Stacks of Paper Slows Work Flow

Based in the heart of the wine country in the city of Santa Rosa, California, MKM handles the full range of structural engineering projects, including residential, commercial, and public works. On a typical project initial design drafts are created by the principal engineer, printed out in full-size sheet sets, and handed off to a staff engineer for review and markup. This working set is then passed to a structural technician who revises it in an AutoCAD® software program based on the engineer’s redlines. Once complete, a fresh set is then printed out for another round of reviews, this time by both the engineer and the client. The number of review cycles depends on the size and scope of job, but three to five cycles is the average. This means that on nearly every job, MKM has to print out full-size sheet sets and deliver them to job sites or client offices a minimum of three times.

What Douglas and his colleagues found so interesting about Autodesk® Design Review was that it had the potential to replace paper-based design review with a purely digital process. A powerful, easy-to-use file viewing and redlining application, Design Review facilitates team communication by enabling anyone to view and print DWF and DWG files, and send round-trip markups directly back into AutoCAD® 2005.“ Like any company, we regard saving time and money as primary goals,” said Douglas.“ In Design Review, we saw a solution that could help us conserve paper and cut time waiting for prints.”