Marius clearly remembers the days when drawing boards were used to produce designs. “This was a long and lengthy procedure because we did it all by hand,” says Marius. “Eventually the use of drawing boards became redundant and a draughting software program was introduced to replace the drawing board”.

The program was however discontinued and the team switched to AllyCAD, which they have been using with great success for the past seven years.

Due to the outsourcing of work to local contractors as part of the government’s job creation initiative, both Marius and Lappies’s role in the actual design process have been centralised to that of providing an advisory service to developers on various projects.

The Moshoeshoe road project is one of the initiatives that Marius and Lappies remember clearly. “Our involvement on the road required close interaction with technicians as they were responsible for the survey of the terrain”.

“The information accumulated on the survey is transferred into Civil Designer, a suite of design modules forming an integrated data-gathering, drawing, surface modeling and design system, and where the necessary calculations are done in order to complete the project”.

“We use AllyCAD to complete the design and provide legends to the drawing as well as labels for the various co-ordinates so that contractors will have no problem when reading the content,” says Marius, explaining that this allows them to standardise designs.

Another interesting aspect of their work involves GIS. “This is a geographical information system with massive information storage capabilities. We are able to provide large amounts of information on any region with GIS,” explains Lappies.

“With the construction of the Moshoeshoe road, we were able to establish what all the existing services pertaining to sewer and water facilities were. This information is vital in order to establish the viability of any project”.

Lappies demonstrates the program by calling up an aerial view of the Bloemfontein region and then zooms into a particular development in order to display the area information. “With this program, we are able to extract large amounts of information on any given area,” says Lappies.

IMIESA
July 2004