Steel Fabrication Software - What Is It For?

Sep.28, 2010 in Technology and Gadgets

The adoption of computer aided design technology has changed the fortunes of many companies and steel fabrication software can do the same, but large swathes of the steel fabrication industry still adopt tried and tested manual methods to deliver projects to their customers..

No one can argue that old methods of working are not successful as we are surrounded by engineering feats that have been standing for decades and even centuries, many of these great engineering projects where planned and delivered with no more than a pencil and paper and the skill and knowledge of the engineer. So of course most business owners who have not moved forward still feel justified with the way they work, so why change?

Time moves on and so do the requirement of the market place, and businesses ignore these changes at their peril. Competitive forces will always be in play in any market, but in tough economic time it is often a case of adapt to survive and finding out how to squeeze every ounce of profitability from a project so in order to remain profitable and win business, tenders can no longer be best guess, or thumb in the air, this approach to tendering is now old hat as many competitors that have already invested in technology no longer have to build in wild fudge factors.

Secondly, fabrication companies are finding that they are required to tender more often than before and principal clients are expecting a much faster turnaround of the tender documents. Mistakes made using traditional tender methods often result in jobs being completed at a loss. One of the benefits that steel detailing software delivers is its ability to aid the tender process by automating the delivery of fast and accurate estimations of project costs and associated material costs. This enables businesses using the software to provide quick and accurate proposals so they invariably find themselves winning a higher percentage of projects.

Steel engineering software is not only used for the tender process, it has other massive benefits as well an example of which would be:

Shorter project lead times - clients are expecting much shorter completion times on projects these days. Steel fabrication software enables your business to work much faster, especially when it comes to plan changes where often you are still expected to complete in the same time frame despite the extra work.

Faster amendments to drawing - design changes seem to be inevitable and are often absorbed by the fabricator, the ability to make drawing changes a lot faster will mean that production staff will not be kept waiting to long for amended drawings.

Accelerating drawing capacity - the right tools for the job, whilst other software does bring productivity gains to drawing production they only give generic gains as the tools the software has to offer have to cover a range of application. Steel detailing software tools are industry specific so users can churn out drawing much faster than with other software

Drawing revision management - one area that is prone to errors is trying to figure out exactly which drawings need amending on a design change. Get it wrong and you could end up with costly rework on site or even worse, with penalties if the job does not get completed on time or holds up other works into the bargain.

There are many advantages to using intelligent software within a business and this is only a sneak preview about steel software solutions, for more information visit steel detailing software.