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StruCad and the competitive advantages it delivers to ACL Structural Group
25th June 2007
Last week the President of ACL Structural Group, Mr Cory LePage, visited AceCad Software’s UK headquarters in Derby and underlined his commitment and belief in StruCad as being the World’s leading 3D Structural Steel Detailing System. ACL Structural Group provides quality Structural Steel Detailing and Design Services for the North American Steel Fabrication Industry. Currently employing over 20 experienced technical staff across three sites in North America, ACL has established a firm reputation for quality, reliability and maintaining project schedules. Established by Cory LePage and Alden Prier and incorporated in 1998, ACL has most recently opened a new office in Eastern Canada in January of 2007 and is now able to conveniently service customers across six time zones.
The business has always been built around StruCad from AceCad Software and we have benefited from the advantages that the software brings to both our business and the entire structural supply chain, states Mr LePage. Our choice of StruCad was initially down to the similarities and familiarity of the system compared with generic modelling or 2D drafting tools. The ease, with which we ourselves could convert and can now teach StruCad to new members of staff, is a significant and continual benefit to our business. We recruit graduates with an engineering or technology background and within 2 to 3 weeks they are already productive and within 6 to 8 weeks of detailing our regular jobs, have entirely covered the competitive cost of their StruCad licence. On a number of occasions we have actually been able to fully recover the capital costs of new Strucad licences within 4 weeks when converting experiences detailers from other 3D detailing packages to Strucad.
The quantum leap that we realised when we invested in 3D modelling software with StruCad nearly 10 years ago was dramatic and we haven’t looked back since. We would always recommend that any detailer that is using a 2D or generic modelling tool consider StruCad, which they will adopt and familiarise themselves with, far quicker than with other systems on the market.
We have looked at and even been swayed to invest in other well known 3D modelling systems. However, we are in business to provide high speed, quality detailing services at competitive prices and we know of no other system that can better help us achieve our aims than StruCad. We could not continue to remain competitive if we were to solely use other systems that we have tried. This is because it is our experience that with other systems we realise a far greater increase in detailing time, even using similarly skilled draftsmen with equivalent experience in all systems. With StruCad we have completed detailing jobs two to three times faster than with these other systems and the larger the project, the greater the advantage StruCad gives us.
ACL regularly completes projects up to 10,000 tons and has an average project range up to 1,000 tons with up to 90% of the output from StruCad ending up as CNC or KISS files for our customers automated production facilities. The reliability of output is critical for us and the consistency of 2D drawing output automatically produced by StruCad is the best that we have seen and we spend very little time editing and re-checking, which substantially increases our productivity.
With significant time savings and therefore productivity and organisational advantages connected with StruCad from learning, detailing and fabrication output perspectives, our entire process is optimised. This leads to advantages not just for us, but our clients also. We can expand our operation faster and complete jobs more rapidly than many of our competitors and at competitive rates. This means that we have access to more jobs by maintaining project schedules and generally supplying fabrication data ahead of schedule. Strucad data output is first class and with StruCad freeware available to all in a project team, fabrication not only progresses sooner, but with fewer queries.
As a direct result of the success that we attribute largely to the benefits of using StruCad we are already well advanced with plans to open a significant drafting facility overseas. The global detailing business is competitive and worldwide market forces mean that we must develop our business to meet the future demands of the industry for the next 20 to 30 years. We would always recommend StruCad for any organisation large or small that is serious about structural steel detailing and is looking for a significant competitive advantage with the best 3D steel detailing tool available.