Grace Under Pressure: Adept Document Management Helps Fuel Natural Gas Company's Pipeline Modernization Plan

Before CPG implemented a centralized drawing management system, the drawing requests were tedious. “All of our drawings were organized on the server in a particular folder by the facility and separated in additional folders by project,” says Reed. “So, in order to find a particular document you had to be familiar with the location on the server and then go into multiple project folders and start opening drawings in their native software to see if those were the files you were looking for.”

And for a couple of years, Mike was the only person available to do that intense document research. “The time it was taking for me to go out and search on the server for the correct drawings and then review the files to see if they were the correct ones was immense. It could sometimes take several hours or days. The request for technical information was so great; we needed a way for not only me, but for everyone in the organization to be able to find the data they were looking for and access it quickly.”

With so many complicated design projects underway at once, and no version control in place, duplication of design efforts was a constant problem. (In fact, upon implementing a document management system, CPG found thousands of duplicate files that had to be cleaned up!). Two designers working on the same drawing at the same time used to happen quite a bit. Recalls Reed, “In the past you would receive the same drawing where two different designers had worked on it for separate projects and you would have to open the files and compare to see which one was the latest revision. It would take a lot of time.”