& Construction
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Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
& Manufacturing
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Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
Integrated BIM tools, including Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D
Professional CAD/CAM tools built on Inventor and AutoCAD
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Success Story
Catterall & Wright was founded in 1965 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Today, the firm employs 40 permanent staff, including 15 designers and 15 engineers. Catterall & Wright aspires to be the most respected and trusted municipal engineering firm, providing professional engineering services to municipalities, land developers, government agencies, First Nations, and industries in Saskatchewan and other Western Canadian provinces.
Catterall & Wright’s Land Development team has extensive experience working on residential, commercial, and industrial land development projects ranging from condominium complexes to large scale neighborhoods and commercial/industrial areas. This group supports a high volume of projects and uses Autodesk Civil 3D to work efficiently.
In his role as CAD Manager, Greg Wollf coordinates projects, handles quality control, and keeps projects on schedule.
One of the challenges faced by the Land Development team is using Civil 3D in ways that support project life cycles. “We often need to do certain things or clients have specific requirements, but there aren’t always existing tools in Civil 3D to achieve those goals efficiently. At times, we feel like we’ve hit the limit with Civil 3D’s built-in tools,” Greg said.
One example is manhole calculations. Catterall & Wright has a survey department that measures rims and inverts for manholes, whether those will be tied into existing infrastructure, or the firm is working on an asset management project for a community. These calculations require a significant amount of math.
“Our team takes the measured elevation at the top of the manhole, then adds or subtracts the distance from the top of the manhole to the inverts in the pipe. It’s a small thing that we have to do frequently, so it’s very time consuming and tedious. It’s also easy for users to key in numbers incorrectly,” Greg explained.
On an asset management project, it can take hours to complete manhole calculations. It’s not uncommon for large projects to have hundreds of manhole calculations which translate into days of calculation work.
Pipe conflicts are another challenge for the Land Development team since the built-in tool in Civil 3D doesn’t meet Catterall & Wright’s needs. “The information wasn’t displaying in the way that we wanted. In addition, a lot of our water main crossings aren’t modeled. Even if you have pressure pipe networks, they don’t give conflict warnings with gravity pipe systems,” Greg noted.
To manually derive the pipe conflict information needed on a project, it could take up to three hours and that information had to be updated frequently. As with the manhole calculations, manually entering pipe conflict data also introduced potential inaccuracies. “Anytime we manually calculate information and enter numbers in a repetitive way, the chance for error goes up substantially. We want to avoid those cases as much as possible,” Greg said
Catterall & Wright researched whether third-party add-ons existed for Autodesk Civil 3D, but did not find any satisfactory solutions for manhole calculations or pipe conflicts. The firm had a relationship with IMAGINiT and decided to reach out to our account representative.
As a first step, our team at IMAGINiT evaluated how the Land Development team was using Autodesk software, including Civil 3D, using Advise and Assess service which reviews an organization’s use of the software in their project environment and recommends steps to enhance performance and productivity.
According to Greg, “As part of those meetings, we learned that IMAGINiT had created custom tools for another client. One was a COGO point analysis tool that automatically inserted the right survey information into drawings which saved a lot of time when processing surveys and setting up drawings.”
Greg and the team shared their challenges with manhole calculations and pipe conflicts with our team at IMAGINiT. After learning that custom tools could be created to address those use cases, Catterall & Wright decided to proceed with this project with us.
The Land Development team has been utilizing the new custom tools for a few weeks and everyone is very excited about using them for full project cycles in the coming months. “So far, the tools have been well received. They’re cleaning up highly repetitive and tedious tasks. With manhole calculations, the tool should reduce that work to just a few minutes on smaller projects and less than an hour on larger ones. That’s a task we’ve always tried to speed up,” Greg explained.
The pipe conflicts tool is also delivering significant value. “Now that we have a tool that everyone is comfortable using, we should be able to complete pipe conflict work in 20 to 30 minutes, rather than hours. It’s a huge time savings!” said Greg.
Catterall & Wright’s first experience with custom software development was a huge success and the firm is considering future collaboration on additional tools with IMAGINiT.
As Greg noted, “The IMAGINiT team was really great to work with and the developer always addressed our questions quickly. Their ability to create these custom tools has opened up a new world for my team to identify other tools to help us work more efficiently and deliver higher quality products to clients.”
Unlock the full potential of your projects with IMAGINiT’s custom tools! Our tailored solutions can help streamline your workflow, improve accuracy, and enhance project efficiency. Contact us today to transform your engineering processes and deliver exceptional results for your clients.
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