logical filename creation

[ntambomvu]

Hello Chaps,

I have an engineering business and we do jobbing work. therfore I have to keep track of many drawings on completely unrelated items from a wide variety of

customers.

 

I often cant find the original drawing so land up doing the drawing again.

 

I have no drafting office experience and would like to learn more about drawing referencing and indexing.

 

many of my drawings are once off single items but often there is an assembly

of quite a few parts.

 

I have often wondered how the mainline manufacturers keep track ?

Does anyone have a suggestion or a tutorial on the subject.??

I use autocad and am trying to learn Inventor.

Thanks for any help

 

Fred

[ReMark]

How are you currently naming your drawings? By client name? By part name? Please cite two or three examples.

 

Have you considered keeping a master database of all drawings where client name, date, title of drawing, etc. would be logged? At least it could be searched by field.

 

When I worked for a civil engineering company drawings were tracked primarily by a job number consisting of the year followed by a sequential number. Example: 1985.27 Individual sheets were tracked by discipline and another sequential number. Example: A1 for architectural sheet number 1. So the final number would look like this 1985.27-A1. All this information was tracked via an Windows Access database that could be searched by client name, job number and discipline.

 

The chemical company I work for now uses a combination of a four digit drawing number, two character process reference identifier and a two digit location number. Example: 1134SU03. We maintain a database of all drawings that were either created from within or obtained from outside vendors that numbers in the thousands. The database contains twelve different fields and each field or combination of fields is totally searchable via predefined queries.

[RobDraw]

A simple logical naming convention for project directories will go a long way and should solve your issues.

[BIGAL]

Like Remark we use year and project number, I can find any project back to 1996, maybe 1 minute to find, we have a Access database as well but why not just use Excel.

 

Jobnumber Clientname description and so on maybe 4-5 search items.