In 1981, New Jersey CPA David Casey founded the Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) to provide a forum for gathering and exchanging ideas as well to provide educational programs for construction finance professionals.  CFMA has since transformed from a small regional association into a national organization with over 7,000 members including general contractors, subcontractors, developers, construction managers, architects, engineers, and suppliers.

Each year CFMA hosts a conference and exhibition bringing together thousands of like-minded construction finance professionals for several days of education, sharing, and camaraderie.  The conference features educational classes through CFMA’s Schools of Learning in addition to showcased speakers and exhibit booths displaying the hottest products and technologies driving the industry forward.  This year’s CFMA 2009 Conference is being held May 16th through May 20th  at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas – the site of the original CFMA national conference in 1982.

A prevailing theme to this years’ CFMA conference is the need for builders to address the exponential growth in electronic and paper file management involved with construction.  Files include emails, invoices, drawings, insurance records, certification of completions, permits, and more.  The mountain of paperwork required for an average construction project can fill up an entire trailer.   Unfortunately this paperwork robs profits by consuming resources for filing documents, retrieving them, and storage costs.  It also exposes companies to the risk of eDiscovery litigation.

ColumbiaSoft is attending this year’s CFMA conference as an exhibitor demonstrating Document Locator, a paperless office solution for construction companies.  Paperless office solutions, also known as document management solutions, offer construction companies many capabilities.   Document Locator digitally archives paper documents, electronically stores them, and indexes them based on client-specified criteria, and has workflow automation.  In addition, paperless office solutions help facilitate disaster recovery planning and reduce the exposure associated with eDiscovery requests.

Paperless office solutions allow construction companies to amass a central repository containing all of the critical documents typically silo’d by departmental applications.  As an example, users outside of accounting could access all of the invoice documents related to their project without requiring access to the accounting software or directly contacting accounting with their requests.  This type of open collaboration between employees, vendors, and subcontractors provides substantial benefits to project team members allowing them real-time access to the information required to perform their tasks.  If you are interested in learning more about how paperless office solutions could benefit your construction company, please do not hesitate to stop by our booth at CFMA to learn more.

Written by: Scott Zieg

Brava! Desktop is an affordable, easy to use application designed for viewing, printing, and marking-up documents and drawings. Brava! Desktop provides support for most major document formats including MS Office Documents, CAD and other engineering formats, as well as PDF format types. By using a powerful markup/viewer application, users have the advantage of being able to open proprietary file formats such as Autodesk CAD, Bentley MicroStation, and Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks 3-D models without owning the original development software or a purpose built viewer for each application.

What truly sets Brava! Desktop apart though, is the ability to markup and annotate files for collaboration. For example, an engineering firm can distribute floor plan drawings for review to the contracted architect and construction company, allowing them to digitally markup each drawing where they have questions. Brava! Desktop is purpose built for this form of paperless collaboration and includes powerful AEC industry features including measurements, drawing magnification, stamping, markup burn-in, save as PDF, and more.

When viewing and digital markup technology are incorporated into an existing document management system that supports metadata searching, workflow routing, notifications, security, records management, remote web access, and email archive - you have a full featured project file management system that will allow collaboration within the organization and to outside vendors, suppliers, sub-contractors, and more. Imagine a system were design drawings (submittals/transmittals) were automatically routed to the necessary reviewers for the project and their responses were electronically captured and returned.

Included in the next release of Document Locator v5.3 will be integration into Informative Graphics Brava! Desktop 2.2 – previous integration support included up version 1.3 of Brava! Desktop. In addition to supporting the latest release, functionality is expanded, allowing users to create and apply dynamic stamps using Brava! Desktop that automatically extract profile property information from Document Locator as the stamp is applied. This means that generic stamps can be employed that will dynamically embed project related information onto drawings including project number, project engineer, or dates by reading the values from the metadata associated with the drawing that is open.

Written by: Scott Zieg

In these uncertain economic times, most companies are faced with the challenge of how to maximize returns on tighter margins. It’s a do-more-with-less strategy that requires business operations be optimized now to meet current economic realities.

One area to consider for improving the bottom line is to look at how information is managed in the organization. This includes all the content, things like documents, invoices, etc.; all the actions, things like reviews, and approvals; and all the processes, these are the repeatable steps that drive the flow of information. Improving how information is managed, the content, actions, and processes, will improve efficiency, reduce risk, and lead to cost savings.

There is another upside to consider with this as well… and it’s a silver lining. With any change comes opportunity, and the right kind of change now can position an organization for even greater success long term.

There are least seven ways that improvements in how information is managed can have an impact on the bottom line in terms of efficiency, risk and cost savings. These were outlined in a document control webinar we held recently, and are also highlighted in an ePaper.

