CAD upgrade in lightning quick time with CQi

NIS Limited is an engineering organisation providing bespoke, and pragmatic, design and manufacturing services to a range of clients across a broad range of markets. The services that NIS provides include aluminium welding, mechanical handling plant and equipment, nuclear glovebox containment, research and development test rigs, special purpose machines, automated assembly lines and cells, the integration, tooling and programming of robots, and fabrication.

The company works for a wide variety of prestigious clients on some of the world's most complex engineering projects, from cleaning up nuclear legacies to developing the next generation of security scanning products.

Upgrading the upgrade process
With a significant public sector contract in its preparatory stages, NIS defined the need for far more cross-discipline internal collaboration than most of its projects usually called for. The new project would require some 40 specialists – from mechanical and electrical, control, and instrumentation (EC&I) design, to stress engineers, manufacturing, and software engineers – able to share and modify designs and models with the same software version.

To drive consistency across the many users involved, a one-off large-scale CAD upgrade was needed. Such a project could potentially involve thousands of installations. The actions required quickly mount up when you multiply the numbers of users by the variety and numbers of applications – Autodesk apps including Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Electrical, Navisworks, to name a few – multiplied by the associated service packs.

Approaching each user’s requirements in the traditional fashion, treating each app as a separate standalone installation, would normally take at least ten days. For NIS it would have required over 600 installations. Just the upgrade process alone would have seriously impacted business as usual. Symetri’s CQ™ installer (CQi) took just four hours to do the same job, but better.

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