‘Digital drawings are easy to share, which is also where the biggest risk lies. A good management system prevents proliferation’

Vgib is a housing consultancy and project management company. Vgib advises on fire safety, multi-year repair and maintenance plans, and they supervise construction projects and coordinate relocations. To manage the data of all those projects, Vgib chose Prostream. We asked engineer Kevin van den Tillaart about his experiences.

Kevin says: ‘We manage all kinds of data for our customers, building files around fire safety for housing associations or drawings for large companies. Regulations require large companies to submit up-to-date drawings when an inspector visits. For example, in the field of legionella or electrical inspections. These drawings are often not available and with this in mind we developed a drawings library. That library had since become outdated and I soon realised that software is not our world. You have to be constantly working on it to make everything work properly. So we didn’t want to develop the new solution in-house, so we started looking for a party to do that for us. We knew Pro4all because we were already working with Snagstream, so Prostream was a logical choice. Our added value lies in the fact that before releasing a modified drawing, we check it for drawing agreements and information loss.

Suppliers sometimes find it exciting to work with new software, but it actually comes very naturally. It works very intuitively, which really causes few problems.

Effective cooperation and short lines

Initially, the system was only used as a drawings library, but it is now used much more widely, Kevin says. ‘We now put many more documents in it. We also let suppliers work in the drawings themselves and process revisions. The drawings are divided into disciplines so we have a structural underlay for all installation, fixture and safety drawings. The moment a wall is installed, this drawing is always underneath it as a substrate and then the other drawing is also updated. Suppliers sometimes find it exciting to work with new software, but it’s actually very natural. It works very intuitively, which really causes few problems.

We want to have influence on who, where to access and who can put back what drawing, where.

Delimited access rights

For Vgib, it is especially important to be able to set users’ rights. Kevin: ‘We want to have influence on who, where is allowed to access and who can put back which drawing, where. We have created a special folder from which customers or suppliers can download drawings. They are also allowed to upload back into that folder. They prepare the drawing, we check it and, if everything is fine, we put the drawing back where it belongs. This is a safe way of working and prevents incorrect drawings from being uploaded or different versions from circulating. Any errors we pick out here.’

Editing drawings

It is also always clear that a drawing is ‘under construction’. ‘When a drawing is edited, we turn on the snowflake icon to freeze the document. This makes it clear that the drawing is being edited. The person downloading the drawing to start using it clicks the snowflake icon and once we have checked the edit, we turn the snowflake off again.’ Kevin also finds the version control in Prostream useful. ‘We don’t use it on a daily basis, but sometimes after a while you get the question of when exactly something was changed, and by whom. You can then look that up easily. This is also much clearer than all the separate folders and difficult names with ones and twos behind them.’

Preventing sprawl

With the advent of digital drawings, it has become very easy to share drawings with each other, and therein lies directly the biggest risk. Because many parties have drawings, they keep revisions of their work on their own drawings. This creates drawings in various places with both current and outdated information. This is not a good way of working Kevin points out. ‘Up-to-date drawings should be available in one place and as the property of the client.’

One place where all data resides, available to everyone 24/7.

Added value

The biggest added value of working with Prostream, according to Kevin, is therefore ‘that we have one place where all the data is, which is available to everyone 24/7 on a laptop or tablet, no matter what device you have in front of you at the time.’