In 2001 at the start of the Canadian Light Source Project, the CLS began to adopt the use of Process and Instrumentation Drawings not only for process systems but also for accelerator and beamline optical components. Given existing industry standards have only been formulated for process applications this posed unique challenges. This paper describes the internal standards that were adopted, how they evolved over the past nine years and operation benefits we have been able to achieve through the use of PID drawings. The paper also examines the benefits from using AutoCAD scripts to automate the implementation of PID drawings.