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Pit Program Improves Profits

Tony Zilles

For small business the price of design automation can amount to a heavy investment that bears little reward in the short term. An Australian precast concrete manufacturer has achieved welcome returns through automation in a very short time frame.

A prominent Melbourne (Australia) precast concrete manufacturer strives hard to maintain its business position through a variety of interesting means. For a start, it makes a range of products from recycled concrete. Waste concrete is acquired from demolition sites and shipped to the production yard. Huge concrete slabs are crushed in stages and processed to make it suitable for re-use in new concrete, and stockpiled close to the concrete batching plant. Reinforcing steel is reclaimed from the concrete and shipped off for recycling elsewhere.

A particular speciality is the manufacture of precast-to-order, concrete stormwater pits. This product also benefits most from design automation. Concrete used in the manufacture of these pits often contains a proportion of recycled aggregate. Custom-made pits enable onsite work to finished very quickly. Precasting eliminates costly, time consuming and dangerous work on site.

Clients requiring precast pits provide civil engineering data in the form of a pit schedule, long sections and face plan. From this information, surface levels, pit orientation, pit depth and pipe opening levels and diameters can be obtained. Pits are custom designed and precast to suit the job. Although not a difficult design and drafting job, creating the drawings for custom pit formwork used to be a real bottleneck in job turnaround.

Accurate and complete information is essential in the factory to build pits right first time, every time, particularly where complex designs are involved. Depending on design requirements, the pits can be small enough to be moved about by one person or large enough to require a craning into place on-site. Pipe penetrations can vary for level, diameter and angle. Various options can be allowed in manufacture such as the provision of lifting points, step rungs or other access systems and provision for a variety of different lid types.

In searching for solutions to improve design office to factory communication and project throughput, it became clear that the answer lay in a program that could draw a pit design parametrically. Such a system might use a library of basic pit types and accessories. Certain aspect of the design could be based on standard pit sections proven over time to be effective and efficient. Now how to put all this together in an easy to use application that could automatically create all the necessary drawings. Word-of-mouth references led to Melbourne software developer Struc Plus Pty Ltd. The result is a custom application that hones the competitive edge for our subject company.

Struc Plus created a custom application that works inside AutoCAD to cut pit design and drawing time in half. The program starts automatically when the designer starts AutoCAD. Design drawings are stored in project groups for easy file management.

Pit-specific data is captured in simple on-screen dialog boxes.

Projects are defined with information common to all designs in a group, reducing the work required to document all the drawings in a project group. To draw a new pit the designer provides all critical pit information through an on-screen dialog box. The automated design process steps through all possible options for a pit ensuring nothing is left out and including only relevant information on the drawing. When all the required information is captured, the application creates a plan and four elevations of the pit. The drawing is generated on an A4 drawing sheet with borders and title block all completed and ready to print. Because each drawing is an accurate scale representation of a particular pit, it contains all the information required to make the pit without any unnecessary information.

Typical drawing page showing the plan and important elevations.

As an added bonus, it also creates a 3D model of the pit which can also be printed out on a drawing sheet for factory use. This model can be viewed from any angle and even rendered if necessary to more clearly show the details of a particular pit. The value of a 3D model is particularly useful in the case of a complex pit design. The form construction crew can swing the model around and get a 3D appreciation of how the finished pit must look. This is a very valuable feature that saves time in production and minimizes the requirement for on-site modifications.

Drawing page showing the rendered 3D model of the pit.

The application is a set of relatively simple routines fine-tuned to work together. The advantages in having a specialized developer create a custom application include…

• Broad engineering programming expertise
• Specific experience in civil engineering design
• Distinguished history in design and drawing automation

Combined, these factors benefit any company looking to design automation to improve business through…

• Faster development time
• Best-of-breed components combined into the final solution
• Benefit of deep, specialized experience

This company has created a winning business position that uses waste materials once destined for landfill. It adds value through manufacturing technology and accelerates time to delivery through automated engineering design technology. The result is higher profits through reduced overhead cost per project and higher job throughput.. Just goes to show that not every business success is based on a high-tech product, but more on the appropriate use of relevant technologies and available resources. Just as importantly, an application doesn’t have to control the office or integrate with every aspect of business to achieve profitable returns.

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