Drawings - Managing Drawings from the Drawings Form
The Drawing Form serves as a powerful tool with functionality akin to a pivot table. It allows you to effortlessly oversee and control all shop drawings within your entire project portfolio through a unified global view.
Organize your data to gain invaluable insights by arranging it in a manner that best suits your needs.
Take advantage of a wide array of grouping and sorting options, leveraging over a dozen properties associated with your drawing records. This flexibility empowers you to tailor your view, facilitating a seamless exploration of your project information.
- 1 Manage what you see, and how you see it.
- 2 Drawing Properties (Attributes/Metadata)
- 3 Configuring Your Drawing Dates
- 3.1 Settings->Options->Drawings tab
- 3.1.1 User Defined Columns (UDCs):
- 3.1.2 Aliases:
- 3.1.3 Starting Rev:
- 3.1.4 Edit Formula:
- 3.1.5 Change Date Calculation Order:
- 3.1.6 Managing Revisions
- 3.1 Settings->Options->Drawings tab
- 4 Configuring Your Drawing Statuses
Manage what you see, and how you see it.
Sorting, Grouping, Filtering, and Managing your Data Attribute Columns
Click the left mouse button on any column header to perform a quick sort based on that column. Alternatively, right-click to access a pop-up menu offering options for grouping, sorting, filtering, and controls to show/hide columns. You can also adjust column widths and configure conditional formatting through this menu.
Drag-and-Drop Column Headers to Group your Data
Create groupings of your data by dragging-and-dropping combinations of columns to the area of the data grid above the column headers where it reads: “Drag a column header here to group by that column.”
To ungroup, right click a column header and select ‘Ungroup’ from the pop-up context menu, or simply drag the column back to the grid where you would like it.
Drawing Properties (Attributes/Metadata)
Termed as properties, attributes, or metadata, the 23 built-in, standard fields serve as designated spaces to store intricate details about your drawings.
Below is a list of each field and the name that will appear in the column header.
(unless given an alias in Settings->Options->Drawings)
User-Defined Pick Lists
Pick List | Explanation |
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Type | Select Drawing Type from Pick List. Types are created to align with your organization’s needs.
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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’. |
Drawing Date Fields (Built-in)
In order for dates to be automatically set by formula or change in status, you must first configure settings in the Drawings and Project tabs of the Settings->Options. Click this link to see how to configure your Drawings for automation.
Dates | Explanation |
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Users can enter dates manually or allow the system to update them automatically, based on formulas. 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. |
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). |
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). |
Other Drawing Properties
Field Name | Explanation |
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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.
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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.) |
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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. | |
Configuring Your Drawing Dates
Settings->Options->Drawings tab
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| User Defined Columns (UDCs):Offer the flexibility to augment the 23 pre-existing, reserved drawing properties.
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| 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
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Drawing Statuses must be created first. Therefore, before attempting to associate a drawing status with a Drawing Date field, the status record needs to exist.
Configuring Your Drawing Statuses
Once you have created your Drawing Statuses, you can associate each Drawing Dates with one or more status.
Here is a typical scenario:
A drawing begins in a status of “To Do”. When the Engineer, or Drafter begins work on the drawing, the status gets changed from “To Do”, to “In Progress”. The change in status triggers the “Date Started” to be populated with the computer’s system date.
Go to Settings->Options->Projects, select a Drawing Status from the Status dropdown, and associate it with a Drawing Date, by right-clicking in the ‘Dates Triggered for Status’ panel. Repeat this process for the other dates you wish to automatically update on a status change.
Once these settings have been established, any change in your drawing status, will automatically update its corresponding drawing date field.