine light on a car when we used to have cars that had engines with oil in them, oh, and we didn't have computers in those cars. We would always change our oil-- we change our oil 3,000 to 5,000 miles.

And then when the check engine light went off, those of us old enough to remember would pop the hood and check the oil. Was it the oil? Probably not most times. But that was the process we used. So that's the analogy I use.

You're going to have a regular maintenance program. You're probably going to want to do it before and after major milestones, weekly or monthly. You're going to find your rhythm. It'll be a spectrum depending on the project and the amount of data you're working on.

And, obviously, when you hand over that project, you want to make sure that you're handing over clean data. But when things go wrong, when the red light goes off or the drawing opens slow today and it didn't yesterday, pull out that tool belt of maintenance tools and start looking at that drawing. I would be very surprised if you didn't find something that you could improve upon.

Automations. Again, keep it simple, right? We can use LISP routines. We can build this into our AutoCAD Docs LISP file that opens every time and purges and audits our drawings. That can tend to upset users because it does slow down the opening.

So this default clean LISP is actually built into one of the other tools we'll talk about here in just a second. But this is one option for automation. So I'm starting all the way down at the bottom level here. We're talking about LISP, which has been around longer than most of the people who are using AutoCAD today.

But the Batch Save Utility ships with Civil 3D. It does not corrupt a AutoCAD drawing. So if you're using it on drawings that are merely AutoCAD, it does not add the Civil 3D content to them, but it does give you the version of what you'd like to save this drawing in to bring drawings forward. You can target individual folders as well as exclude information.

You have full control over how that information is processed, whether or not you're skipping drawings that have already been processed. Is there only a window of data you want to look at? Because you did this last month. I just want to look at drawings that have changed in the last month because everybody told me they cleaned last month's drawings.

So we have that flexibility here. And then we can also start to tell it, OK, if the drawing takes more than 20 minutes, move on. And let's go ahead and try to process multiple drawings at the same time.