You're struggling to keep your engineering documents organized. What's the best way to get started?

DMS is an essential to keep the documents organised. In my view the following are important considerations to be kept in mind while choosing DMS. A. User experience (this is what user care) 1. Documents should be searchable. 2. It should be hosted in such a way that it can be accessed in a fraction of a second, to allow seamless user experience. 3. Editable docs should have collaboration capability. 4. 2-3 level of categorisation will help to find docs quickly. More levels will be detrimental to find it easily. B. Security, access control etc (this is what organisation care) 1. Secure access, access/permission control. 2. Version control, and easy & quick access of prior version are important 3. Disk space 4. Cost, one time/recurring

In case you work in a production/ manufacturing environment I recommend the Value Stream of the product as general folders. Each project goes into those folders and has subfolders for the different phases it them. Once the project is done, like a optimization of the line, you take the standards created by the project and put them into the correct folders. For example: You created a new maintenance plan during the project for a new production line. Once the project is done, line is up and running, you close the project and transfer this document to the maintenance folder of the production line where every single part of the line has the maintenance documents stored.

One thing I've found particularly helpful is using meaningful names without spaces. If you copy them from another program, Windows tends to cut the hyperlinks in the first place. Also, it is better to use only English symbols to avoid possible problems.

In my experience people tend to overdue it a bit here. Some of the naming conventions out there are too complex to remember. It always reminds me on the Johnny Decimal System. I understand where this is coming from, but your brain should focus on other things than remembering that convention. I try to work with maximum of 2-3 subfolders, use important keywords and the status of the document (released, ongoing, etc).

In the realm of document reviews, clarity is key! A solid review matrix and clearly defined document owners make all the difference. When everyone's on the same page, the review process flows smoothly. Regular check-ins and open communication keep things on track.

the system you implement should be intuative from the beginning. Nevertheless, we are all different, therefore everyone should be on the same page when it comes to the system and how to use it. In my experience, if there is too much of defense against the system from the staff, it is probably too complicated.

From my own experience, the Microsoft 365 suite works just fine for distributed teams which produce technical documents. For instance you can collaborate in a Word document hosted on SharePoint, using its reviewing and commenting functionality. If anything goes wrong, you can restore the previous version of the document from the archive.