Number 1: Find information, Instantly
Number 2: Automate business processes
Number 3: Improve collaboration
Number 4: Capture a record of every change.
Number 5: Reduce the risk of email.
Number 6: Maintain compliance with regulations
Number 7: Eliminate paper storage costs and go Paperless.

Check out our document control webinar and request a copy of our Silver Lining ePaper to get more details on each.

Written by: Jim Kemp

Are you grappling with how to automate document version control?

We’re all familiar with this scenario: There’s an important document with a critical deadline that has to be worked on by a group of people. Round and round the document goes, often by email, with edits written over edits. And… as the document progresses through stages, each person appends the file name to indicate their own ad-hoc, individualized versioning scheme. File names like “CustomerRFP-Sally-version 5-June7-DRAFT.doc” start to appear. In the end, it’s impossible to retreive prior versions (stored on individuals’ computers), and it’s a nightmare to assemble all the changes.

This is just one example where automated version control can save the day. There are many others, and we’ll touch on them all in a 20-minute webinar on January 22 called Managing Document Versions - Organizing chaos with a record of every change.

We’ll talk about how standardized version control software improves productivity and collaboration by eliminating ad-hoc and individualized versioning schemes; how document versioning increases accountability by logging information as it changes over time; and how version control reduces information loss and the need to duplicate or recreate information content.

Learn more and register for the webinar on Managing Document Versions.

Written by: Jim Kemp

Sustainable engineering and design headlined Autodesk University for 2008.  The theme was featured via a series of classes and exhibits throughout the conference.  And more than just a theme… Autodesk showcased its own renewable design by manufacturing this year’s conference bags using recycled vinyl banners from prior Autodesk University conferences.  In addition, Autodesk’s Director of Sustainability, Lynelle Cameron, led a Sustainable Design Leadership panel in presenting a number of top architects and engineers that regularly employ sustainable design practices.

Autodesk University 2008 also emphasized the importance of “going green” within your own organization.  This includes reducing your reliance upon printed materials, reducing your office space requirements, and lowering your overall carbon footprint.  Implementing a document management system can help your business move to the forefront of the green office movement.  Here are some of the ways a document management system has helped companies work towards a paperless office and go green.

• Electronic Approvals: Document management systems include solutions for electronically routing documents for review and approval, applying digital signatures, and creating electronic markups.  Reviewing documents electronically reduces the demand for paper and ink products within the organization.
• Digital Archiving: Document management scanning technology provides solutions for electronically archiving paper documents in PDF or Tiff formats.  Digitally archiving your documents reduces the need for paper storage facilities, limits exposure to fire/flood damage, and promotes recycling efforts.
• Collaboration: Document management systems allow for sharing documents online with co-workers, vendors, and suppliers.  By providing electronic access to documents, companies reduce delays, cut costs, and lower the environmental impacts of shipping paper documents.

Written by: Scott Zieg

The road to true collaboration with your business partners begins with developing an exceptional system of internal controls. For document intensive organizations, those controls are implemented using a robust document management system. When selecting a document management system for your organization, you will want to research systems that support collaboration as well as metadata indexing, workflow routing, fast searching, document audit logs, records management, and business rules enforcement.

Companies with fully deployed document management systems recognize the benefits of their implementation immediately. Repetitive tasks that involve searching for and/or distributing company documents can be performed in a matter of seconds by a single employee. Implementing agreed-upon standards for storing, naming, and profiling documents means less time searching for documents and more time focusing on what makes the company money. The list of benefits an organization will achieve is quite remarkable. The question that inevitably emerges is how to connect your internal business processes with resources on the outside of the organization.

The capacity to collaborate with resources, both inside and outside of the organization, while maintaining your internal business controls is king. Collaboration is the means to efficiently communicate and share data with your outside vendors and/or suppliers in a consistent and auditable format. Your success with collaboration depends upon whether you have the necessary tools to provide a secure, intuitive portal for easily uploading and retrieving documents and for involving external users in workflows.

Advanced collaboration solutions also offer tools for distributing bulk documents to resources for the purposes of document turnover, transmittals, or e-Discovery. This technology is used for extracting entire projects or folder directory structures from within a document management system and exporting the information to an external storage device - CD, DVD, thumb drive, or USB hard drive. The documents are accessed through a self-contained, searchable document archive that presents the complete folder and file hierarchy, metadata information, and a robust search function. All of this functionality is available to the data recipient without requiring any special software installation process.

Leveraging collaboration tools in your organization will improve your ability to produce the goods or services that drive revenue. Collaborative tools provide real-time data sharing with your vendors and suppliers. This improves your overall efficiency while reducing risk. Bulk document distribution functionality allows your organization to provide a greater level of service to your customers and therefore a strategic advantage over the competition. Implementing a document management system with collaboration has proven valuable to many organizations across a broad range of industries.

