In some oil companies in engineering, there are NO DRAUGHTSMEN as all design work is farmed out. These engineering departments do not need CAD.

For a draughtsman it takes six months to learn CAD and must use CAD daily to remain fluent and efficient. An engineer in an oilcompany should not have time to learn CAD.

Putting EXISTING PLANT DRAWINGS ON THE COMPUTER WITH THE MAIN PURPOSE TO UPDATE THEM, keep them updated and to replace the hard copy drawings available in the files is a waste of time as these drawings will become outdated again, whatever you do. Furthermore an engineer, who is serious about the job he has to do in a plant, will always check personally, with a drawing in his hand at the site, whether the drawing is still up to date, irrespective of whether it came from a hard copy drawing file or from the computer file and irrespective of the date of the last update.

Operators, maintainers and engineers have one thing in common, they are always short of time, want to meet their targets and they are not good at administration!! It means that such matters as keeping drawings up to date is of secondary importance to them irrespective of whether you have your drawings as hard copies in an archive or on the computer.

Having contractors produce drawings and material lists for new projects or major revamps on a computer is a good thing and the interested company to be able to check contractors work on its own computer is a good thing too. For the company the emphasis is on CHECK, not on DO.

One can think of a further sophistication of CAD whereby all steps in the development of a project are integrated into one giant computer program. It would start at the conceptual thinking stage, cover the process simulation, determination of equipment dimensions, weights and costs estimation, it would include all capabilities of present CAD programs and also the project management systems presently available to us. Ideally the end result would be a detailed design including all drawings. To assume that this integrated package would "take over" from the engineer is Jules Verne thinking but to assume that a number of computer programs will be integrated to assist the engineer is a next years reality.