CADD Associates Case Study
Project: Automated Computer Aided Drafting & Design Software
Technologies: Win Forms, ADO, AutoCAD API, VB, SQL Server
This is another great example of CADD Associates’ bridging the gap between engineering and software development.
Not all consulting companies bring engineering experience to your software development problems. In this case it made understanding Kolpak’s problems a faster, more efficient, more successful process.
Kolpak produces metal clad compartment based walk-in freezers and coolers for the commercial restaurant and food service industries. These walk-ins are formed of interlocking door, wall, floor and ceiling panels of varying widths built up into multiple compartments that must all interlock when they arrive at the construction site.
Throw in different finishes, accessories and the desire to have "L" shaped configurations and you have the makings of a manufacturing Rubik’s Cube. Writing a piece of software that would parse the users’ gross dimension input into efficiently manufacturable panel widths with specific placements and then automatically generating AutoCAD shop drawings and Bills of Materials was no small feat.
This piece of software was written years ago using a SQL Server database and a Rapid Application Development platform (RAD) popular at the time. By leveraging the RAD platform and various third party tools and pre-built software components CADD Associates was free to concentrate on the engineering problem. It’s our experience that users don’t care what platform software is written on as long as it works and management doesn’t care as long as costs are kept to a minimum. These are our driving goals.
Prior solutions to this Rubik’s Cube had started on the premise of assembling one compartment and getting that solution working and then tweaking what had been written to then accommodate more than one compartment.
We saw that as painting ourselves into a corner that would incur a second solution to accommodate "L" Shape configurations. Instead we borrowed a structural engineering technique normally used in force and load computations. The details of this implementation are proprietary but what can be said is that this theoretical solution makes controlling walk-in panel development and configuration a much simpler, more logical task.
The fact that this piece of software has been in use for almost a decade without need for replacement or serious upgrade investment is a testament to its powerful underlying design concept. In the first seven or eight years there was an average of $2k or $3k a year spent on modifying things like finish management, Bills of Material output and so forth.
In fact this software runs so well it has outlived the AutoCAD version that it was originally written for. Autodesk retired that version of AutoCAD years ago but this software and the design process it facilitates just keeps chugging along.
We’ve been told that, on average, this software speeds walk-in design from a four hour process to an hour. Users have called it "indispensable".
We have a design proposal in to Kolpak for a modernization upgrade of this program but when they’ve had years of productive use it’s difficult to convince management that an upgrade is necessary.
For better or worse, these are the kinds of problems we live for, software so good you don’t want to upgrade.
Jeff Roberts
CADD Associates
13065 Little Big Horn Ct
Ste. Genevieve, MO
(636) 537-8120
http://www.caddassociates.com