Question 1

What is an electronic document management system?

Accepted Answer

An electronic document management system (eDMS) is a type of software that stores, organizes, and manages documents in the form of electronic files for an organization. This system works best for documents that do not undergo much change, such as legal files, financial reports, marketing collateral, and scanned posts.

Question 2

What is a digital engineering document management system?

Accepted Answer

A digital engineering document management system is a type of electronic document management system purpose-built for engineering documents and drawings. It centralizes, organizes, and manages these documents while providing users with complete, actionable facilities and asset data they can use to increase efficiency and save money. It ultimately provides a single source of truth for all documentation, helps organizations maintain regulatory compliance, provides configurable workflows to streamline collaboration with all internal departments, provides comprehensive document version control, and simplifies auditing.

Question 3

What are the best document management systems?

Accepted Answer

There are a few key features of a best-in-class engineering document management system. Above all, the right document management system must be easy-to-use, intuitive, and highly adopted by your employees. It also needs to provide a single source of truth for all mission-critical data to maintain the quality, accuracy, and completeness of your data and metadata. Likewise, it offers easy-to-configure workflows that allow for streamlined collaboration, easy document version control, and auditing of documents to maintain regulatory compliance. It also ensures that everyone is working on the correct version, provides accessible data to maximize staff productivity, and supports personnel safety.

Question 4

What are the advantages of an engineering document management system?

Accepted Answer

The right engineering document management system will provide many advantages, including helping users process, store and retrieve records, simplify document version control, and streamline collaboration across departments, facilities, and devices. It can also improve project timelines, audit and inspection readiness, increase document control and security, lower costs, streamline knowledge management, and facilitate compliance.

Question 5

What is the difference between an engineering document management system (EDMS) and a content management system (CMS)?

Accepted Answer

There are key differences between an engineering document management system (EDMS) and a content management system (CMS). While both tools work to manage documents and content, a CMS is generally used to store web content from various websites, while an EDMS focuses more on engineering documentation for storage, reference, workflow management, and process improvement.

Question 6

What is the typical ROI for engineering document management?

Accepted Answer

An engineering document management system delivers both immediate and long-term ROI improvements. An EDMS can immediately improve cash flow in the short term by reducing paper costs and increasing employee efficiency. Over time, ROI improvements will be seen in savings per document, reduced timelines for companies for payroll, turnaround, invoicing, and other key processes. Also, document-related cost reduction, more efficient customer service and public service, reduced storage and archival costs, and more effective collaboration and document modification.

Question 7

What are some engineering document management system examples?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 8

What is ISO document control?

Accepted Answer

There are many competing standards worldwide for BIM and EDM tools, though ISO standards are essentially replacing these, which the entire world will eventually adopt. These include ISO 9001, which calls for document control. In other words, ISO 9001 tries to ensure that the right people have access to documents when needed, that those documents are up-to-date, and that no unauthorized users can access or change a document's contents. This ultimately helps ensure that essential engineering documents are up-to-date, comprehensive, and trustworthy, increasing compliance and improving operational efficiency over time.

Question 9

Why is EDMS required?

Accepted Answer

An EDMS can provide many necessary improvements to operations and workflows, particularly for businesses with lots of documentation or those looking to digitally transform their operations. These benefits include cost savings, simplified compliance with ISO 9001, Sarbanes Oxley regulations, HIPAA, and other regulatory bodies, improved disaster recovery, employee productivity, audit management, automation of the document workflows, and security.