We like it when you have holidays. Why? Because then our workload eases off a bit, and we have time to breathe, eat and sleep (which are usually luxuries for us).

If any customers are working at our office, we take them on trips to nearby holiday areas. We don’t stay late, we work without stress, we don’t gulp our coffee.

In short, when you have holidays, we enjoy time off too.

This probably holds good for many of the CAD companies in India doing outsourced CAD work.

Maybe all the CAD drafting companies here should go on a group holiday… think of the discounts we could get…

Technorati Tags: cad, cad india, outsource cad, cad drafting, autocad drawings, the magnum group

We are pleased to announce that we are adding nearly seven staff members. They are all CAD drafters, several of them with years of experience. Some have this experience in 3D drafting and some in 2D.

This augmentation of our “forces” has been necessitated by the demands of our existing workload and our need to absorb additional workloads expected in the next few months.

After about a week, the head count on our ‘About Us’ page will be updated to reflect our new size of more than 50 professionals. Hooray, we’ve passed a half century!

What we usually do is migrate CAD drafters who have been with The Magnum Group for more than two years to  senior positions involving increased design complexity (such as to the project group designing HVAC for a state-of-the-art mega cruise liner).

Newly inducted staff members work on less complex assignments, at the same time absorbing our work culture, which is an amalgam of the best workplace practices of the East and the West. We are proud of this work culture… you should come see it sometime!

Technorati Tags: the magnum group, india cad, lucky balaraman

We’ve just uploaded an article which gives an overview of AutoCAD drawings. It presents the following information in our trademark easy-to-read, informal style:

• Where AutoCAD comes from,
• Who should use AutoCAD,
• The benefits of using AutoCAD,
• Basic AutoCAD commands,
• 2D and 3D drawings,
• Xrefs,
• Blocks,
• LISP,
• AutoCAD file formats and
• Free AutoCAD software.

If you’re curious about this marvelous program or are thinking about how to create drawings on your computer, this article is a must-read for you.

We’re keen to know your thoughts on it, so please let us hear from you through the comments form !

Technorati Tags: autocad, the magnum group, article, lucky balaraman

The furniture drafting specialists who went to Sweden are back. They now have firsthand knowledge of libraries in Sweden and Denmark. They visited around a dozen libraries and studied the furniture layouts in detail, took photographs and took photographs of the counters, shelves, stacks, book display racks and book return kiosks.

An interesting observation was that Swedish library design style is different from  Danish library design style (the exact difference in detail will be the subject of another post). But the important thing is that The Magnum Group can now design library layouts in either style. Our customers can outsource library layout design to us by giving us just summary specifications.

More power to them!

Did you know that when the housing industry in the US is in a slump, there is a huge backlash felt by architectural drawing providers in India?

We experienced this firsthand two months ago during the sub prime crisis. Several architect customers of ours in the midwest US were down for the count, and therefore there was a large decrease in the demand for AutoCAD drawings of plans, elevations and sections.

Interestingly enough, as soon as the Feds cut the interest rates by five points, we experienced a huge resurgence of construction-related drafting work.

Fortunately we’ve hedged our revenues by also having very large customers in Europe, for whom we do engineering drafting, and it is very rare that Europe and the US experience equally bad (or good) economic conditions simultaneously!

Technorati Tags: architectural drawings, engineering drafting, autocad drawings, cad drafting services

As I write this, two of our top specialists, R. Kamalthasan and N. Inayathullah Khan, are in Frankfurt airport waiting to connect to Sweden.

We have a wonderful CAD customer in Sweden who sells library furniture ensembles, and he was very particular that the TMG people working on his project come to Sweden to see what the libraries there are like.

This is their first trip overseas, and their minds are going to expand maybe 400%. One can also imagine how bonded to the project and the customer they are going to be. This was also one of the explicit objectives of the customer. If ever there was an outsourcing project made in heaven, this must be it!!!

Technorati Tags: furniture, furnitutre design, furniture cad, offshore cad, outsource cad, swedish design, the magnum group

We are uploading a new web site design…. it is the fruit of thousands of hours’ study and practice in the latest usability design principles. We hope you will find it easier to find what you want… and hope that we have what you want!

Because of our considerable expertise in web design, we also have a separate web site offering web design to you as a service.

We are additionally drilling deep into Iphone-compatible web design, so that we can help you get ready for the tidal wave of Iphone visitors coming in June 2007!

The format of this blog is going to change as well… just keep watching!

Technorati Tags: web+design, css, usability, blog

The runaway escalation in salaries rampant in India’s IT sector has now hit the CAD sector.

The reason is the enormous growth in large projects such as IT parks, mega housing developments, huge shopping malls, cineplexes and airports.

The developers building these projects need large contingents of in-house drafters, and these companies are hoovering  experienced drafters from the marketplace.

What’s the skinny here? Demand is outstripping supply and salaries are rising rapidly.

Fortunately, salaries are still small compared to those in the Western hemisphere. But there is less money for us and other CAD service providers to invest in new hardware and software. We’re going to have to tighten our belts some more to make that money appear…

Who ever said life in an ITES (IT Enabled Service) industry was smooth?

Thank goodness The Magnum Group is light-footed!…

Technorati Tags: cad+service, offshore+cad, outsourcing, cad+drafting+service

	As part of the launch of our structural drawing service, we have authored an expert article that defines the subject and tracks its history. It has been uploaded to various sites on the Web. We recommend that you kick back with a latte and do a quick read of the article.

To your structural health!

	Remember our earlier post about an upcoming blockbuster offer for structural drawings? Well, we have liftoff! Our new offer for free structural drafting, year-long discounts and a free book is now a reality. This is a rare offer where we are giving away more than $2,000 in services in return for long-term business.

There’s this saying, “The best things in life are free…” . Welcome to one of the best things!