Written by: Scott Zieg

So here’s a recent success story worth a mention: A manufacturing company that implemented Document Locator into their Quality department received a higher return on investment than they anticipated. The process resulted in the company receiving accreditation for selling their manufactured products into a lucrative new market.

The primary business driver for purchasing document management was to strengthen document control activities for the Quality department. To that end, the company concentrated their deployment on building controls around approval processes, folder structure standards, metadata indexing, document security, audit trails, and automatic change notifications.

Since completing their deployment of Document Locator, the company has fulfilled the necessary Nuclear Quality Assurance audits for being a supplier to construction companies building nuclear power plants. As they communicated to ColumbiaSoft, they would have never passed the audits without the capabilities and auditability of their document management system.

Written by: Scott Zieg

For employees whose job dictates that they regularly create new documents, having access to an intuitive and easy to use version control system is a major advantage. Early in my career I distinctly remember the struggles I experienced creating specification documents, training guides, and other business related documentation. Authoring the content was challenging enough, but the issues were compounded by the processes associated with saving revisions, routing the documents for approvals, and distributing the final version to the intended recipients.

Version control is defined by Wikipedia as “the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.” While that definition is accurate, I think my brother put it best when he said “version control is akin to having unlimited edit-undo.” When creating documents using a version control system, the author has the capability of recording snapshots of their document at any point in the document lifecycle. This permits the author to lock in a version of the document for historical purposes that can be referenced later in the development cycle. Having access to snapshots of the document is especially helpful when the author needs to rewrite or remove a section of a document. Prior to working with a document management system, I am embarrassed to admit to the number of times I removed entire sections of a document without saving off a version of the file. Deleting sections from a document inevitably leads to rework and it did for me countless times.

The symptoms of a business needing a version control system are easy to recognize. The primary symptom is when users have file names saved with special extensions detailing the file version’s “something” (date, editor’s initials, or internal revision number). Experienced document authors compensate for not having a document management system by developing their own naming conventions for each document revision. As a result, their ‘My Documents’ folder is littered with countless revisions of documents using specialized file naming conventions such as filename – date – revision.ext. Modifying file names can partially address the individual author’s version control needs, but invariably leads to wide-scale confusion across an organization. The confusion is exacerbated when versions of files are emailed to others in the organization responsible for editing and/or approving the documents. Often the email recipients save a local copy of the file using yet another naming standard before performing their edits. When the files are returned, the original author now has a trail of dissimilar named files that require manual consolidation and cannot be easily audited.

In engineering and software departments, version control systems have been commonly used for decades. One Tree Software, in the early 1990s, developed the most prolific version control system for application engineers called ‘SourceSafe’ for Windows. One Tree Software was subsequently purchased by Microsoft and the SourceSafe application became integrated as part of Microsoft Visual Studio (Microsoft’s software development application suite) since 1995. Visual SourceSafe (VSS) became a widely adopted tool for managing versions of source code files, but never gained popularity with users outside of the engineering and software development teams.

The document management industry recognized the benefits that engineers were experiencing with version control and sought to bring equivalent functionality to the rest of the business community. Before that vision would be realized, a new breed of intuitive, integrated document management system needed to be developed that supported how document creators produced content. Business users required the essential version control features that engineers had come to expect such as saving revisions of documents, notes for detailing specific versions of the file, and the capability to promote historical versions of a file. However unlike the engineers, the business users also demanded advanced document management functionality including integration into Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat applications, electronic workflow for routing documents, electronic review and approval, digital signatures, document retention schedules, and profiling with metadata indexing.

Today business users have the opportunity to deploy a document management system that provides their users with robust version control functionality. Document creators from diverse industries gain notable efficiencies by utilizing a version control system for maintaining revisions of their documents. The benefits they realize include having access to all historical data associated with the document being generated, a complete document log detailing who and when a document was accessed, and the assurance that all of the versions of the document are stacked in the document’s version history and not concealed through varied naming standards. Can your organization afford not to provide your document authors with the tools they need to efficiently and confidently create the documents that drive your organization?

Written by: Scott Zieg

Included in Document Locator v5.2 are several enhancements to the workflow system. One enhancement already generating enormous fanfare in the user community is the overhauled notification system. Previous generations of Document Locator dutifully rendered and distributed email messages to the appropriate users notifying them based on the required task. These notifications included relevant information such as workflow task details, file index information, and user entered comments.

What ColumbiaSoft heard from our user community was that the existing messaging solution worked. The notification messages contained the appropriate content and were reliably received by their intended recipient notifying them of subscription events, pending workflow tasks, or user initiated notifications. As with anything, however, there is always room for improvement. Many customers told us they wanted to have the capability to design custom notifications.

