Process Automation & Quality Assurance with 12d Synergy

Document control and quality assurance (QA) sounds easy enough right? You just need to ensure you’re always working from the right version of the right data, at the right time and with the right people… Okay maybe we could all use a little help to streamline your processes!

I’m sure you’ve had countless moments where you just want to face plant onto your desk. And all because you’ve lost data, or you’ve spent countless hours reworking a model only to find out you were working with old data or you need to rollback to a previous version but it’s nowhere to be found. 

One of our clients had a very similar problem before 12d Synergy. On a previous pump station project, the team from one office would need structural work done, so they’d send it to the structural drafters located in a different city. It was sent on a Tuesday, giving a snapshot of what happened on that day. By Friday, the designers had developed the design further but the structural drafters still had the older version of the layout from Tuesday. You can imagine it was a big headache for the team, keeping the data up the date between the two offices. The entire process always caused a snowball effect.

We often hear about the many challenges civil & construction professionals face when it comes to document control & QA on built environment projects. Including working from duplicated or outdated data, no centralised repository for managing files and information, no clear audit history of the changes made to files, and inconsistent file naming and folder structures – just to name a few!

In this article, we’ll show you how to streamline your everyday operations through effective data management and collaboration practices. We want you to maximise your project output through effective workflows. Let’s eliminate those “D’oh!” moments.

Watch: Process Automation & Quality Assurance with 12d Synergy Webinar

Join Connie Butler (Digital Engineering Specialist, 12d Synergy) who has 15+ years of industry experience across various engineering disciplines, as she shares how to utilise 12d Synergy to achieve document control & QA.

12d Synergy Features to Maintain QA

Job Templates

Job templates for the entire folder structure can be created and maintained in 12d Synergy. Once set up, the structure can be effortlessly rolled out for each new job created. These templated jobs can include accepted file types on each folder, enforced naming rules, predefined attributes, project groups & roles, and access & write permissions at each level. This ensures that a consistent job structure is utilised across all jobs and conforms to industry or company standards. Users can also move between jobs and know where everything is stored leading to more project efficiencies.

Software Integrations

12d Synergy supports integrations to many common industry software packages including Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, BricsCAD, and 12d Model. To further streamline processes, you can create and store various templates for all these software packages in your Company Library and Job Templates. Templated files can be pre-populated with your job attributes. For example, you may need to write several letters to different stakeholders during the project. If you need to constantly add your company name into the document, add it as a pre-defined attribute and this will automatically self-fill in the document. By automating this small part in a large project, you can save many resources.

Centralised Data Library

All your data is located and stored in a secure & centralised location with 12d Synergy. A lot of businesses will maintain a data library, but there’s an inherent danger in locating these files in a folder system that is unsecured. In 12d Synergy, you can specify read & write permissions on all document and files, even your templates you’ve created. Preventing people from making unauthorised changes to them. This will safeguard not only you but your company and the entire project. On top of that you’ll know exactly where everything is stored in our organised folder structure.

Check-in/Check-out, File Versioning & Rollback

12d Synergy offers one single point of truth, meaning there’s only ever one version of your file. Whether you’re creating or making changes to your document or model, you must first check-out it out. This caches the file to your local drive, preventing any other person from making changes. Once you’re done, you check-in the file back into the platform. 12d Synergy also provides version history and rollback functionality. Each version of your file is recorded on the system, essentially keeping a built-in superseded directory of the file. If at any point you want to access a previous version you can view it locally, or you can rollback and make it the current version. This will help with any future auditing that needs to be conducted.

CAD Integrations

As previously mentioned, one of the software integrations 12d Synergy supports is integration with AutoCAD and BricsCAD. With a little set up by your CAD lead and system admin, your block revisions could fully be managed in 12d Synergy. This means changes can be made server side and pushed to your drawings without the need to open and adjust each file manually, like your title blocks. Now some of you will say that you won’t use this feature because you currently have Excel registers that do this for you. The benefit of 12d Synergy is that it also supports Drawing Registers, our aim is to help your business no matter which method you use.

Publish & Issue

12d Synergy also offers many options to publish your files, and you may not even need to open the other software packages to do it. For example, we can publish the files through our CAD package by any person on the team who has the permissions to access the files, internal or external from our business. From here you can the issue the files to other team members if needed. You can choose to either issue one or multiple files and who exactly on the team you want to send the file to. This entire process is simple and takes out the complicated mess of printing documents and manually sending them.