It’s All about Document Control

By Evan Coulter

“Is this the latest version of the spreadsheet?”

Evan Coulter

You won’t hear any of us say these words anymore at UCEC because we’ve recently started using a secure Google Drive to share, edit and update documents. This has been a helpful and efficient change because spreadsheets and drawings are no longer confined to a local server or updated on someone’s hard drive but never shared. With our secure Google Drive, anyone can see everyone’s changes.

As we’ve grown, our document control process needed some TLC. There are so many moving parts to our business, and we knew we needed to find a tool where we could collaborate in real-time and track changes.

Change is constant at UCEC. So much so, we have a saying here: “No change, no happy.” We expect change constantly, whether it’s a request from a customer or a tweak we want to make to a project. Perhaps a requested part is now obsolete. Or perhaps the customer wants to use a different part than planned. Construction changes happen, too, in far-off places, and that affects our plans. All of these changes need to be noted in a “living” document that everyone can access.

Our document control project is one more way we’re constantly improving as a team. We just don’t settle for “good enough.”

“Every job has a Bill of Materials (BOM) that nearly everyone in the company accesses and occasionally modifies,” says Operations Support Manager Zach Fothergill. “By utilizing Google Drive, we are all able to collaborate better; multiple people can change a document at the same time; and on the rare occasion we make a mistake, we can search through the document’s history and restore what may be needed.”

This change is a great step forward for UCEC, and yet another way our efficiencies will pay off for our customers as we continue to refine our processes. Stay tuned for what we think of next!

Evan is VP of Business Operations at UCEC.

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