Why AEC Firms Need M-Files

If you work in the AEC industry, you know how important it is to work off of the most up-to-date information. Simple mistakes due to lack of document version control can lead to project delays, misuse of resources, tear-downs, and in extreme circumstances, a point of failure that has the potential to lead to an accident.

That’s why your business has so many process checks in place, and takes document version control so seriously — because in the AEC industry, a mistake can have dire consequences. But what if you could be positive you were working off the most recent version of a document, without having to triple and quadruple check with your team?

AUTOMATED VERSION CONTROL SAVES TIME

For businesses that live on contracts, time is money. Take a second to think about how much time in your day is spent communicating with your team to determine if a blueprint or plan is the most recent version of the document. Individually, each conversation may be a minute, five minutes or even longer.

Those minutes add up throughout the lifetime of a contract, and over time, can lead to a multitude of wasted hours. This is in addition to the slow-down that occurs every time someone on your team needs to double-check the version of a document.

HOW M-FILES PREVENTS MISTAKES

This is where the content management solution, M-Files comes in. M-Files is a platform designed to work within your existing digital framework — so if you use AutoCAD, M-Files will integrate with it. If you use Quickbooks to keep track of finances, M-Files integrates with that as well.

Because M-Files is capable of integrating with virtually every other software on the market, it can efficiently and reliably organize unstructured data — meaning it can read documents like PDFs and image files, as well as standard data documents like Microsoft Excel or Word.

After sifting through all of the files on your network, M-Files will then organize your files using metadata, rather than folders. This means your files are readily available to the employees who interact with them. They can be easily searched using keywords in the document. Because M-Files leverages AI learning to organize this data, it can recognize patterns in work behavior, and auto-populate your employees’ digital workstations with the files most pertinent to their daily tasks.

Most importantly, M-Files tracks all changes made to a file, noting when the changes were made, who made them, and each instance of the edit. Once the document is saved by the employee working on it, the document will be updated throughout your entire organization; and if a change was made in error, the changes can easily be reverted via the change log that saves every version of a document.

M-FILES SAVES YOU TIME AND MONEY

When all of your employees are working through personalized, shared workspaces, there is no need to slow down a project to ensure version control — M-Files does it for you.

If you’d like to learn more about how M-Files works, check out a recording of our live event, Coffee With Cobb: Folders are Dead, Metadata is Alive.