This was from a former job and was in another CAD system. I supervised the CAD IT director (Ray) and given my limited CAD skills it made reviewing his work difficult. One year during his review, we got on the subject of utilizing the "computer's power" so as to eliminate mundane tasks. We were in the corporate engineering office of a large paper manufacturer.
Ray asked what was I thinking about and I said that I'd like to use a dialog box to define things like bay spacing's, column line designations, etc. I said that I would like to layer the grids, dim's, etc. so that they could be then used for all of the plans - Floor Plan, Foundations, Framing, etc. In that system, we drew in what would be "paper-space" in AutoCAD. Each sheet was on it's own.
Ray thought he could do that. What else would I want? For a single story warehouse structure, we would input the loads (DL, LL, SL) and the allowable soil bearing pressure and then design/draw the footings (square footings only in this first trial) for those loads and bay spacing's. Within a couple of weeks (in his spare time) he came back with the first effort. It worked pretty good. We tweaked a few items and then had a floor plan and foundation plan for our fictitious building. Wind Loads and braced bays were never in this preliminary effort.
When we presented it to the entire department, there was a lot of skepticism, such as: "Not all of our buildings have constant bay sizes for their entire length or width". Yes that was true, but with a "stretch box" those idiosyncrasies could be easily remedied.
Ray then asked what else was a typically mundane task. Drawing and detailing stairs came to mind. As he was not a structural drafter, we reviewed the last couple of projects to see how the stairs were drawn. Standard details were used to define all of the connection's, etc. The plans and elevations were shown for each stair system.
We reviewed the basics - max. step height (7.5"); one less tread than riser; landing lengths, Code limitations, etc. So with this dialog box, one would put in the elevations of the floors, the number of runs between levels, any limits on individual stair runs, etc. Again, in about 2 weeks, we had a working model that drew the plan and elevation views of the stair in question. It could be repeated for each set of stairs.
I'd like to tell you that it was a resounding success, but I was downsized out later that year when the company was purchased by a foreign competitor. The engineering staff was gutted (70+ to 6). They were forced to switch to AutoCAD and they contracted out virtually all of their design/drafting. Ray still was there, but mainly to convert any existing drawings to AutoCAD or PDF's and to provide them to any of the consulting firms that were going to do the work.
I've related this idea at my subsequent employer's but no one was ever interested. We billed by the hour and there was no incentive to reduce any hours.
gjc
