Anyone with experience feel free to shoot me down or give me an Attaboy for accuracy and laziness.
The new position is to schedule R&D and resultant manufacturing.
There is an engineering process of validation, with Prototype at the earliest level of development. The tendency has been to get to Prototype and move on to the next new thing. Feedback and issues have been accumulating around prototypes but the drawings' feedback and corrections are not implemented to clean up the original drawing (... Rev4) and move the drawing package forward in its QA process from Preliminary to Comprehensive to Final review.
Drawings trailing 5 shop queries, an NCR and 12 installation corrections are often included in subsequent manufacturing projects, R&D of new products or variant models. I may have a drawing activity in 5 projects and it is not obvious what the state of that drawing was in any iteration (or what version procurement, vendors or production have in their files.)
The best long-term solution seems to be to plot the original R&D project as it proceeds to final completion, linking the current drawing level of completion to each new application. Now I can report that Rev4 is implemented in both current manufactures, but only Prototype in three other variant models pending production contracts.
The engineering Scrum gets some new Backlog items for the spare 10 minutes here and there, possibly prodded to Next by any new production runs.
Linking instead of having multiple instances of a drawing moves the original project container forward as some drawings get corrections and some remain intact as the package progresses to Final review approval with the client agency(ies).
Essentially, I am reducing the R&D enterprise to a list of drawings which are linked singly or as groups to an original project, new/variant R&D projects or multiple manufacturing projects where the links are from the level of completion of the drawing when linked. Of course, any new print job of the drawing is current, but manufacturing, procurement and vendors would need their dated copies refreshed and the links detail the housekeeping. Filtering for linked projects gives an inventory report of outdated or current level for drawings in distribution.
Get the update that all 5 linked projects were updated to Rev 4, verify completion and change the 5 links to Rev 4.
Anyone with experience, feel free to shoot me down or give me an Attaboy.