Drawings have many, many iterations, and tracking them was cumbersome and disjointed for many of our architecture, engineering, and construction customers.
Based on her prior work experience in architecture, VPO Product Designer Kelly Rickli knew "we needed to capture metadata (categorizing information about a drawing, such as discipline or percentage complete) and make it possible for the customer to sort by that information in their expansive library of drawing versions."
Kelly developed VPO’s Issuance Summary Module to track iterations of drawings and specifications from programming through contract documents. "I understand how drawings are developed, because I used to do it."
VPO customers benefit from Kelly's construction experience, because she knew that with such an overwhelming number of drawing and specification versions, we would need to assign properties for sorting—such as date or phase—rather than setting up nested folders and sub-folders for a user to search through when looking for the current version. "Using our filters, a user finds the current drawings instantaneously," she explains.
Leveraging ball-in-court and workflows, VPO’s Issuance Summary Module organizes files in a way that facilitates better collaboration, and better supports process enforcement. According to Kelly, "Construction owners quickly and easily see exactly what they want and need to see, in terms of process creation."
This concept can be used throughout cloud-based VPO construction project management software, for tracking and managing documents with metadata. "In fact," Kelly says, "a VPO customer requested that we use our metadata method for tracking and distributing Meeting Minutes as well--and because VPO is nimble and customizable, we were happy to deliver on that request in a matter of weeks, not months or years."