An EDMS, or engineering document management system, is a robust software designed to centralize an organization's dynamic and often complex engineering documents, drawings, and data, thereby replacing outdated, disparate, or manual systems. The goal? To provide a single, consistent source of truth that can streamline collaboration, facilitate compliance, ensure safety, simplify document version control, and ultimately lead to significant efficiency and ROI.
Yes, and no. They are both document management systems (DMSs), and they are both electronic, but that is where the similarities end. An engineering document management system is a particular flavor of an electronic document management system purpose-built for engineering documents, drawings, and data. It optimizes the complex and dynamic documents you find in asset-heavy organizations.
In the engineering, construction, and manufacturing industries, an EDMS like Meridian can connect to and inform building information modeling (BIM) and facility and asset management tools such as Maintenance Connection to improve operational connectivity and ensure important data is accessible company-wide.
Conversely, an electronic document management system is built for storing and managing unstructured data that undergoes very little change, such as legal and financial documents or marketing collateral. An electronic document management system is not well suited for asset data and engineering drawings, such as CAD files, BIM models, and schematics.
Businesses and organizations find that a well-designed and properly implemented EDMS can help their users tackle some redundant, mundane, and error-prone tasks of day-to-day operations. Using the robust features of an engineering document management system, employees work faster and more efficiently, especially when it gives them the ability to:
And make no mistake — an EDMS is more than a digital filing cabinet. It's a document organizer, distributor, and integrator that will simplify processes and allow your team to quickly use your data rather than fumble through it.
When choosing an EDMS system for your organization, keep in mind that the best engineering document management systems include the following features:
Revision controls and approval processes will help you streamline workflow information like document type and the number of working copies. This can ultimately simplify collaboration and ensure everyone is working on the right page at the right time.
Automatic document version control and auditing help ensure that all versions and drafts of a document are accurately recorded and managed across different teams and devices. This type of content management can help regulatory compliance and ensure that all users have access to up-to-date, accurate information to maximize productivity and safety and ensure data integrity.
A robust EDMS software will pull information from other key systems and departments — including a CRM, EAM, or CAD software — to ensure that your mission-critical data is always effectively tracked, recorded, and synchronized into a single source of truth.
Make document storage and document sharing more user-friendly with an EDMS system. Share documents, organize your electronic files, simplify your document workflow, control your file formats, and optimize file sharing in just a few clicks.
Maintaining ongoing compliance with regulatory bodies requires easy-to-follow audit trails, strict document authorizations, and — according to ISO engineering standards — strict document version control. The right engineering document management software can help set permissions and control document access to facilitate ongoing compliance. It can also connect your documents to records retention schedules, allowing your team to turn active documents into compliant records easily.
In a COVID-19 world, organizations and team members are forced to work across facilities and devices more than ever before. Meridian EDMS offers cloud deployments and mobile capabilities to help ensure data integrity, content management, and document control across devices and locations.
With manual data entry or disparate document management systems, only one person can access an up-to-date document, and no one else can work on the same project until that document is shared or copied. This leads to low productivity, poor execution, ineffective records management, and even injuries. The right EDMS will avoid such concerns with multi-site capabilities and widely available schematic information to help users understand the as-built environment, schedule, complete work orders, and carry out concurrent engineering.
If the right data is missing or difficult to find, it can be difficult to execute work orders or complete workflows. The right EDMS can require completing certain fields and organizing relevant documents to ensure that the right information is in the right place at the right time.
A robust document management system will provide the capabilities and tools your team needs to modify documents and streamline updates or decision-making effectively. This includes mark-up tools like annotations, redactions, highlighting, stamps, and text boxes.
Like any filing cabinet or library, an EDMS must be effectively hierarchically structured, organized, and indexed to be useful. In Meridian's engineering document management system, your digital documents are available in a central repository. And they can be organized by any parameters you choose, including creation date, department, and more.
With an EDMS's hierarchical structure, metadata, search, and archival functionalities, finding the right information at the right time is easier than ever. These tools will help you track key milestones like creation dates, modifications, reviews, and approval statuses while effortlessly searching for and locating the files you need across folders and repositories.
