Discover how to efficiently budget for all aspects of your projects, and learn how to tackle common workflow bottlenecks and productivity hurdles. This article offers actionable insights on creating detailed budgets and managing CAD environments effectively.
Key Insights
- The article suggests that effective budgeting means being thorough and including everything, from every sheet of paper to every training class. This approach may not guarantee getting everything approved, but it ensures that nothing is overlooked and helps in securing allocation for the listed items.
- A key strategy to managing an environment with numerous CAD users is to leverage user feedback. By understanding what is not working for the users and finding solutions to their problems, you can win their trust and boost productivity.
- The article emphasizes the importance of continually identifying and addressing productivity bottlenecks. By regularly analyzing and improving the processes, you can significantly contribute to your company's profit margin, thereby enhancing your value in the organization.
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The way that I budget is basically, I just create a spreadsheet, tabs for every major category of stuff that I need. So there's hardware, software, services, consumables; granularize it out as far as makes sense for you. I then record every item that I'm going to need in that category, what it's going to cost, and if possible, a brief phrase about the justification for it. So, new plotter, $36,000; justification might be, old one was installed in the Clinton administration.
Whatever, okay, but hopefully there's a little more economical justification behind it than that. What do you include in your budget? Everything. Every sheet of paper, every pen, every pencil, every training class, everything.
If you skip over it, you're going to have trouble getting it allocated. Now, just because you include everything, does that mean you will get everything? No. But if you don't ask, you certainly won't get it.
I'm also a fan of printing some stuff out because I don't know if you guys experience the same thing as I do, but just because it was on the internet once doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be there again. So, if I find something really cool—price sheets, quotes that come in from vendors, whatever—I tend to print it out, throw it in a folder. That way I've got it.
I'll purge it a few times a year for stuff I don't need, but at least that way I have it. This allows me to continually budget. Every time I just have a thought about what I'm going to need or what I need to budget, I add it, pop it in the folder a little bit at a time.
Far, far easier. Now, coming back over to the more traditional CAD Manager workflow piece. How do you dig in and really become successful managing an environment that has many CAD users who you are not the boss of? This is a typical question for most of us, and it's a hard one to answer.
The only way that I've really found to be successful, ultimately, is to go to the user community and ask them what's broken. They'll tell you, and then you fix their problems. Slowly, surely, methodically, win the users over and get them on your side.
It kind of works like this. Where are your productivity bottlenecks? Where are the places where the workflow breaks down? Traditionally, there's always a big train wreck around the plotter. It seems like any time there's output that's being generated for jobs, it always seems to be a train wreck there.
There's some kind of bottleneck, right? Well, my goal—kind of like that traffic jam you see there on the slide—is to analyze where that wreck is on that road and go clean it up, so we can get the traffic on the road flowing better. The operational questions are: What's slowing you down? What's broken? What would you do to fix it? Now, just because we know we have a problem and we have a suggested solution doesn't mean we will be permitted to solve it. We have computers that crash all the time because they're eight years old.
What would I do to fix it? I'd buy nice new ones. Well, if they don't give you the money to do it, that's problematic. But there are a lot of things that you probably can fix that you can do for the users.
How do you get the CAD traffic flowing smoothly through your CAD department? I want to walk around and just think that way all the time. How can we do this better? What are we doing wrong? Where are the kinks in our process? You kind of need to become Sherlock Holmes to find all this stuff, and incidentally, this is your absolute number one value to your company because if you walk around making things run better, you are ultimately saving that company money, increasing the profit margin, and you are a valuable person in that topology. Do this, you'll get noticed.
Spend all your time walking around complaining about what's broken, you'll be labeled a whiner. Walk around analyzing what's broken and fixing it, you'll be a hero, especially to your users. And once management figures out you're saving them money, you'll be a hero to them too.