There’s a lot of buzz in architectural services about Building Information Modeling (BIM). In my opinion it’s necessary for all practices to use it but alas, only about 20% do (according to opinions on a dedicated group on LinkedIn). If you feel your concept of BIM is incomplete, listen to the 4-minute video below, then, after a week or so, to its concluding part.

Let me know if there are specific details you need explained in the second video other than the planned subjects mentioned in this one.

To your brilliant designs,

by Lucky Balaraman, Executive Director, The Magnum Group

It’s better to have a holistic picture of what’s going on in the CAD outsourcing area before you jump into it. Here are some in-your-face factoids:

Because it’s a pain outsourcing CAD to a strange foreigner…

You’re going to get into an intimate relationship with a person from another culture. Will he be polite, will he slap you around? Does he have body odor? Does he spit in public? Will your parents like him? Does he have table manners? Does he dress like a tramp? Does he have aligned teeth? Does he pick his nose in public? Will he return your calls?

If it fails, you look like an ass

Everyone can outsource CAD but you blew it. Is something wrong with you? Plus you mentioned your failure to a friend and he’s broadcast it all over town. What will people think now? Added to that, your friend succeeded in outsourcing his CAD to India in 2002! That kind of establishes that you’re stupid compared to him. Will any customers approach you now?

If it fails, you would have spent a ton of scarce time for nothing…

36 hours down the drain. You could have done the CAD drawings yourself in that time. Or spent it bonding with your largest customer. Or just pondered how to improve your latest design. Or tried to get an appointment with that large new prospect (after chatting up the receptionist). Or put your life back together at Starbucks.

You’re ruining your county’s economy by outsourcing CAD

All the jobs are moving to less expensive economies. Drafters in your country are increasingly unemployed. Why contribute to that? Also, the CAD drafters working in your office are going to be mightily ticked off when you start to outsource some of your CAD requirements. What’ll they think of you? They will leave for more secure employment pronto. Then you’ll be forced to outsource, i.e., to eat crow.

WHY IT DOESN’T SUCK TO OUTSOURCE CAD

You pay per use. When there’s no work to do, there’s no expense.

If you had your own full-time staff, you would have to pay them even during slack periods.

Your cost is at least 30% less

Let’s say you pay an in-house drafter $2000 per month. Add-on vacation pay, disability insurance, workman’s compensation, social security, cost of the workstation, cost of software, cost of space taken by the workstation, cost of electricity, cost of parking spaces plus any other benefits you might be giving a drafter and you’re nearer $3,000 a month. Outsource at $12 an hour for 160 hours (1 month) and your cost is $1,920. You save $1000 a month on a $3,000 tab, i.e. 33%.

You grow faster

The above savings can be deployed for growth: it can fund lunches with prospects, Christmas presents for clients, networking events, media and online advertising, association fees, et al.

You are more competitive

Because of your higher margins, you can cut your prices when you need to for winning contracts. You’re a lean, mean design machine that your rivals are seriously concerned about.

You have less administrative hassle

You don’t have to worry about filling out all those forms for your employees (like W2s), your facilities department will have fewer hardware maintenance headaches, your accounts department will see a reduction in payroll processing costs and your HRD department will not have to look under every rock in the State and spend a packet in ads to find new drafters when you need them.

These are the facts. NOW YOU DECIDE WHETHER TO OUTSOURCE YOUR CAD OR NOT.

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, business, management, HRD, CAD, autocad, microstation, india, the magnum group

By Garnet Malowney, CAD Designer, The Magnum Group:

AutoCAD 2007 includes several intresting features of significant utility in 3d drafting. Here is a description of some of them which have proven particularly useful to our AutoCAD drafting work at The Magnum Group.

Loft… This command is useful in creating many designs which was not possible in the earlier versions of AutoCAD for example a sample view has been shown below. It can even be shelled and subtracted.

Sweep…  This command acts the same way like “Extrude Path” but has its own features, like you can twist and extrude the object, and you should have a end point.

Slice… There is a new feature in the slice command you can now even slice using surfaces

Rendering…  the rendering also has more features than any of the previous versions; you can actually get to see what the object looks like even before you render the object. This feature is something new to AutoCAD. The rendering can be compared to that of 3Ds Max, but only to a certain extent.

Views…Now you can change your views, there are 2 types of projections namely Parallel and Prospective Projection.

Walkthrough…This feature was never available in the previous versions of AutoCAD; it provides the designer an added advantage. With this feature the designer can not only move inside the drawings but view it at and from any angle. Walkthrough has many interesting features which would benefit the designer.

Flatshot…This command creates a flattened image of your 3d image, this command is similar to that of Solprof, Solview used in other versions of Cad but it has more options.

Presspull…With this command you can extrude or intrude and it will be active only when in the options, “when command is active” is selected.

Convtosolid and Convtosurface… with these commands you can convert closed objects with thickness to either solid or surface.

Polysolid…with the help of this command you can convert circles, arcs, rectangles etc into 3d drawings

Thickensurface…with the help of this command you can thicken the surface of the object; it acts just like the “Extrude” command which is used for 3D drawings…

Revolve…with the help of this command you can revolve a 2d object circle or rectangle to any given angle into a 3d object, as compared to the previous releases this has more options.

U.C.S… The U.C.S command has been improved by making it easier for you to handle.

In PPC advertising, there is a frequent need to predict how many ad impressions will be generated by a given keyword. This basically depends on the popularity of the keyword.

Since Wordtracker has long been widely acclaimed as the best tool for performing this research, and since we already subscribe to it, we decided to correlate popularity listings in Wordtracker with impressions in Adwords.

The specific question we sought to answer was: From Wordtracker results can one predict with some accuracy how many impressions an ad will receive in Google Adwords?

Methodology

(1) Put a phrase, “Satellite TV for PC” into both the Adwords and Wordtracker engines with “Exact Matching” Bid on the phrase appropriately to ensure the Google Adwords ad appeared between positions 3 and 5 on the first page of search results

(2) Find out how many searches were counted by Wordtracker and how many impressions occurred for the ad

(3) Compare these two numbers and draw a conclusion

The results were encouraging. The Wordtracker “Count” was 292. Google Adwords received 253 impressions during one day.

Discussion

Wordtracker’s “Count” includes searches made from all over the world; our Google Adwords ad was programmed to be triggered only by searches made in India and the US. To normalize the two, it is necessary to multiply the number of ad impressions by a positive factor. 292/253 = 1.154 would work perfectly in this case.

Conclusion

For a given exact-matched keyword, Wordtracker’s “Count” and Google Adwords impressions are nearly equal. In our first attempt, their ratio was 1.154.

Further testing should be performed to make the ratio more reliable.

This article will be updated with new test results as soon as they are generated.