With all the current excitement and talk of BIM and Revit, I have been thinking recently about the future of AutoCAD.

At CADS we’re pretty representative of the market, and our current mix of licenses is around 15% Revit / 85% 2D CAD (AutoCAD and MicroStation). It will remain this way for some time yet, largely because this is where our customers are in the cycle.

If we examine the manufacturing marketplace, Autodesk took the (at the time) brave decision to remove AutoCAD Mechanical Desktop and migrate everyone to Inventor.  My personal opinion is that this won’t work in the AEC market due to the construction supply chain being quite different. The approach Autodesk are taking of nudging customers to 3D via product suites is the right way to go.

A recent survey of Architects showed 55% market share in AutoCAD with no other product (including Revit) being in double figures.  Perhaps more telling was that in the National BIM Report conducted by NBS, 35% of the 1,000 respondents had no CAD at all!!!

So AutoCAD is here to stay for a few years to come.

We also use Microstation Software…

At C A Design Services, we’re big users of Autodesk CAD software, such as AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max, and more recently Revit; but most customers aren’t aware of our Microstation Services.

Microstation Experience:

We are currently working for a major client on a long-term engineering based project,using Microstation.
The work includes maintaining and updating existing drawing records, and creating new drawings as required. This is a varied project, which draws on a number of CAD drafting disciplines, including the use of document control systems, revision of drawings following redline mark-ups, and digitising and redrawing archived hard copy drawings. On top of this, the drawings are necessarily complex, therefore attention to detail and quality control procedures are paramount.

The team have also been involved in various projects for other clients, including:
•    Redrawing a series of P&ID, HVAC and General Arrangement drawings in Microstation format to a very tight deadline
•    Updating a series of construction drawings to client requirements
•    Reworking a series of track and overhead line equipment drawings for a rail operator
•    Clinical Space Planning in an on-site resourcing role

Examples of the types of drawings we have produced are:
•    Schematic Diagrams
•    Wiring Diagrams
•    Single Line Diagrams (SLD)
•    General Arrangement Plans
•    Section and Elevation Drawings
•    Geographic Route Drawings
•    Plant Layout drawings
•    Compressed Air Diagrams
•    Piping & Instrumentation Diagrams (PNID)
•    Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning Drawings (HVAC)
•    Other Mechanical & Electrical Plans
•    Block Diagrams
•    Fire System Plans
•    Space Planning Drawings

We also provide other Microstation based services, such as the cleaning up and updating of your raster files using Bentley I-RAS software, or carrying out Microstation to AutoCAD file conversions.

So if you have any Microstation queries, please do not hesitate to contact Ross Cooper or Mark Johnson in our sales team for further information.

Daniel – CAD Technician

C A Design Services

Should CADS make a full transition to Revit?

You’ll probably have gathered from previous posts that CADS is very keen to keep up-to-date with the newest technology. CADS Space Planning team are no exception. As a department we have recently been taking steps into investigating the use of Revit to deliver our projects. I’ve been challenged with investigating what benefits the use of the Revit programme would bring to the office and ultimately to our clients.

Having worked in-situ with a client recently it appeared that they had made a complete transition to Revit and that although the cross-over period had been a slow one, other programmes had eventually been completely phased out.

The question is should CADS make this full transition too? Or should we remain multi-software users, adding Revit to our arsenal to stay flexible in our market?

Given the nature of what we do, I think we’d be wrong to phase out our other planning tools completely, in favour of Revit. Our projects are led from the top through Architects and/or Trusts. They specify how the project is run and dictate what programmes and methods they require. As suppliers, CADS has to adhere to the requirements.

So there are a number of benefits of our working knowledge of multiple programmes, and on live projects this has meant that we are adaptable, able to understand the clients sometimes difficult requests, and can put a strategy into action using the full toolkit of AutoCAD, Micro station and Codebook in conjunction with each other.

In trying to meet a clients’ requests recently it actually proved useful in discovering that we could use a greater amount of codebook tools than previously thought on other projects, such as creating link code schedules and room labelling.

So, how should we be responding to the changing market place and the introduction of Revit? My recommendation is to carry on with what we’re doing – up-skilling team members to become advanced Revit users, without losing our existing expertise in the other tools. But will these tools eventually become redundant? What do you think?

Steven Ellis

C A Design Services