Manage Complexity Through Engineering Workflow
Manage Complexity Through Engineering Workflow
Find Out What Makes Sense for Your Business
It is possible to manage complexity through engineering workflow., but you have to find out what makes sense for your business. There are many ways you can go about managing your company’s workflows, but it’s important to note only a few workflow configurations actually make sense. Depending on the roles of your employees, you must organize your workflows in a way that maximizes efficiency and ultimately gets the job done without creating unnecessary bottlenecks. This can be achieved by first brainstorming how, why, when, and by whom each task is completed.
Start by identifying the roles and strengths of each employee and delegating tasks accordingly. If you haven’t already done so, establish a hierarchy to determine who has what level of authority and assign permissions accordingly. Remember, all workflows should be created with your end goals in mind (including deadlines and compliance), so try to eliminate any unnecessary steps that may be keeping you from achieving your objectives. If you’re an engineer, this shouldn’t be difficult, since you deal with efficiencies every day.
Talk to Your Team
While your workflow configurations may seem to make sense to you, it’s important to ensure your team sees it similarly and is on board. In design and development, you may feel confident you have a complete understanding of each step and what it takes to complete, but without talking to your team first, you may be left unaware of some of the possible challenges that come with each step.
The truth is, only your experienced team members know what it takes to complete each task in your workflows, so it is always a good idea to consult them before making the decision to implement. Other people may be able to see flaws in processes that aren’t immediately apparent to you or other team members. You may not be able to act upon all the inefficiencies in your workflows, but knowing they exist can be beneficial to both you and your team members.
Further Reading: What is a Document Management System?
The Discipline of Workflow Schedule Management
Business operations seem more chaotic than ever. The economic swings seem bigger; the labor pool is tighter, more diverse, and more geographically dispersed; the amount of information is enormous; and at the end of the day, management has just become harder. Trying to get your arms around all that’s going on and ensuring the organization is focused on getting the tasks done is now more complex and daunting. Add pandemics, supply chain disruptions, geopolitical uncertainty, and now even historical inflation.
What is a manager to do?
Automate Whenever Possible
Automation has become an important component in managing complex workflows, particularly in the engineering and manufacturing industries. Since design and development requires a series of review and approval processes, it’s important your workflows reflect these processes in a way that’s simple for your team to manage. Engineering workflows are usually document-centric with managers typically reviewing CAD drawings and, depending on the nature of your organization, documents may require a voting process, which can easily be completed through automation.
You may need to adjust user permissions as a document moves between steps, depending on whether they are approved or rejected, which is just one of the many reasons why workflow automation can be so powerful. This is particularly useful for companies that manage telecommuters, as remote workers are typically given less control over their proprietary documents since they are working from out of the office. At any given time, only those who are modifying, reviewing, or redlining documents should have access to them, ensuring the highest level of security and compliance with industry standards, like NIST guidelines.
Keep Audit Trails of All Actions
Compliance is often one of the biggest concerns when managing workflows, but is not the only benefit of recorded audit trails. Audit trails give managers full transparency into how workflows are actually being utilized, making it easy to spot inefficiencies, such as bottlenecks. In most cases, people typically don’t get everything right the first time around, inspecting audit trails is an extremely useful mechanism for working and improving document-centric workflows.
Improvement is Within Your Reach
It is possible to manage complexity through engineering workflow. Managing workflows can be as easy or as difficult as you make it, but with access to the right tools, it’s simple to create and manage your team’s workflows. Workflow tools such as ImageSite can support teams in managing collaboration and creating efficiency, reducing costs, and allowing for quicker time to market. Unlike other out of the box solutions, our engineering document management system can be implemented within just a few days, and at a fraction of the cost. Businesses of all sizes have enjoyed the tangible benefits of ImageSite and its workflow tools for more than 25 years, making it one of the most powerful, field-tested products on the market to date.
Additional EDMS Features
Our EDMS solutions
ImageSite and EngineBox are eQuorum’s robust workflow and document management solutions, created to help workers manage their essential workflows while maintaining complete control over their engineering files and documents. Not only do they provide a secure collaboration site for workers, but they also help organizations manage document distribution with third parties like vendors, contractors, and customers. Both systems are offered at a competitive price, enabling organizations to get a quick return on their investment by providing the features and functionality needed to help organizations improve efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. Companies can choose from concurrent user subscriptions or named user subscriptions, ensuring organizations have subscription options that make sense for their business.
ImageSite®
Our single source engineering workflow and document management system. Built in HTML5 so there is no software to deploy to client computers or mobile apps to download. Offered as an On-premise or Private Cloud system.
Our EDMS solutions
ImageSite and EngineBox are eQuorum’s robust workflow and document management solutions, created to help workers manage their essential workflows while maintaining complete control over their engineering files and documents. Not only do they provide a secure collaboration site for workers, but they also help organizations manage document distribution with third parties like vendors, contractors, and customers. Both systems are offered at a competitive price, enabling organizations to get a quick return on their investment by providing the features and functionality needed to help organizations improve efficiency, productivity, and collaboration. Companies can choose from concurrent user subscriptions or named user subscriptions, ensuring organizations have subscription options that make sense for their business.
EngineBox™
EngineBox is a cloud based workflow and document management version of ImageSite that resides outside the corporate network.
The eQuorum Customer Promise
In 2005, eQuorum developed the first all browser-based EDMS. The system, although for on-premise use, was still created to remove client software and JAVA from user computers and allow users to have a single viewer based on the simple navigation functionality of browsers. Today, eQuorum provides that same application in a private Cloud or a SaaS Cloud option. We can do this because we are, and have always been, browser-based, understanding the enhanced speed, security, and usability of this technology.
With the abundance of document management systems on the market today, there’s no doubt that choosing the right Cloud document management software can be a difficult decision. eQuorum is here to provide a comprehensive, powerful, and most importantly – affordable Cloud document management solution. We believe in providing real value to our customers by eliminating unnecessary costs, providing industry-leading functionality, and equipping your team with the right tools using cutting edge technology to bring your products to market faster.
Resources
eQuorum®
We specialize in engineering workflow and document management. Our comprehensive, yet easy-to-use software provides the solution to manage data from design to manufacturing and production, to sales, support and administration.