Many factors — including an aging asset infrastructure, reactive maintenance practices, and incomplete document and preventive maintenance (PM) information — can lead to skyrocketing maintenance costs and inefficiencies. This is unsustainable in today's lean environment. Accruent's engineering document management system, Meridian, can reduce these maintenance costs while also extending the asset lifecycle and ensuring a safer workplace.
By connecting to other relevant data sources such as CAD, CRM, CMMS, or EAM applications, engineering document management system software can maintain the integrity of your data and help create a single source of truth for your mission-critical information. This can resolve common pain points like out-of-date information, incomplete information, or incorrect active versions.
A document management solution like Meridian makes information, documentation, and schematics easily accessible during any project or even an emergency by offering concurrent versions of documents and drawings. Meridian also maintains the integrity of data throughout the asset lifecycle and provides a comprehensive CAD software agnostic solution for engineering drawing document management, thereby creating a single source of truth for all important information.
Mistakes and redundancies caused by missing information or poor document control can cost time, efficiency, and productivity. A comprehensive EDMS will facilitate document search and offer automated document data completion and updates to reduce such mistakes and increase ROI.
Meridian helps over 350,000 professionals keep their mission-critical documentation up to date. It also ensures that data is easily accessible by the right people while maximizing staff productivity, breaking down silos between departments, and supporting personnel safety.
This widely available, comprehensive information can close the skills gap and allow for better training and knowledge management within an organization.
In asset-heavy industries and environments, preventive asset maintenance and maximized asset reliability are crucial to increased margins and effective job completion. Such reliability requires complete and easily accessible maintenance data. A powerful EDM system provides this data, allowing organizations to easily track, manage, and use all relevant asset documentation and maintenance data. This ultimately breaks down communication lifecycles, increases technician efficiency, and improves asset safety and compliance.
To increase processes and improve productivity, an EDMS can provide a 10,000-foot view of how documents are being used and how well your document-driven processes are working. Use this insight to reward employees, restructure processes, and drive ROI.
Eliminate the need to dedicate physical space, employee bandwidth, and operational budgets to maintain file storage and organization.
Data breaches, document loss, and compliance concerns are real pain points, particularly in an unorganized digital, cloud-based environment. By controlling information access and offering consistent security updates, an EDMS can help your organization effectively address and sidestep such concerns.
Immediately upon implementation, an EDMS can replace current paper archives, drastically reducing the time and budget spent managing paper records. In the long term, more effective search and automated document management can transform efficiency and release funds to other business-critical verticals.
Data extraction, implementing workflows, invoicing, contracting — all these internal processes can be complicated and slow. An EDMS's automated data extraction, search capabilities, and workflow templates can reduce such bottlenecks, improving company-wide efficiency and uptime.
An EDMS can be useful for many asset-heavy businesses, providing a single source of truth for engineering documentation that can reduce inefficiencies and improve decision-making.
An EDMS can be used in a range of asset or information-heavy industries. It's also an ideal tool for businesses that rely on paper-based operations (and notice the resulting inefficiencies or bottlenecks) or for those that have digital documents living in many disconnected systems or repositories (i.e., in Word documents, PDFs, Excel sheets, PowerPoints, emails, mobile documents, etc.)
For professionals in these industries and situations, an EDMS can help resolve common pain points, including:
An EDMS can also be an essential component of broader digital transformation. It can inform strategies and processes such as preventive maintenance and business process automation that will modernize your built environment.
By centralizing disparate information and providing a simple tool for searching documents, completing work orders, maintaining compliance, and more, an EDMS can help users across industries and verticals to:
Initially, your IT department can spearhead your EDMS initiatives and work to import data and standardize information across devices and team members. That said, implementation can often be complex – and Accruent experts are certainly here to help you begin, scale and standardize the process.
For ongoing maintenance, you can also consider hiring an electronic document controller to oversee the daily document management process. More specifically, this person will:
If you're looking for examples of engineering document management systems, keep in mind that there's a lot of variety, including the functionalities and the real results they can deliver for your business. Consider your company's scale, complexity, and document management needs when evaluating these options. Here are some real examples of how Meridian EDMS helped organizations: MSCM Ltd integrated Meridian with Solidworks (one of their existing systems) to consolidate documents and streamline their document management. Zurich Airport used Meridian to improve data and plan consistency across their organization. Seattle City Light improved its engineering data integrity and, in turn, its compliance and productivity.
