Your teams want autonomy and agility when collaborating on project engineering documents. They are driven by schedule urgency and will work outside of your regulated systems and processes using email, Microsoft Teams, or other tools if they feel your official project information systems are too cumbersome and restrictive. When project teams and contracting parties bypass your processes, policies, and document control systems, and start distributing uncontrolled copies of documents, they are exposing your business to major risk that can lead to catastrophic delays, safety incidents, and costly disputes. Even if your team is not at fault for issues that arise within the project, you face the extremely difficult task of proving compliance when the team has been bypassing the system that supports the recording of all official project documents and information.
If you think team members bypassing your engineering document control system (EDMS) with insecure workarounds isn’t that big of a deal, go and look at any media site dedicated to engineering and construction project news. Numerous articles detailing issues on projects will have a relationship to mismanaged project documents and information, and many will describe litigation where the party with the best documentation processes won the legal verdicts and settlements. A quick look and I found this example - ENR detailed a battle over a $900 million bridge project payment claim and the very heart of this issue stems from the production of project documents in a timely manner. The article quotes legal experts who say, “document production is a critical phase in any litigation.”
The values of control and agility have eluded project owners since the beginning of the large projects' era. But new tools can balance the requirement for information control with the system usability needs of the people performing the day-to-day tasks.
Current imbalance of document control and team agility
At Ascertra, we've come to recognize this struggle and have been working with project owners to achieve the balance. And the result is a new web application designed to simplify usage for external parties while maintaining the required control necessary for risk mitigation on these projects.
| Agility / Usability (for external parties) |
+ | Control / Quality (for document control) |
= | Reduced Project Risks (for entire project team) |
|
✓ Drag and drop file transfer ✓ Submittals with no cumbersome coversheets ✓ Work-in-progress documents shared via the Cloud, but synchronized with the official repository ✓ Mobile access via any modern browser ✓ Simplified, user-centric design with zero training required |
✓ Metadata verification for submitted documents with data-matching intelligence ✓ Controlled release of official documents to collaboration area and acceptance back to official repository ✓ Change history in collaboration area united with repository audit trail ✓ Review & approval workflows for process compliance |
✓ Barriers to document repository removed ✓ No more system workarounds ✓ No more duplication of official documents beyond the repository (via email, public sharing sites, etc.) ✓ All activities tracked and documented in historical database |
If you're interested in learning more about how the Proarc Document Management solution can help your projects achieve compliance with your document & information control policies through user-friendly tools that enable team agility, be sure to reach out and our document management experts can tell you more.