Ron Gillespie

The building is part of the design of the plant.

East elevation of the building

The Acrobat Connection In addition to PowerCADD and WildTools, Adobe Acrobat has changed everything. I used to labor for hours putting together bid packages for installation contractors, machinery vendors, etc. A typical installation bid package would contain from 20 to 50 drawings. These would have to be printed (by me) and collated into sets. If we go out to say 10 installation contractors with two sets (minimum) each, that's somewhere between 400 to 1,000 drawings I have to handle. This used to drive me crazy, because it is work I hated and didn't do very well. Now I send all drawings for review by our clients and bid via the Internet in a Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Using Acrobat, I only have to electronically print one copy of each drawing. I can then create master documents and sent them to the bidders or our clients. The drawings are all 17 x 24 size. I use an Epson 3000 printer, and many of the companies I deal with now have the same printer. A real life example: The job shown here was put together recently for an installation bid. There were 21 of PME's drawings and 31 associated vendor drawings. That is 52 drawings. To create the PDFs I open the files to be "printed", press the Control key and select Page Setup (my Adobe control panel is set up to respond to Control, but you can use Option or whatever) enter the page parameters just like any printer. Then I press the Control key and select Print, click OK then I get a screen to give a file name and location for the PDF. This done I click OK and the drawing is now saved as a PDF. It takes less time to do than to explain. When I'm done doing this to all the files, I open one (usually the first I want to appear in a master document) and do "save as". I give it a master document name and save it. Then I select "Insert Pages" from the "Document Menu" and proceed to insert all the pages that I would like to have in my master document. For this example project, I created two master drawings, one for the our drawings and one for the vendor drawings. These master documents are then E-mailed along with a PDF copy of the specifications to the contractors. This all takes far less time than it would take to print just one set of hard copy drawings. This package went out to eight contractors so I avoided printing and handling at least 816 drawings. The client saves money on my time and the cost of express mailing hard copies to all the vendors. I believe in putting the responsibility on the vendor/contractor for absorbing the cost of the bidding process, not my clients. They print the drawings at their end. They can print as many copies as they need thus eliminating the need to call me and ask for an additional set for a new sub-contractor they want to try. Changes and revisions can be handled in a few minutes. No waiting for the next days express mail. Quicker turn around of info can be priceless. We do industrial design so most of our clients are at the site where the work is done. Making revisions and E-mailing to the clients site is very powerful stuff. We can execute revisions in literally minutes from engineer to welder/fitter, etc. with NO CAD expertise required. Ron Gillespie

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