7 Reasons Document Management Is One Of The Highlights Of BIM 360 Workflows In 2022

The AEC Associates
3 min readNov 25, 2022

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Top service providers like The AEC Associates understand the fact that design iterations and document versions make it very tough for organizations, they successfully tackle the challenge using a powerful modern tool like BIM 360 workflow in the year 2022. Storing and retrieving a great number of files makes the job even tougher, BIM 360 workflow offers numerous benefits allowing multiple users to access a centralized file storage system for convenient working and better collaboration among various teams. BIM 360 is much more than just an ordinary file storage system, it’s a web-based platform, so it’s very convenient to use and it’s easily accessible allowing you to authorize members regardless of their geographical location or time zone. This is an ideal scenario for projects involving multiple teams and requiring remote work.

Significance of document management:

Some time ago, people often wondered if BIM 360 Document Management Workflow had some substance or was just another hyped-up product. Experience has shown that it’s full of powerful, intelligent features and must be included in our project workflow in an era when we often work in collaboration with external stakeholders globally. Document Management is one of the four basic modules in BIM 360 platform, the other three being Design Collaboration, Model Coordination, and Build. Let us discuss here some reasons document management is one of the main highlights of BIM 360 Workflow.

1. Publish drawings

BIM 360 Document Management Workflow allows users to publish and upload multiple file formats from 3D models, 2D projections, images, and word documents to support the current workflow. This makes working more efficient for the entire project team.

2. Hyperlinks

It’s important to maintain links to documents for you to be able to easily switch from the floor plan view to the section view by simply clicking the view marker. Alternatively, hyperlinks can be added manually by choosing a specific document to link.

3. Permissions

BIM 360 Document Management Workflow enables the project administrators set permissions at a granular level based on company, role, or user. Thus you can store the entire project file in one single location, and still restrict certain locations to authorize members. Depending on the job to be performed by the user, one can choose from many permission levels.

4. Document sets

Managing your documents becomes much easier if you assign files to a corresponding set. This allows you to collectively group documents together based on milestones or level of completion. These documents can be conveniently sorted using the filter tool.

5. Approval Workflows

It’s essential to set up a mechanism for reviewing and approving your drawings to ensure you produce quality work. An approval workflow should be set up by project administrators to assign the responsibility of submitting the documents and reviewing them to specific people. Approvers can then go ahead and mark the drawings under different heads- approved, approved with comments, or rejected. The workflow includes sending automatic emails to everyone involved in the process.

6. Versioning

A well-established process is necessary to ensure that the latest version is always shown. Every time a modification/ alteration is made to the design, a new version is created, and the previous version is kept in the history. BIM 360 allows users to easily compare the different versions or use the older versions when required making it the current version.

7. Desktop Connector

The desktop connector ensures seamless connectivity with the BIM 360 web platform. Users are thus able to execute typical commands like open, save, delete, and so on.

Managing your drawings and documents well is imperative to avoid chaos, BIM 360 Workflow is a powerful tool to achieve this objective. This cloud-based platform offers numerous benefits like improved collaboration among stakeholders, easy access to documents from just anywhere, good control over people you want to access/ review/ comment, and effective storage and retrieval of files, to enable you to have an efficient file management system.

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The AEC Associates

CAD & BIM Outsourcing, Design Support Services for Architecture, Interiors, Engineering and Construction Industry