Storing Cad Files

I just got tasked with cleaning up our cad files because i recently took a autocad drafting class before a landed this job. We have 9 lines with various pieces of equipment by many different vendors that make up each line.

The old maintenance manager here used to keep up with the cad file sand it looks like he didi a poor job. They are all on the network T: drive but it appears they opened them on that drive because i see.bak files and plot log files on there.

They have a electrical file and then a machine file with a folder for each machine. The machine file has electrical and mechanical cad files.

I wanted help on how others store these? By machine and have mechanical and electrical folder under the machine or have a mechanical root folder and a electrical root folder then a folder for each machine in each.

To store them by mechanical / electrical or by machine that is the question. There are pdf versions of the cad files as well. I have no ideas on how to handle those.

By machine and have mechanical and electrical folder under the machine

Click to expand...

This would be my preference.

Tim,

When i worked for an oem, we had this problem, over 100k of files all in one folder.

now in maintenance, i do the following method:
the main folder is the line,building, mach name serial #.

then sub folders for electrical dwgs, mechanical dwgs, manuals, setup procedure, calibration, po's, plc, hmi, displays, maint requirements.

works great.
regards,
james

James how do you seperate the drawing revisions? We keep old revisions if ever needed. Example on many lines we have started to replace dc motors and VSD with AC type but we still keep the old dc system drawings also.

@ Tim Ganz

I like line then mech or elec myself but we use autodesk vault for drawings. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?id=4502718&siteID=123112

We use Adobe PDF versions also for our Techs.

I don't store those with my cad files because we use vault. I guess you could but i have never tried it.

Are you saying you have some drawings that are PDF only? I would contact the machine builder and try to get CAD if so. They are real handy when changes need to be documented.