Write-up about MSoft Solution and Gibson-Thomas Engineering Co.
Source: Carlson Software
Carlson Civil Suite – Gibson-Thomas Engineering Tried It and Liked It
May 22, 2017
By: Karen Cummings
What’s the one big thing engineering software needs to be? Stable. There’s so much work involved in producing drawings and designs that having your software crash – and usually at the worst time – is just not acceptable.
That was one reason staff at Gibson-Thomas Engineering Co., whose home office is in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with several other locations in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida, decided to start looking for an alternative to their civil software. The company, which works primarily on civil engineering and hydrology projects, made the decision to switch to Carlson Civil Suite with built-in IntelliCAD. They purchased 17 seats of the software, which includes the Carlson modules Civil, Hydrology, Survey, and GIS, from Michael Sobel of MSoft Solutions, an authorized Carlson dealer in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Gibson-Thomas busy draftsmen Dan Fmura (background) and Joe Palacki.
“Stability was a big issue for us,” explained draftsman Joe Palacki. “You’ll work on a drawing for some time, then you’ll go back and open up the drawing and suddenly there’s something there that’s a week behind. We have back-ups,” he added, “but legitimately, I shouldn’t have to go to that every week or two.”
Palacki also noted that when the software they were using was updated, tools that they used regularly were removed. “In this day and age, it’s assumed that everyone is using GPS to survey,” he said, “but if your GPS stops working in the field, the surveyor is not going to just pack up and head home. He’s going to get his notebook out and get his instrument out and do it the old-fashioned way, but they removed the side shots entirely from our software.”
That meant no utilizing the information stored in the 30 years of survey books saved at their 101-year-old firm. And no entering information manually. “When you do the topography in western Pennsylvania, there’s a lot of areas where you just can’t get a signal,” added Dan Fmura, also a draftsman at Gibson-Thomas. “Thankfully, Carlson still has that tool – it’s one that we absolutely have to have.”
Training helped with switch
Though both Palacki and Fmura noted that it was not easy to switch software midstream, and that they were still in the process of doing so due to extended projects started with their former software, they said that the training they received was an enormous help.
Michael Sobel of Carlson dealer MSoft, here with Dan Fmura, provides support to Gibson-Thomas.
Mike Hyman, Carlson New York and Pennsylvania Sales Director, and Mark Long, Civil/Hydrology Support and Training for Carlson, spent four days with the Gibson-Thomas crew. “It was time very well spent,” said Fmura. “They were both so knowledgeable and covered a lot of ground over those four days.”
“They were organized and had examples for everything,” said Palacki. “Legitimate examples, not just something out of a textbook. Something they have worked on; something they had put together.”
“We do a lot of work in different areas,” he added. “Dan’s our property expert. I do mostly water-related projects. We have guys who do sewer-related projects and stormwater engineers. Then we have our Wexford guys who do subdivision and development design and they covered it all.”
So far, so good
While when they were interviewed Palacki and Fmura had only been working with the Carlson software for just over three months, they have been very pleased with it so far.
“I worked on a visitors center for a historical site with Carlson,” said Fmura. “The amount of time it took to do the topography work with the new software compared with the old software – the difference was like night and day. Plus, the stability of the software is great,” he added. “To go all day with the old software and not have it crash was almost unheard of.”
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