I’m often asked how EDMS can benefit an engineering firm looking to scale up its operations. Here’s my answer, based on working with engineering clients all over the world.
Scaling Up in the Digital Age
When an engineering firm scales up operations it means taking on more work, producing more drawings, having more clients, and maybe more offices and locations as well. A few years ago this would have entailed a great deal of planning and expansion of resources, people, infrastructure, buildings, perhaps even moving the bulk of operations to more profitable locations. In short, all the toil and expense that is usually associated with ‘scaling up’.
But times have changed. Today scaling up doesn’t necessarily mean more offices and more infrastructure, it can simply mean more business. More work, more output, more orders. More revenue. And that’s possible because of the evolution of specialized engineering digital collaboration technologies, or EDMS.
EDMS is a complete gamechanger.
We now have digitally-enabled work cultures like work-from-home and work-in-place and hybrid work – and EDMS is the only way to such make such work models feasible. Today it’s perfectly possible for an engineering company to have its headquarters on one continent, its design team on another, and its consultants and vendors on yet another! Again, impossible without EDMS-backed digital collaboration. We’ve also seen the rise of new employee-employer relationships, like gig work and freelancers who are hired for the duration of a project or a certain amount of hours ie not full-time employees. You need EDMS to manage them.
I’ve worked with clients whose entire team was virtual and temporary, that is, the entire team was working remotely and on a freelance or project model, from different lower-cost locations around the world. This allowed my client to hire the best people for the lowest price and without having to invest in permanent infrastructure. Everybody just logged in from wherever they were, for as long as their contract was running.
With EDMS ‘scaling up’ takes on a new meaning. You’re not limited – you can grow business almost infinitely and with great flexibility and all you have to do is invest in a digital system, ie EDMS.
How EDMS Transforms Management and Quality Control
But – and this is a big ‘but’ – when you scale up in this manner controlling and managing your expanded/extended operations becomes critical, in fact it will be one your biggest success factors. Without an EDMS you cannot effectively manage your team or your deliverables, and you certainly cannot maintain standards or enforce quality procedures across a distributed or multi-located workforce.
Think of it: the business of an engineering organization is to deliver quality drawings and designs on time and with quality. How do you do that without an EDMS? How do you track and manage people, deliverables, documents, and processes without multiple (expensive) managers and document controllers and administrators making it their full-time job to do the tracking and managing? Whereas an EDMS can take on the jobs of all these controllers and administrators. It can be set up to assign and manage the work of each person in the team, their deliverables, schedules, tasks, and ToDo lists, and it can also ensure quality via the inbuilt workflows that drive how work is carried out, making sure each step in your quality process is followed to the letter.
Let me walk you through a scenario.
You’re a small design firm located in Australia. You’ve recently taken on a huge design project and you don’t have the manpower to produce the volume of design work required. You also don’t have the budget to hire locally. So you invest in an EDMS. And now you are able to hire virtual workers. Qualified people, from around the world. You’re able to hire top-notch specialists in their fields from various countries who will work remotely. It’s a lot to manage and oversee, because there’sdifferent time zones and local standards and regulations and work cultures involved. The good news is that with your EDMS, all the processes and regulations and standards are built-in, everything is centrally controlled, everybody logs in to the same work platform. In effect, every one of the workers is just a login name – which means transparency and accountability but with flexibility and room for discretionary decision-making from your trusted senior managers.
You use your EDMS to distribute the work and the system gives you visibility on every interaction and transaction, so its easy to spot mistakes or problems and solve them quickly before they impact the larger deliverable.
You also don’t have to manually enforce the quality process. Each workflow, defined as per your QMS and the benchmarks your client asked for, have been already implemented into the EDMS and since it’s the driving the work, the workflows kick in automatically and ‘push’ each document step by step through its lifecycle, from creation, through all the layers of review and change, until final client approval. Everything is driven and tracked by the system, including reminders and alerts and reports – and over all this, you, of course, have full control.
In conclusion, for an engineering organization to scale up work in today’s economy with its models of distributed work, virtual teams, and online collaboration, an EDMS is a necessity not a luxury.
