How do you handle complex and challenging CAD drafting tasks and scenarios?

The best way you can plan ahead for challenging and complex tasks is simple: find the most compentent and experienced designer on your team, or even a colleague outside of your team and ask their advice. Nothing will save you more time and guarantee more success than gaining the knowledge of those who have been down the road more than anyone else.

A competent and experienced designer will have have developed workflows for design tasks that can be repeated and provide consistent results. Build the workflow into the template, so the final product is on the proper layer, color, line weight, etc. Build labels styles into the template, to ensure the required information is provided consistently and accurately. Build a high quality project template for each design phase. The template will include your companies drafting standards. It doesn't stop there, build your clients design standards into the template. Provide template building training at the drafting level. If the directive is to enforce CAD standards, try changing the message to help develop company standards.

If you are using CAD for any task, firstly establish what you want your drawing is to be used for! If you simply want to impart information, make sure the necessary information is on the the drawing, I receive so many drawings with a crucial dimension missing. Having used CAD for 34years the biggest innovation has been CAD/CAM. Using a drawing to feed data to a machine via another program which creates G code, in the old days we had to manually transfer data then load it to machine centres via blue punch tape. With modern CAD/CAM that task is so much more efficient, so if someone might use you drawing such as a DXF file to upload to a machine please don’t do anything stupid like scale your drawing to fit on your companies blank template!

It is good to use layers, but keep it simple. Sometimes less is more. Depending on the discipline , to many layers is a waste of time and money. Pre set company borders, templates, macros and lisp routines are the way to go along with good training documentation.

Grouping object together for reuse or to turn their visibility on or off in a few clicks can be extremely helpful for being more productive.

Remember that drawings are a means of communication. Try to ensure that you make it as easy as possible for whoever needs the information held within a plan to understand.

In my experience every company has its own way of doing things. If you can pattern your models and drawings after these internal practices it will prevent confusion when sharing information. What worked well at one place may only confuse others at a different organization.

I agree these will help speed your process but remember to save a copy of your personal settings in case your system crashes or you have to start on a different computer if your settings aren’t tied to your login.