Phantom CAD Technicians!

[CAD-1311]

So here's the issue.

One CAD team of just over a dozen supporting a multi disciplinary company that has over 400 employees. 70+ LT licences installed on employees workstations that are not within the CAD team, this historically was to help them draft designs that are then normally passed onto the CAD team to work up in more detail etc. In theory a dozen CAD technicians supporting 400 staff should mean the team will be busy all day every day!

The problem now arises when the workloads of these LT users are a little light they suddenly become CAD technicians and hold onto the CAD work to help stay busy causing the CAD team to be extremely light.

Personally, I think the best fix to stop this happening and to keep the CAD team fully busy would be to remove the CAD LT licences from many users workstations but this would just cause carnage!

Does anyone know of a lighter version of AutoCAD LT that will allow people to maybe do quick modifications and check drawings only? AutoCAD 360 doesn't quite work with it working in the cloud.

How would other managers tackle this issue?

Thanks in advance

[rkmcswain]

In the words of CAD Manager Mark Kiker - "Don't let a management problem become a technology problem"

No, there isn't an "AutoCAD LT, light". What would you envision this program being able to do? Make text edits only?

Going back to the first line in this post, this is a classic management problem. Have the offenders instructed to NOT mess with the drawings. Problem solved.

[tedg]

In the words of CAD Manager Mark Kiker - "Don't let a management problem become a technology problem"

No, there isn't an "AutoCAD LT, light". What would you envision this program being able to do? Make text edits only?

Going back to the first line in this post, this is a classic management problem. Have the offenders instructed to NOT mess with the drawings. Problem solved.

Yes^^
It's a known fact the cad technicians bill out much lower then engineers/architects. So the fact that they are doing work below their pay-grade is a work flow/management problem.
They need to be doing their engineering and architecture that they were hired to do and keep the production work flowing to the cad team.

If that means hitting the pavement to help drum up work than so be it.

[CAD-1311]

No, there isn't an "AutoCAD LT, light". What would you envision this program being able to do? Make text edits only?

Pretty much yes. Well a little more than that.......

As our offices are spread all around the country (and that we still don't have a CDM in place), if a very minor amendment is needed then I can justify why project manager would want to quickly make the adjustment instead of spending time explaining the amendment(s) via a call or an email when it will only take them 2 minutes to do. But then giving them access to LT also gives them the tools to do more than that which defeats the purpose! Catch 22 !

If that means hitting the pavement to help drum up work than so be it.

That's exactly what I want to do but I can see the backlash it will cause at many levels! I just know it's not going to be taken lightly, hence why giving something extremely basic to replace LT with may soften the blow slightly.

[cadtag]

True View, Design Review, Bluebeam Revue, Acrobat Pro. cheaper and more consistent with a qa/qc process than random Billy Joe Engineer making ad-hoc edits. Look at the file in TrueView, plot it to PDF or DWF, markup in ADR or one of the others, and email, the thing. Bingo-- Audit trail to who did what when. Handy when you end up in court.... or want to pass an ISO Quality check.

[dgorsman]

When something wrong gets into a drawing there needs to be accountability; you need to trace where that change came from, supervisor or technician. Without that markup it's unknown if the change is actually valid or not. Those kinds of questions lead to churn (mystery change => take time to change it back => field/fab/client/etc. notices it doesn't work => change is redone).

And, being a bit of an *** about it but... It's easy to end up a little "top heavy" when the supervisors/engineers/whatever are well connected with management. Bottom line still has to be consider though. If the engineers/supervisors are frequently moonlighting internally it may be time to shed some excess weight.

[Dinochrome]

How would other managers tackle this issue?

Vault keeps pretty good dibs on who/what time and you can set permissions.