Type

Select Drawing Type from Pick List. Types are created to align with your organization’s needs.

Status

Statuses represent the current state of the drawing along its lifecycle, such as “To Do”, “In Progress”, or “Done” and are represented visually on the Kanban board as “Swimlanes”. Statuses are created by your organization to align with desired workflow. New records inherit the status that is set to ‘Default’.

Users can enter dates manually or allow the system to update them automatically, based on formulas.
All date fields associated with Drawings can be formulated.

Additionally, each of these system dates for tracking drawings can be aliased (e.g., “Target Date” can be labeled “Client Deadline”, or just “Target”, to shorten the width of the header.)

Target Date

The date you are intending to get the drawing to your customer/client. As with the other dates, this date can be set to compute automatically based on a formula.

Date Started

The date the Engineer/Drafter begins work on the drawing. This date can be set manually or set to automatically update when the status of the drawing gets changed (e.g., from Not Started to In Progress).

Date Submitted

The date the drawing is submitted to the customer/client. This date can be set manually or set to automatically update when the status of the drawing gets changed (e.g., from In Progress to In Submitted).

Date Required

The date you want the drawing back from the customer/client, to provide enough time for revisions and to re-submit the drawings for client approval.

In addition to manually setting this date, you can also allow the system to utilize the Default Days Allowed setting or make use of a formula.

Date Returned

The date the customer/client returns the drawing regardless of whether they marked it ‘Approved’ or otherwise. This date can be set manually or set to automatically update when the status of the drawing gets changed (e.g., from Submitted to Approved or Revision).

Action

Allows users to select from a picklist of user-defined actions. Originally added for customers wishing to have an easy way to indicate “Who’s court the ball was in”.

Assigned

Click the ellipsis in the Assigned field to pop open a list of employee within your organization. User’s can filter by Department and/or Supervisor to select an employee to assign as the person responsible for completing the drawing.

Comment

The Comment field is a text field that allows for the user to write up to 500 characters in total.

Description

The Description field is designed to compliment the Name field. A place where you can provide up to 500 additional characters to augment the drawing name.

Group

Most commonly used for grouping/sorting building floors, project phases, or batches of rooms or like work orders. (e.g., “Level-1”, “Level-2”, and “Level-3”)

ID

The ID is a sequential number that is automatically assigned by Crows Nest when you create a new drawing record. The system assigns the next sequential number. Right click any column header to open the pop-up context menu and select “Hide This Column” move it off of your grid, and onto the Column Chooser, where columns you want to hide live.

Links

Click the button to add a new link.

You can link to external files, RFIs, Change Orders, and Phases (aka: Work Orders, Releases, SOWs, etc.)

Name

At the time of creating a new drawing, you give your drawing a name. The Name field and the Type field are the only two required fields when creating a new drawing. The field name will also display icons that represent whether there are any notes and/or RFIs associated with the drawing record.

Note 1

Note fields 1, 2, and 3 are all text fields that allow up to 500 characters each.

These fields can be aliased (think: renamedto

Note 2

Note 3

Number

The Number field works in conjunction with the Project field. It displays the number of the drawing relative to its parent project.

Example: If a project has ten drawings, the number-1 in the Number field represents that particular project’s earliest drawing, and a number-10 would represent the most recently created drawing for that particular project.

Project

The Project field is a concatenation of the Project ID and the Project Description and are displayed as a hyperlink that will take you directly to the project when clicked.

Rev

When a drawing has been submitted to the client and is redlined and returned for further revisions, a new revision number is assigned by the system, so that a snapshot record is kept of all of the dates associated with the first iteration of the drawing. Subsequent revisions are sequentially numbered. Keeping separate dates by revision allow you to track the entire history of the drawing from initiation to completion.

Revision Note

When creating a revision, users are prompted to optionally provide an explanation, note, or reason for the revision.

Vendor

The Vendor field was added as a way for organizations to create a pick list of vendors for when they contract engineering/drafting services and want to be able to group/sort by vendor, or create custom reports that can be segmented by this field.

User Defined Columns (UDCs):

Offer the flexibility to augment the 23 pre-existing, reserved drawing properties.
This functionality enables you to extend and tailor the database to better suit your specific needs. Create additional columns for:

• Quantities - (Five additional fields available by default)

• Text Field - (10 additional fields available by default)

• Checkbox - (Five additional fields available by default)

• Date - (Four additional Date fields are available by default. See #6 below for more details.

Aliases:

If your company employs abbreviations, acronyms, or other jargon, consider assigning aliases to the names of the 23 database columns provided. This practice ensures that your team members can easily comprehend and recognize the terminology used in your organization.

Starting Rev:

The Drawings form tracks drawings from initiation to completion. Typically, client-submitted drawings return with redlined revisions. The software captures original dates and initiates a new revision, numbering it based on the 'Starting Revision Number' in your settings. Therefore, if the Starting Revision is set to zero (0), your first revision will be “Revision 1”.

Edit Formula:

Each of the built-in drawing dates fields can be set to calculate via a formula that utilizes either one of the built-in drawing dates, or any Project milestone dates that you have set on the Settings->Project tab.

For this example, the Target Date is calculated by adding 15 Work Days to the ‘Project Awarded’ date.

Change Date Calculation Order:

Custom formulas sequentially calculate drawing date fields. The "Change Date Calculation Order" setting empowers you to customize this sequence according to your organization's workflow by easily dragging and dropping the drawing lifecycle dates.

Managing Revisions

1. When a drawing requires revisions to be made, the new tracking record will be set to the status that you select here, from your Status pick list.

2. Choose which Labor Department should be the default department for tracking job costing as it relates to Drawings.

3. This setting allows you to set a global default number of days used to automatically calculate the Date Required automatically.

4. What drawing date should be used when a new revision is created? Typically, you’ll set this to the Date Started.