Microvellum Knowledge Network

Foundation Library “Tolerance” Form/Survey

DISCLAIMER: The title may seem very misleading. This thread is not intended to be a place to post problems or issues. I do not want this to turn into anything negative. This will not be a sounding board or place to vent.

Okay, disclaimer aside, I will be pulling the trigger soon on setting up the Foundation Library for our company's use. (Connect with me on LinkedIn and message me for my reasoning on using this library versus another.)

However, I am finding the time that I typically set aside for library testing and development difficult to come by in my current role. I'm hoping that I can get some help when it comes to things Foundation Library users find themselves changing often, forgetting often, and/or products and subassemblies that have some quirks that need awareness.

I call these things "tolerances." They are all the little things (or big things) that annoy you that you just deal with because you can quickly work around them at the moment and address them later on. Does that make sense? For example, from my personal life, my wife and I have a shared digital list where we can add our tolerances. Things like: the front door sticks when you open it, our bedroom door hinges squeak, our fireplace needs a good cleaning, there's a nasty cobweb in the corner, the stacks of bill receipts need to be filed... Those are tolerances that we just keep putting aside but we know we need to tackle. Then, what we do is plan an evening or a Saturday where we try to knock off as many items on that list as possible.

So, I'd like to ask for your help in bringing awareness to "tolerances" that you have found that would help me in my development and testing processes so that I can work more efficiently and perform more thorough testing than I might typically do.

I would greatly appreciate any input and ideas. Please take a moment to submit any of your tolerances in the form below. I have some fields for a name and email. That information isn't required, but if you enter it in I can use it for correspondence for questions and updates as I get around to tackling these tolerances. I can even share my resolutions if interested.



Why am I doing this? Well, our goal at Master Millwork is to scale our business, and the enemy of scalability is variability (an over abundance of exemptions to SOPs). Eliminating tolerances, work arounds, and as many manual processes as possible is the most effective way to ensure that those processes are simple to train, maintain, and can be repeated consistently. Nothing is more critical in engineering than ensuring your team has the best products available, and that using those products can be easily trained to anyone brought on board.

For anyone who may be curious about my standard process for library testing and development, here is a brief summary that I go through: Whenever I plan to incorporate ANY new library I first start by creating a new project with rooms/drawings that match the library product categories. From there I draw EVERY product - 3D, 2D elevation, and 2D cross section (at a minimum). Then I run every product through a series of tests to ensure everything is up to par, anything I find that doesn't match what we need for our company standards gets fixed, saved, and incorporated into our library. (In the Foundation Library I plan to create a tree structure for all the products where I can save them as "custom" in order to take advantage of new updates.) I've performed this process many times over my career and it's helped me to create the best products for my team to use - and I typically develop my products around my least experienced engineers so they can focus on producing products quickly and confidently.

I hope to be able to create video content as I get going on my development that will go more in depth on my processes and what my role as an engineering manager means to my team and my company.

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