Electronic Files

If your are not a professional (licensed)

and I release a cad file to you I can be in big trouble.

If your are not a professional (licensed)

I am a PLS in both states I work in.

I don't do much construction staking anymore, but my experience is that paper plans have become an adjunct to the digital versions, despite claims to the contrary. Most of the paper plans I encounter don't contain sufficient dimensions to allow staking of all the elements shown, so you're left with the choice of sending an endless stream of RFIs to the engineer or using the digital plans to extract staking data.

The client paying them should be the one directing them to distribute the file. Tell the client you will need X days for review after you get the file before you can begin staking.

I have never understood why some companies are so darn anal about their plan files either. If I was the client I might want to consider a different source for my engineering services.

I have mixed emotions about giving our engineering electronic files to another surveyor to do stakeout. Sometimes it's a legit situation. But when the other surveyor low balls me for the stakeout assuming he'll get our electronic files to save him time and expense, I have a problem. After all, why should I work against myself.

I wonder if this might be the situation in your case. The engineering firm may be wishing his survey crew was doing the stakeout, but you underbid him. So why should he be interested in helping you put his crews out of work?

My experience is that when they don't want to give you the cad files is often because there are technical problem's with the cad plan that are to time consuming to fix such as overshoots and undershoots of intersecting cad lines, scale factor problems, rotation and co ordinate system problems.

If they send you the file, you pick up on all these problems and wonder how they ever get any work, often the errors are due to junior cad jockeys being unchecked or supervised and just plugging pointless dimensions and co ordinates onto a plan.

I often get co ordinate lists with the Y & X columns the wrong way around, the constants are not indicated and the incorrect + or - in front of the co ordinate, sometimes they are not even in meters, but millimeters... try explain that to an architectural cad jockey.

In this case the surveyor from the engineering company that prepared the plans cannot bid on the staking (conflict of interest).

If your are not a professional (licensed)

Then we should be o.k.
Sign a release and we should be able to work together.

Why should he make your life easier, without you compensating him for doing so?

I'm not saying this is true in the above scenario, but in general.

I run into this problem on occasion.

When faced with a engineering company that won't release the electronic drawings for a project, one can assume that said drawings are inaccurate or substandard and don't reflect the latest changes, and said company doesn't want to waste their time making all the necessary changes even though they have probably been paid to do so. The only other reason is that they expect to "get paid" again for something they have already been paid for.

If said company refuses to comply with my request, I remove them from the scenario and go through either the owner or the lead Architect (whomever it was that commissioned the electronic drawings in the first place).

Usually within hours of contacting the owner or lead Architect, I receive an e-mail containing the release forms from the engineer, who is now suddenly eager to comply.

This is a common scenario here and there are several engineering companies that refuse to give CAD files. I try and work through the owner but even then some still won't turn the files over. I simply redraw it myself. Sooner or later they always call asking for a CAD file from me and I remind them of the fact that they refuse to share with me and tell them if they want a file to have the owner of the company call me. I have yet to get that call.

I dont go to the site with out the cad file . I jump up and down until its released .I will put so much pressure on the client to pressure the engineer i always get it. I have never gotten one. Paper drawings are useless these days . Funny how the board will rape surveyor maps but the engineers slide all over the place with crappy cartoons .

The root of the problem lies with the contract between the Engineering company and the municipality that hired them to do the work. The municipality rarely if ever addresses the electronic data conundrum that we surveyors and people actually using the data for construction encounter. I have been on both sides of this fence and see your point exactly.

Therefore, if it wasn't in the original contract they are under NO obligation to put there neck out there and hand over the Cad files. It's that simple.

Does that make it right? Not really....because like you said we're all on the same team trying to get public projects done as cost effective as possible. Or, at least that's the premise.

I can't see all of the responses as I type this but someone else pointed out the face that there are most likely errors in the Cad data. True, there probably are, but if the engineering company is hired to produce a paper product, a paper product is what you get.

Now, if both parties (engineering co and municipality) were on the same page and had some forward thinking they could setup the original contract with accurate electronic deliverables as one of the products in a specific format. Sure, their contract price will go up but it would certainly make the construction surveyor's like alot easier.

It really comes down to the company's approach and how they view cad files. Some strictly use them to generate a paper copy and could not care less if lines overlap or what the stinkin' coordinate basis relates to.

Some (and I imagine it is most of you these days) use the coordinate geometry inherent to your cad program to stay in the real world and keep it dimensionally correct. I've worked with some folks who are very good at doing both their cogo and cad work at the same time, and when you check dimensions they relate to the printed set.

As far as I know, there is no law that says your electronic cad drawing has to do anything other than create a picture.

So I get a project to stake a new building, parking lots, roads, utilities, ect. The engineering plans state that there isn't enough information on them to stake the project and the surveyor has to use the electronic files.

OK.

So I request the files and they send a release form that basically says that I have to release them from liability if there is something wrong in the electronic file. Now just a minute....

T-Ray

Why not just call the liason at the city and tell them that you need it. It was engineered for the city, so it's their work product essentially, and can dictate to whom it is circulated.

This would take about 10 minutes to fix and NEVER have another problem with again.

We include a line in our proposal that says we MUST be given the electronic CAD drawings, or the price will increase. So far, that seems to work.

Before we started doing that, we would often get the above-mentioned runarounds, with engineers refusing to give us the CAD drawings (citing the same arguments mentioned above, about how only the paper drawings are legally binding), or engineers who would want to charge us up to $300/page for CAD drawings. But since we revised our proposal to include that clause, the owner of the project always makes sure we get the CAD drawings.

We never actually paid to get CAD drawings, but always did. We discovered that when someone wants to charge us $300/page for CAD drawings, we couldn't build the project from their paper set, and hit them with so many RFIs that they either had to redo the entire plan set, or give us the CAD drawings. And they always chose to give us the CAD drawings, rather than redo the entire plan set.

We're in a digital era these days... Paper plans are still important, but the CAD drawings are far more useful. It saves time and money for the owner, and sharing those drawings amongst all people involved in the project generally results in far fewer errors, faster development, fewer problems, and a higher-quality end result in general.

That being said, we HAVE noticed that the harder it is to get CAD drawings from someone, the lower the quality... So I think a lot of low-quality companies like to clamp down on their CAD drawings, because they don't want to others to see how bad they are... The good guys are always willing to share their drawings.

> In this case the surveyor from the engineering company that prepared the plans cannot bid on the staking (conflict of interest).

It’s not really a conflict of interest. It’s a conflict of contract. Every other municipality in the area allows the design engineer/surveyor to construction stake the project.

Here is a clip from my standard Construction Staking Proposal:

"Thank you for the opportunity to provide Construction Staking services for ***** in ******, **. This construction staking quote has been compiled from information downloaded from the http://****+*/-/*+ on June 20, 2012.
Pricing information in this quote is contingent upon **** receiving the correct CAD files of the construction plans for this project."