PR-CAD & Revitation

Principal Representative for CAD
Since I bought into the company a bit more last year I became an Associate Principal instead of a lowly Stockholder. I won't go any higher only because I want to keep my fingers in the actual design side rather than taking on more corporate business action. I only see myself in this position for another ten years and then they'll need to be a buyout. Given my techie background and depth of use with CAD I've become the Principal Representative for CAD. The three big partners do not use CAD while the other two principals do use CAD and are prepping for Revit.

New Revit Man
I'm supposed to become a Revit MEP Suite 2009 user. That was to have been two weeks ago but the process has been slowed. I won't be doing it full-time, just whenever I can. The primary reason is to 1) test 64-bit WinVista to see if it is up for primetime usage in our office and 2) review the action of 64-bit Revit. Mostly I'll have fun with the assortment of standard company programs to test. Of course I'll be trying out Revit following along with the MEP tutorial.

The machine is either not quite ready or the KVM switch isn't correct for the connections on my current PC. The test machine is only a dual-core PC but has 8GB ram to better simulate what could be a real 64-bit PC setup for Revit. My current PC is quad-core with 4GB ram using a 512MB ramdisk for AutoCAD temp files. The test machine will have a second hard drive dedicated strictly to the Revit installation.

Do we have any Revit projects? In theory, yes. In practice, no. We have three to five that are to be Revit but they stopped design months ago due to a lack of financing.

It will be interesting to go down the Revit path. I've always been able to see the mechanical design in 3D fairly quickly. The challenge was getting all the other design consultants to see it as well. Figure I was just lucky to have that ability.

Reality Take

That last post had been stored since early January as a draft. I finally set it free.

Like a lot of MEP engineering firms the downturn in the economy has not been kind. Not as many people around as there were a year ago. The realities are everywhere and we are doing our best to keep moving along.

We have decided to forego our subscription payment for AutoCAD 2010. We know we'll be behind but since no one else is hiring in the construction engineering business there's not much risk. We fully acknowledge it will cost us more next year should we upgrade then. No matter. If we need to upgrade it means the economy has turned upbeat and we'll have the money to pay for the added cost.

I did a full cost review on the issue before we made our decision. The CAD Manager had gotten some subscription costs from our regular dealer and another one. I accessed cost in a spreadsheet over three years with a fourth-year eye-opening cost should we fail to return for AutoCAD 2013. Returning to subscriptions at Year 3 will almost certainly happen unless total depression economics overruns this country.