Publishing Vertex BD to the shop floor: what is in a publication and what the team does with it

The drawing office in Vertex BD knows everything about a project: every wall, every floor, every roof, worked out precisely down to the board and the profile. On the shop floor, what is often left of that is no more than a stack of printouts at the saw station, or a pdf on a tablet that is little more than a photo of that same printout. Anyone standing at the assembly table who cannot read a dimension properly, because the drawing was printed too small or the detail falls just outside the frame, has two options: call the drawing office, or guess.

Both cost time, and a guess sometimes costs more than that. A panel cut on the basis of a wrongly read dimension cannot be undone. Meanwhile, that same information, accurate to the millimetre, has been sitting in the model the drawing office works with all along. The problem is not what has been drawn, but what reaches the team from that model.

Vertex BD already has a step for this: publishing a project. What such a publication actually contains, and what a team on the shop floor does with it in practice, is less obvious than it sounds.

What a published set contains

When you publish a project from Vertex BD, you generally take three things with it that belong together:

• the 3D model, with the elements as they have been drawn: walls, floors and roofs, including the profiles and boards worked into them;
• the 2D drawings that come from that same model, such as element or production drawings and floor plans;
• the cutting lists or materials lists that follow from the model.

That looks like three separate documents, but it is one whole. The model, the drawing and the list come from the same source. That is the difference with a stack of printouts: on paper they are three separate things that can each go missing or go out of date on their own, in a published project they stay linked to each other.

Tap a wall and the drawing appears beside it

Because the model and the drawing come from the same source, at the workstation you can tap an element in the 3D model and get the matching production drawing beside it, with the dimensions that apply to that specific piece. It works the other way round too: start from the drawing, and you find the element in the model. You no longer search through a stack of paper for the sheet that belongs to the piece in front of you, you tap it.

How that link looks in practice at the workstation and the saw station, you can read on Vertex BD on the shop floor.

A publication is a snapshot, not a fixed given

A publication shows the state of the project at the moment it was made. If the drawing office later changes something about a wall or a detail, a new publication is needed to pass that on. Anyone working with an old printout in the meantime does not see that something has changed: paper tells you nothing about its own age.

The approach to that is simple. There is one place where the most recent publication of a project sits, and the screen shows clearly which version you are currently looking at. That way nobody has to guess whether they are looking at the latest state or at something that has since been superseded.

Version control is not, then, a button you press once and never think about again. It is an agreement between the drawing office and the team about when publishing happens and where everyone looks. That agreement has to be known and followed, or even a good system will not work.

What is in the model is at the workstation. The rest is not

Publishing is not a new step for most drawing offices. It is an action that today mostly already happens towards production or CNC. Field-Viewer connects to that: no second way of modelling is added, and the drawing office does not have to prepare anything extra specifically for the shop floor.

That also has a flip side: what you want to see at the workstation has to be in the model. A dimension, a name or a property that the draughtsman never entered does not appear on the screen at the saw station either. A publication makes visible what has been drawn, it does not add anything that is missing.

What the team on the shop floor does with it

On the shop floor, a team uses a publication for a limited number of very concrete things:

• looking up the element they are working on at that moment, with the drawing right beside it;
• checking an unclear dimension in the model themselves, instead of calling the drawing office;
• turning layers on or off to see what is under a finish or cladding;
• checking whether the part arriving at the assembly table really is the same as what is on the screen.

This is not an elaborate way of working that first has to be learned. They are the same questions that are asked today too, on the phone or over a colleague’s shoulder, but then answered at the place where the work happens. How that comes together on the rest of the shop floor, from the saw station to the tablet on site, is set out on the page about the workshop.

Where it goes wrong

Two things go wrong most often. The first is a publication that is not complete: part of the project has been changed but not published again with it, so the drawing and the model start to drift apart without anyone noticing straight away. The second is a lack of clarity about who publishes and when: if that has not been agreed, it eventually does not happen at the right moment, and the shop floor falls back on the old habit of printouts and phone calls.

Neither is a technical problem. They are agreements that the drawing office and the team have to make together, and that matter at least as much as the software that makes the publication visible at the workstation.