The result: we designed a configurable email notification template architecture in v5.2. The new HTML-based template framework allows users to merge variable data from Document Locator into pre-configured HTML-based email templates. This architecture enables customers (maybe with help from their graphic designers) to create templates based on the company’s own brand or look and feel. These templates can include embedded images, CSS styles, table formatting, confidentiality statements, and more. Because the templates are HTML-based, any standard design tool can be employed including graphics-based design tools such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

One of the 5.2 beta customers “test drove” the new email notification system and created a report-style email for customer distribution via a workflow process. The notification system uses tokens to dynamically merge metadata attributes into pre-configured HTML templates. The design also supports one-to-many data relationships as it loops through sections creating multiple lines. This enables the report-style email notification being tested by the customer. In their example, the email report included their corporate logo along with detailed information pertaining to all of the files being distributed through their workflow process.

Configurable email notification templates are included as part of Document Locator v5.2, so note to DL customers… get ready to brush up on your design skills and start gathering your thoughts about how configurable notifications could benefit your organization. I’m looking forward to hearing your stories about implementing the configurable notifications and how it impacted your organization.

Written by: Scott Zieg

I recently read that product managers categorically receive the most emails in the company. Reading this brought a grin across my face - misery loves company. My email inbox gets bombarded daily with product enhancement ideas, consulting proposals, internal questions, meeting requests, and industry articles. For me, it’s an imperative that our employees have a means to organize and manage their entire volume of emails. Without these tools, we could never leverage the wealth of reference and historical data contained within the email archives.

As Product Manager at ColumbiaSoft, I speak with managers and executives from a number of industries including AEC, pharmaceutical, facilities management, legal, health and manufacturing that are inundated with emails and need solutions for managing them. It is clear that there are differing needs across an organization based on a person’s job responsibility. With employees working in a project-based environment there is tremendous value in having the capability to store and manage your emails in the same directory structure as the bulk of your project documents. For IT and corporate executives, the capability to provide fast and accurate e-Discovery, to meet regulatory compliance, and to allow employees to restore their own lost emails is exceedingly important.

Email has a number of inherent shortcomings. It is de-humanizing, riddled with unscrupulous SPAM, and seeps beyond the regular work day. Unfortunately, many of those issues are beyond my control. (My only advice is to avoid those invasive handhelds that beam email communications to you 24 hours a day. ) But, there are real world issues we can confront such as providing solutions for employees to help organize emails alongside their project documents in addition to providing IT staff tools for managing the backend email archive.

In a project-based environment, one of the most endemic problems is gaining access to emails that are siloed in a project manager’s inbox. Non-email documents associated with a project such as contracts, schedules, and specifications are typically stored on a shared file server to promote collaboration across the project team. Project-related email storage is not. A manager’s inbox will contain critical information that affects the direction of a project, yet the data is trapped on an island. Even though the information contained in these emails normally gets disseminated to the team members, when unexpected contingencies arise (and they do) the team does not receive critical information. This costs money, time, and credibility. Imagine if the project manager had automated email rules configured in MS Outlook that stored and indexed project related documents in the same directory structure as the other critical documents, thus providing the entire team access to critical information regardless of the PM’s availability.

Dealing with the volume of email in your inbox is difficult enough, but let’s not forget the struggles that your IT staff has dealing with maintaining the servers 24/7, providing for disaster recovery, and dealing with the constant requests for retrieving lost or deleted emails from backups. To lessen the load on the IT staff, I recommend migrating older emails that are bloating the MS Exchange server to an email archive solution. Leading email archive software packages offer a variety of solutions that expedite many labor intensive tasks that burden IT departments. One such task is handling e-Discovery requests. Unless you have ever been involved with an e-Discovery process, it’s difficult to imagine the complexity of aggregating all relevant data across your organization and from dispersed systems. With litigation so frequent in many industries, IT teams are too often dragged into e-Discovery without the benefit of tools that simplify gathering and distributing the data. Having an email archive tool capable of providing instant search results based on sender, recipient, body content, and attachments along with associated emails tracked through threading information can shorten e-Discovery processes significantly. Another common time drain for IT is handling requests for copies of lost or deleted emails. Imagine if all of the company’s inbound and outbound emails were stored in an email archive solution capable of providing secure access to the archive so that IT staff could enforce smaller Exchange database size limits while providing emails 24/7 access to emails they either sent or received.

Regardless of whether you view email as a blessing or curse, it’s here to stay. The question is now how best to deal with managing and archiving emails along with the myriad of other documents amassed in your organization. With the software packages being offered by several document management companies focused on integrating email management and document management into a single solution, I think they are worth investigating in more detail.

Written by: Scott Zieg