managing updated drawings

Here is the problem

I create a house. I call it p.dwg

I send it to my engineer, who adds framing and foundation.
he send it back to me and calls it pE.dwg. I copy the work he has done on
pE.dwg
over to p.dwg, then trash the pE.dwg file

I do this in case there have been modifications to the p.dwg file while the
engineer had it.
(things that did not effect the engineering)

Is there a better way to keep up with this?

Thanks,
jojo

 

Sounds like a lot of unnecessary work. Why not just compare pE.dwg to your
p.dwg, and fix only those things (if any) that fit your category of "did not
effect [sic] the engineering"?
___

 

Hi Paul,

Is there an automated way to do that?
Several people may work on one drawing and when the engineering comes
back I may not know exactly what was and what was not fixed.
jojo

 

Whoa ... pardon my saying so, but it sounds like you need to take a serious
look at improving your document control. You should have a copy of the file
as it was before it was sent out for engineering; just have someone with a
sharp eye compare that with the engineered one, and make the needed changes.
___

 

I don't mind you saying so at all...Document control is one of the many
issues I'm striving to improve!
Thanks for your help,
jojo

 

We do structural engineering. I take the Architects drawing and xref it into
our drawing as a guide for our work (we draw all our own linework), the
architects drawing is then unloaded. We send the architect our drawings
(minus the xrefs). They xref our drawing into theirs for coordination. When
the architect sends us updates, I replace their previous drawing with the
updated copy and reload. I then compare theirs with ours for changes.

As a side note we keep copies of all of our drawings that go out and all
source drawings that come in. For example we would have folder (2004-09-01)
A Progress and folder (2004-10-01) B Progress. We never trash anything. We
can prove in court (if necessary) what changed at every step in the design
process. I previously worked for a firm that did not and it cost them alot
of money.

Additionally we add a digital signature to every cad file that we send out.
If someone moves a column or changes a beam size, plots it and trouble
occurrs, we can prove the plot did not come from one of our electronic
files.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you are doing things wrong ... just
wanted to provide some food for thought.