“At first we used drawing boards to produce our 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”.

“When the program was discontinued a few years ago, we switched to AllyCAD and seven years later, the rest is history,” explains Marius, adding that they haven’t looked back since.

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
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 as well as labels for the various co-ordinates, so that contractors will have no problem when reading the drawing,” 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.

Despite the long and winding road that Lappies and Marius have traveled at the Council, they are ready to tackle any new challenge with vigor and are optimistic about developments ahead.