HomeCase StudiesEngineering project document management
Engineering firm · 120 people

Project documents found in seconds, not email threads.

A 120-person engineering firm where every project ran its own folder convention, and finding the current drawing set meant asking in three group chats — and hoping. This is how one standard project-site template put drawings, RFIs and submittals a search away on every project.

45 minsaved / person / day
1project template
100%projects on standard
The problem

Every project spoke its own filing language.

The firm ran project work the way most engineering firms do: each project lead set up folders the way they liked them. One job was organized by discipline, the next by phase, another by whichever contractor sent the files first. None of it was wrong — but none of it matched, so knowing where a document lived on one project told you nothing about where it lived on the next.

Drawings were where it hurt most. Revisions arrived by email, got saved wherever the recipient happened to be working, and superseded sets sat beside current ones with nothing but a filename to tell them apart. Finding the current drawing set meant asking in three group chats and hoping someone who knew the answer was at their desk.

The cost was invisible because it was everywhere: engineers hunting instead of engineering, the standing risk of someone working from a superseded drawing, and every person joining a project having to learn its private filing logic from scratch.

What we did

One template, enforced by automation — not memos.

The fix wasn't asking engineers to file more carefully. It was making the structure the default, so every project site starts standard and stays that way.

1
A standard project-site template

Every project gets the same site: same libraries, same structure, same place for everything. Where a document lives on one job is where it lives on all of them.

2
Content types for drawings, RFIs & submittals

Each document carries its type and key properties as metadata, so a drawing is a drawing wherever it's filed — no more folder archaeology or filename decoding.

3
Search refiners by project & discipline

Search results narrow by project and discipline, so engineers filter straight to the current set instead of scrolling a wall of look-alike filenames.

4
Auto-provisioning of new project sites

When a new project opens, its site is created from the template automatically. The standard isn't a policy anyone has to remember — it's simply what appears.

Results

The current set is one search away — on every project.

What changed, in the only numbers that matter here.

45 minsaved / person / day
1project template
100%projects on standard
Built with
SharePoint Online SharePoint search Content types Managed metadata Power Automate

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