…if you were an architect or an engineer, it used to be either..or!  Either you used the industry-standard DWG format and lost the CAD tools you really wanted to use or you used the CAD tools you wanted but had to sacrifice DWG compatibility. Thanks to the Open Design Alliance (ODA), that is no longer the case. The whole construction industry can now work using the solutions they want, yet can interoperate using DWG. Now, with Caddie Software and the ODA, you really can have the best of both worlds.

Advanced Computer Solutions (ACS) creates, develops, sells and supports the Caddie range of 2D and 3D design, detail and visualisation solutions for the architectural, construction and interior design industries.  Caddie products are renowned for their ease of use and embody specific functionality for architects, civil engineers, structural engineers, surveyors and more. According to Derek Bretherton, ACS Managing Director, “You don’t have to change the way you think to use Caddie: it matches your thought processes and you design using the technology of the industry you are in.”  He continues, “We offer a product that gives users something they really can use at an affordable price.” Derek adds, “People come to us because we can show them how to use Caddie to solve their problems, because they know that they can always get hold of somebody who can help and because they feel they can make a difference to the development path of the software.”

 

Derek again, “We started selling in the UK in 1987 competing head on with companies now long gone. We are still here, though, going strong and getting stronger.” He continues, “Of course, there are the usual business challenges, though to be honest, in this intensively competitive multi-vendor world, our biggest challenge is ensuring that our software is completely compliant with DWG as it develops.  Users quite rightly expect that the drawing they create or the drawing somebody else has created can just be opened and given back without anybody really knowing what systems it was created in.” According to Derek, “It also became very clear that unless our larger customers – those with several hundred systems –were able to work in a common format with other systems which used the DWG format –they would no longer remain as our clients.  File translation just would not do.”

Derek is clear, “At the end of the day, DWG is just a file format and people don’t generally buy the file format – people buy the software for what it does for them. Before the ODA, that choice was not available. The ODA libraries are easy to implement, they do exactly what they say they will do and there are never going to be any surprises.” 

 

“Access to the source code has made a huge difference to us,” according to Derek. “We now have an understanding of what is going on inside and we have the ability to modify it to our requirements. We need the code to be fast as we are using other functionality, not just DWG.  We ran an analysis with our benchmarking software, modified the slower modules and gave them back to the ODA so they can be incorporated into the software for the benefit of the members.” Derek also thinks, “Being on the Board of Directors has been very beneficial. We get more say in the direction of the ODA, we get an understanding of what is trying to be achieved and actually have even more confidence in the products we are using.”

 

 

Drawing with simple lines and arcs was appropriate for many in the past, and for some users it remains relevant today. However many users are now required to address energy efficiency and green issues when designing buildings and this is reflected in Caddie 17, released in September 2011. “We have incorporated automatic scheduling, live energy calculations and intelligent drafting into Caddie. This means that a window is understood as a window and a door as a door, with a collection of relevant properties as opposed to a bunch of lines simply depicting the object.”

 

For Derek, the return-on-investment of ODA membership is clear. He says, “For a little over £12,000 a year, using the ODA libraries has enabled us to retain clients that needed to change to DWG and to expand our customer base.  Initially, we were successful with smaller practices who didn’t have CAD systems. As those opportunities reduced our ODA membership enabled us to win new clients who were dissatisfied with their existing suppliers and wanted to move to Caddie yet retain DWG. Now ODA technology is helping us to meet the changing needs of users. We have made significant use of Teigha for Architecture and that has given us the ability to create a whole suite of AutoCAD Architecture compatible functionality in the latest version of our software.”