Cad Person/Department Survey

[bcbnine]

I was hoping that everyone could help me gather some information as to how your company is running so that I can prove something to my company. My company is against having a cad person/department to handle any and all cad/modeling issues. We have a couple of designers that currently do all the duties that the cad person/department I feel should be doing. Plus we are short of designers with our work load and are basically loosing valuable work time helping others and setting things up

I believe that we should have a cad person/department to handle all cad/modeling support, training, updating, set up computers/software, Project Administrator duties, catalogs, specs, etc. This cad person/department would answer to our Drafting/Design manager not IT and have every network rights possible to perform the job(s).

Could you please post what you company is doing? What are the roles/duties? Is it one person or a department?

Thank you so much for the help?

[dave]

Sort of a mix with us. It was 95% in the design dept. but we have since gone to a 70% design 30% IT phased approach. IT controls servers, licensing, and DB's which leaves the catalogs, standards, project admin and such with design. That being said there is harmony between dept's and when design asks for something they generally get it. I know of other situations though where IT clashes with everyone who wants to get within 50 ft of the server room. When I worked for the design dept. and served the project admin role, I had almost admin level permission.

Also, if you're dealing with sarbanes oxley (SOX) compliance then that is a tremendous strain on IT and it is necessary for them to lock the place down.

In either case, going to war against IT makes it twice as hard to get anything done.

[HybridAWD]

CAD Manager --> Overseas CAD operations, sits in all of the big meetings, yada yada

3D Senior Design Lead --> Leads the 3D design group (basically assistant manager)

3D Designer --> Simply works on 3D models

Site Planner --> Deals with nothing but site plans

2d Senior Design Lead --> Overseas all 2D work, distributes among users, Admin 2d Projects, Troubleshoots issues....

2D Designer ---> Works on 2D P&ID's, Q-Equipment Drawings, Process Flow Diagrams

IT- Backs up daily for us, no real hand in the cookie jar.


Our 3D and 2D lead pretty much setup any server stuff needed as far as projects go. Now IT does help with some of this stuff, but they mainly leave this operation up to us. We structure our own network drive and we are the only ones with read/write/delete capabilities. It helps keep out all of those pesky engineers.

So to break it down it's like 95% Design Group, %5 IT.

[Aplant Monkey]

Ours seems to be a bit different than most of yours. We had it a couple of years ago where the Piping Manager had the Cadd support person working for them. We grew way to fast and needed to change. We created a new department called Engineering Applications. Under this is the entire Cadd support network. We have a Cadd manager who looks after JUST AutoCad related stuff for users. We then have a PDS Dept and a AutoPlant Dept where there are specialist in each field. I work under the AP section as a Project Lead for Admin support. Our IT department is totally separate and only sets up the Hardware side of things. They also look after the setup of our DB's. Once set up it is the responsibilty of the Admin lead to maintain the server for their specific job. The job I am running has 20 designers currently. I do not answer to the Piping designers or Civil or Electrical. They come to me with their issues and I address as needed. I am equal to the Various design leads in terms of management structure. I then answer to the Department head of the AP group.

Hope this helps

[dave]

Do any of you have CAE teams devoted to automation and tool building?

[Packin31]

No teams here.

[Colby]

Do any of you have CAE teams devoted to automation and tool building?

Yes

Me Myself And I

That is my basic job function is to Automate The Hell out of applications....

[dave]

do any side work?

[bioPiper]

That's the most fun part of my job. Increasingly, a smaller part of my job, since no one likes to take me off of "billable" hours to do the work.