When I came on to my current company a few months ago, CAD management was completely absent and when I informed my manager I thought we should have some type of CAD policy users can look to for guidance, he promptly made me the de facto CAD Manager.

 

As such, I'm trying to research the best way to manage the various projects we currently have in development.  Specifically we have two specific contracts with completely different drawing requirements (i.e. different Layers, Title Blocks, etc.) and one of those contracts has different requirements depending on the type of drawing (electrical, piping, structure, etc).

 

I have setup read-only drawing templates for each specific discipline of each project and currently the designer will just open the relevant drawing and save it with a new name.

 

There are several drawbacks to this, the first being that for one project, the zone numbers on each sheet of the format are continuous (i.e. Sheet 01 has zones 1 thru 8, Sheet 2 has zones 9 thru 16, etc.).  I've manually created 10 sheets thinking none of the drawings currently being worked would have more than that.  Our electrical lead just informed me he has a wiring table drawing that he anticipates will have upwards of 50 sheets.

 

I know there is a better way to create the necessary sheets and I do have some experience with lsp files but not enough to figure out what I should do.

 

I have created a lsp routine and associated dcl that displays the various projects we are working on.  The user selects the project and clicks the 'OK' button which in turn loads the lsp file linked to the selection.  That lsp file starts a new drawing and loads the correct layers.  I'd like to add a sheet function that either asks the user how many sheets they want to create or load just the first two sheets.  If it only loads the first two sheets, I'd like to create an add/subtract sheet routine that when ran will detect how many sheets are currently in the drawing, then add or subtract sheets based on what is needed.

 

I'd appreciate some opinions on how I could go about doing all or some of this. Thanks in advance.

 

Lonnie