Couch Consulting Engineers, with its main office in Canwell, near Sutton Coldfield, was founded in 1986 but was restructured extensively four years ago when the two present directors, Nick Reed and Tony Rundle, took over. It's very much a hands-on consultancy, paying considerable attention to detail while remaining flexible in approach and actively seeking out innovative and interesting work. Couch is an enthusiast for new technology, seeing it as essential to improve the service it gives to clients. The practice invested heavily in networked IT systems some years ago and has been a heavy user of AutoCAD for drafting since then. It uses other packages, including particularly the CADS SMART Designer suite.
This business approach has obviously worked. It's become a well-regarded Midlands civil and structural engineering consultancy and in 2003 opened a branch office in Warwick to cope with demand from around that part. The Warwick office is growing steadily and now has seven technical staff out of a total of 25 for the practice. "We're very focussed on high quality work and we're also versatile" explains Associate Director Ian Davies who runs the Warwick office. "We do everything from residential developments, both small scale housing and large apartment blocks, right through to large scale industrial and commercial work, projects like retail offices, industrial units, hospital and educational units. Schools and colleges are a bit of a speciality for us, but there's a full spectrum." Couch has numerous high profile clients including BBC Pebble Mill, Central England, Boston and Aston Universities, several NHS Trusts and Hospitals, the West Midlands Police and most of the major residential developers among others.
"...it seemed clear that CADS has the most developed product with CADS RC. It's the market leader, of course, and some of our people recommended it. So we had a demonstration and really liked what we saw." Mike Matjaszek, Senior Detailer
Choosing the Right RC Detailing Software
Mike Matjaszek, Couch's senior detailer and with nearly quarter of a century of experience, comments "We've been getting more and more concrete jobs into the office. Detailing these takes time - you need to draw the bars, schedule them and check carefully to make sure that everything's correct. So we wanted to look at speeding things up." "Some of our technical staff had earlier used various detailing programs" adds Ian Davies "and it seemed clear that CADS has the most developed product with CADS RC. It's the market leader, of course, and some of our people recommended it. So we had a demonstration and really liked what we saw."
CADS RC is licensed on an any-user basis so Couch ordered a two-user licence in May 2007 which it shares between its two offices according to varying demand. By chance it became CADS' 4,000th customer for the CADS RC product and CADS Marketing Manager Gary Dale presented Couch with a specialist 22" drafting monitor in recognition. "That came right out of the blue" says Davies "and we're still fighting over who's going to get the monitor!
Working with CADS RC
We've already used CADS RC on one project and we're using it now on something much larger where it's working well and helping us a lot." Getting to grips with new software can sometimes be difficult but the user interface of CADS RC has won praise for being intuitive and flexible. After a training day Matjaszek took time to explore the different ways of using the program the produce the same results and is now finding CADS RC very responsive to his particular approach. "Sit three CAD draftsmen down and ask them to detail something" he says "and they'll go about it in three different ways. Same with CADS RC - you find your own way of doing things and it can easily adjust to suit the detailer. That's really good."
"You also have the initial period when you want to check everything" he adds "but then you find no mistakes on job after job after job and you become confident about it. Anything that helps to cut out human errors has got to benefit me as a detailer as well as the company I'm working for." He's also impressed with how the program monitors what's happening and alerts users to their own mistakes. "It'll point out that you've got a bar too long or you're asking it to bend a bar that it can't bend. If you're doing something daft it will tell you and give you a correction. That's really useful!"
NEW CADS RC V9
One of the major features of CADS RC 9.0 is its completely redesigned scheduling interface which offers improved usability and clarity. There's better speed too, because scheduling doesn't have to be done as a separate process and because, over time, a practice will build up a library of elements which can easily be re-used. "Once I've detailed something, a pile cap for instance," says Matjaszek "then next time I just pull in the old one and change the dimensions. It's a lot quicker than sitting down and reproducing it from scratch. Same with changes to drawings - obviously the schedule changes straight away as well and we've been able to re-issue drawings in half an hour whereas with the old way it would have taken an hour, an hour and a half maybe."
Looking Forward
"We're using CADS RC now on a project in Sheldon" says Ian Davies. "It's a typical ten storey apartment block, 130 flats. The flats are in a lightweight Metrek framing system supported off a basement flat slab transfer slab with the cores all in reinforced concrete and we're doing all that core and slab work in CADS RC."
"Then we've got what's quite a significant project in a £30m redevelopment of Solihull College, the Blossom Fields Road redevelopment. That's challenging because it's got elements like a big cantilever in the front of the building, cantilevered out about six metres. That's an interesting challenge, quite difficult to detail so we'll use CADS RC for that."
Apart from fighting over the specialist monitor what do Couch's detailers think of CADS RC? "I've been most impressed" says Matjaszek firmly. "It's the first time I've used any sort of detailing system so I've come to it with fresh eyes and I've been very impressed, very impressed indeed. It's really speeded things up in this office."
