I just spent two excruciating days fighting with software that is supposed to make me more productive. I have been a loyal AutoCAD user for nearly 20 years, but this week, so help me, I almost swore it off completely. About 5 years ago, the people at Autodesk decided they were going to help bring civil engineers into the 21st century by launching Civil 3D, a model-based design environment that would replace the clunky, albeit stable, Land Desktop application that had become the industry standard for production drafting and design. Despite my tech junkie inclinations, I held off on making the switch until recent months, when rumblings about Autodesk no longer supporting the older products began to circulate.

One of the major inhibitors to making the switch to Civil 3D was the need to invest significant upfront effort to generate numerous customized ”styles” that permit a user to implement standards for their particular organization. Don’t like your contour labels to have the contour lines running through them? Better create a custom style for that! It’s almost as if the software developers were afraid to hinder our freedom of limitless choices by providing a few of the most commonly accepted industry standard styles as a starting point. As a result, they have created a product that is impossible to start using right out of the box, or even six months down the road. It would be like Microsoft releasing the newest version of Word, only without any of those pesky preloaded fonts. If they followed Autodesk’s example, you would be provided with some sophisticated dialog boxes with a dizzying array of options for creating every aspect of your fonts from scratch. And you would need to hire or designate an individual to act as full-time Font Manager to not only create the fonts, but to police the rest of the team to ensure that no one screwed the fonts up or attempted to create a font without sharing it with the rest of the company. Silly? Absolutely - and it’s the reason that the Civil 3D transition program of so many engineering companies has imploded before even leaving the launch pad.

Fortunately, some smart people at US CAD, our local Autodesk retailer, came up with the bright idea of creating a collection of styles on CD-ROM that suits the needs of most civil engineering projects. The cost was nominal when compared with the hours of staff time that would have been spent creating these things from scratch. My original intent was to use the US CAD styles as a starting point and have our CAD Manager tweak them as needed to better suit our needs. Well, he got laid off in November so I’ve decided that the styles we have work just fine. In fact, our Civil 3D transition efforts were put on hold for the most part when we shrunk the group down to its core and started devoting every second of spare time to business development.

Anyway, back to the story… Last week, I was presented with an opportunity to score some major points with a potential client by running some preliminary earthwork volumes on a project site for which we had prepared a couple of site plans. It was the perfect job for the new grading design features of Civil 3D. I had gone through enough training with the software to feel comfortable with the required process and I figured that the whole exercise should take about 6 hours. 18 hours later, I was ready to blow a gasket.

Of course, the problems didn’t begin until I was so far along in the project that turning back wasn’t an option. In the middle of creating a simple grading object, the program crashed. A fluke, I thought. So, I tried again - crash. After about 5 restarts and a couple of file audits, I was able to move ahead slightly, only to have the program crash yet again. This process continued late into the night and the better part of the next day. I finally got the answers I needed, but the effort and frustration that it took to get there was absurd.

Before the die-hard Civil 3D devotees start critiquing my flawed workflows and poor file management practices, I should point out that I don’t have this problem with other high-end software applications. Adobe Flash, for example, while requiring a very disciplined workflow, does not arbitrarily crash on me in the middle of an operation if I happen to miss a step; it just doesn’t give me the results I want.

What are the lessons we can learn from Civil 3D?

• If you’re going to charge a premium for your product or service (Civil 3D sells for $7,500+ per seat), make sure you deliver on your promises.
• Don’t take customer loyalty for granted; your competition would love their business (and there’s always hand drafting).
• Don’t use your customers as guinea pigs… and if you do, at least give them a discount.
• Finally, if it ain’t broke…