CAD drawings are essential for facilities engineering, as they provide the basis for planning, designing, maintaining, and upgrading buildings and systems. However, inaccurate or outdated CAD drawings can lead to costly errors, delays, and safety risks. How can you ensure accurate CAD drawings for maintenance and upgrades? Here are some tips to follow.
One of the first steps to ensure accurate CAD drawings is to use a consistent naming convention for your files, layers, blocks, and attributes. This will help you organize, identify, and retrieve your drawings easily and avoid confusion or duplication. You can follow a standard naming convention such as the National CAD Standard (NCS) or create your own based on your project requirements and preferences. Make sure to document and communicate your naming convention to your team and stakeholders.
When creating and managing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings for maintenance and upgrades, accuracy must be carefully considered at every stage. By using standardized procedures for creation and updates, upholding uniformity in measurements, and layering, you can guarantee the accuracy of CAD drawings. Continually incorporate maintenance modifications onto current designs. Together with your team, do thorough quality tests and manage layers to arrange components for simple updates. Make use of digital measurement instruments, reliable component libraries, and accurate data input. To support correct design production, use cutting-edge CAD software with error-checking capabilities and regularly train CAD operators in best practices.
Another way to ensure accurate CAD drawings is to follow CAD standards and best practices for your industry and discipline. CAD standards are guidelines that define the format, quality, and content of your drawings, such as dimensions, symbols, annotations, colors, and scales. CAD best practices are recommendations that help you optimize your workflow, such as using templates, layers, blocks, and references. Following CAD standards and best practices will help you create clear, consistent, and compliant drawings that meet your project specifications and expectations.
You can also use CAD software features and tools to ensure accurate CAD drawings for maintenance and upgrades. For example, you can use the audit, purge, and recover commands to check and fix errors, remove unused data, and restore corrupted files. You can also use the measure, snap, and align tools to ensure precise dimensions and alignments. Additionally, you can use the compare, xref, and revision cloud tools to track and highlight changes and updates in your drawings.
Before you finalize and submit your CAD drawings for maintenance and upgrades, you should validate and verify them for accuracy and completeness. You can achieve this by performing manual checks and reviews, using automated checks and validations from your CAD software or a third-party tool, applying quality control and assurance procedures, or testing and simulating your drawings in a virtual or real environment. All of these methods will help to ensure the accuracy of your CAD drawings before submission.
Finally, you should update and archive your CAD drawings regularly to ensure accuracy and accessibility. You should update your CAD drawings whenever there is a change or modification in your project scope, design, or specifications. You should also archive your CAD drawings in a secure and organized manner, using a naming convention, a folder structure, and a backup system. This will help you preserve your CAD drawings for future reference, maintenance, and upgrades.
Don't make many different files for different categories of info for the same physical area. e.g. the electrical file of my WC area, and the plumbing file etc. Instead make differnet layers in the same file and switch on/off as required, to see how stuff coexists and interacts. Obvious as this may sound I have found it is not respected quite enough.