Saffa
Member
I've had a bit of a curly one come up today and I'm not sure how best to approach it. Interested to hear if anyone else has had this experience before.
We have a maintenance contract for a water authority here, and we have previously done the majority of their upgrade, maintenance and even new capital works projects on the electrical front. Treatment Plants, Pump Stations etc. I've only been here for 5 years, but a number of my guys came over from the previous contractor... Contract generally gets renewed via tender process every 6-10 years. The client has little understanding of anything electrical and they rely heavily on the maintenance contractor for everything that has wires, code or a radio.
At the start of the contract we were issued a big ol USB of all the previous contractor's electrical drawings (which included the contractor before that too... probably around 15 years worth of .DWG files!). No problem at all, when we had to make changes we left their title block and simply marked up with revision details. If a site was significantly re-built and we had to do new drawings, only then would we "make it ours" and copy the remaining parts into our title block, logo etc. I like to think that "drawn by", "checked by" and "approved by" used to mean something on drawings, especially 10 years down the track if someone finds a problem!
So about 6 months ago, the client decides they want to engage a 3rd party electrical consultant (one of those... "Yeah I'm buddies with a guy" kind of arrangements) to come in and do some work on sorting out their electrical asset register etc. They ask for all the electrical drawings for all client assets, which we dutifully supplied.
Then today we get told that we are to use their "new" drawing register for all future work. I take a look, and lo and behold, every drawing has been rather amateurishly moved into a new title block with all our information stripped from it, and these guys initials slipped into the "Drawn by", "checked by" and "approved by" fields.
We are in that tricky position where the contract is up for re-tender in a few months. Not the best time to be making waves. But I'm just amazed that anyone who considers themselves a professional would do this on such a massive scale. I've done drawings for clients where they have wanted their own title block because the drawing is going into their drawing set with mech, civil etc, but they still respect that it's your work, and they leave you name and company details on the title block, next to theirs.
In some ways I don't really care... there's a bunch of terrible designs out there from previous contractors, and these guys have now put their names against it... but I'm just wondering if this situation has happened to anyone else, and what did you do about it? Am I over-reacting to this and letting my ego get in the way?
Most of the drawings were paid for in one way or another by the client, so they can technically do what they want with them.
We have a maintenance contract for a water authority here, and we have previously done the majority of their upgrade, maintenance and even new capital works projects on the electrical front. Treatment Plants, Pump Stations etc. I've only been here for 5 years, but a number of my guys came over from the previous contractor... Contract generally gets renewed via tender process every 6-10 years. The client has little understanding of anything electrical and they rely heavily on the maintenance contractor for everything that has wires, code or a radio.
At the start of the contract we were issued a big ol USB of all the previous contractor's electrical drawings (which included the contractor before that too... probably around 15 years worth of .DWG files!). No problem at all, when we had to make changes we left their title block and simply marked up with revision details. If a site was significantly re-built and we had to do new drawings, only then would we "make it ours" and copy the remaining parts into our title block, logo etc. I like to think that "drawn by", "checked by" and "approved by" used to mean something on drawings, especially 10 years down the track if someone finds a problem!
So about 6 months ago, the client decides they want to engage a 3rd party electrical consultant (one of those... "Yeah I'm buddies with a guy" kind of arrangements) to come in and do some work on sorting out their electrical asset register etc. They ask for all the electrical drawings for all client assets, which we dutifully supplied.
Then today we get told that we are to use their "new" drawing register for all future work. I take a look, and lo and behold, every drawing has been rather amateurishly moved into a new title block with all our information stripped from it, and these guys initials slipped into the "Drawn by", "checked by" and "approved by" fields.
We are in that tricky position where the contract is up for re-tender in a few months. Not the best time to be making waves. But I'm just amazed that anyone who considers themselves a professional would do this on such a massive scale. I've done drawings for clients where they have wanted their own title block because the drawing is going into their drawing set with mech, civil etc, but they still respect that it's your work, and they leave you name and company details on the title block, next to theirs.
In some ways I don't really care... there's a bunch of terrible designs out there from previous contractors, and these guys have now put their names against it... but I'm just wondering if this situation has happened to anyone else, and what did you do about it? Am I over-reacting to this and letting my ego get in the way?
Most of the drawings were paid for in one way or another by the client, so they can technically do what they want with them.