| Personal
productivity and efficiency are key elements which
can affect the professional's ability to generate a
profit - architects, in particular, have a unique
talent for disregarding structured office management
systems in favour of "organised chaos".
To many architects
in Africa and the world, Chaos Management is a valid and much practiced system of
architectural administration. This is particularly
true when it comes to managing electronic
information such as CAD drawing files, word
processor documents, graphics and photographs.
The current popular
method of human resources management which many
architects engage is the employment of contract
staff for short, project length related terms. This
has many economic benefits but it has several
important disadvantages - particularly the inability
to administer cohesive and continuous Practice
Systems. Enter
the ArchiNET Utilities ... This
particular set of information management tools -
dubbed the Call Utilities - are in fact just
small independent segments of modular code from the
ArchiNET Practice Management System which are
frequently utilised by people who do not use
management systems to keep track of practice
information and as a result can never find anything! The
Call Utilities are small programs which you can
easily download from the Net, email as an attachment
or carry around on a floppy disk. They do only one
thing: scan your disk drive for CAD and other
document files and build a database which is easy
and quick to scan. You can launch the associated
application and view the file at the press of a
single keystroke. The
next time you need to find CAD drawings on a
computer with no file management system try out the
incredibly fast and simple CallCAD Diagnostics
utility which will generate a list of drawing files
on your PC's drive in seconds. When
you're ready to try something a little more
sophisticated (not much more...) try out CallCAD and
CallDOC (or CallStar for StarOffice users): these
drive scanners generate a simple database of your
documents and list them in a way which makes finding
drawings as simple process and enables quick access
and launch.
In the following
issues of Architect Africa we will be looking at the
more sophisticated ArchiNET solutions, particularly
the document and drawing management and issuing
systems. Document
and Drawing issues are an everyday occurrence in the
practice and are essential to billing and cost
control. The traditional method of issue control by
filling in forms with carbon paper copies is dated, inefficient
and costly. In the next issue we will present a
working system that is as practical as it is easy to
install and maintain.
|
