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Lennon McDuffie helped the company make Lennon McDuffie saw the future almost pass him by He stud- the transition to automated design years ied drafting in high school but CAD work stations arrived the ago. Now he harnesses the power of CAD to create better deliverables for clients. year after he left. "Thankfully, my old drafting teacher let me go back and work with the equipment even though I had already graduated, he says. As it turned out, r= McDuffie's career has paral- leled the rise in prominence 3 N of automated design tools 1 in the modern engineering office.After working his way through college,he landed a job with Brown and Caldwell's Atlanta office as �o a drafter. "When I first arrived, there was one CAD station and I was hired to operate it," s he says. At the time, CAD stations were ten times as expensive as they are now and offices couldn't afford to buy very many of them. Soon they couldn't The disk drive afford not to. "Within a year and a half, our office was up to Although McDuffie's prediction may be several years from being practical four stations and I was spending most of my time training to produce,there is plenty of demand for drafters to become CAD operators. Now,years later,we're a the more basic applications.As a profes- fully automated CAD environment" sion that delivers information as its "That was a big change for guys used to picking up their product,engineering is a natural candi- date for virtual deliverables. triangles. It was hard for some of them to give up their tools. The demand for deliverables"on Now we specify coordinates: We tell the line to go 50 feet at disk" comes mostly from managers of 25 degrees instead of measuring and drawing; says McDuffie. larger wastewater facilities,says Stigers. "They want to be sure that they can He sees CAD as strongly tied to client service and so he access the information for their next makes sure he delivers on client requirements. Often, out of project' the maze of options, the most crucial requirements are the Clients also want the efficiency of most basic: "Readability, clear differentiation among types of standardization. "It helps them manage when they have several big projects equipment,legible text' he says. going on at once. They want to deal with But the more complex applications have their value. one set of standards that is common to "If you draw a plant in 3D, the client can see exactly what all of their engineers and contractors" they're getting, and I can test whether the design is in conflict. The dependence on automated tools has grown so great that there is little I can see whether we've run pipes through an electrical demand for manual drafting.Drafting conduit. And we can create [cross] sections at any point" students all study CAD before gradua- He feels the presence of CAD has given drafters greater tion and drafting schools concentrate on the technology.Brad Bryant,the com- responsibility in the design effort. "Since we lay out the objects, pany's CAD manager in Denver,explains we know a lot about the designs.We double check the engi- "We do so little manual work that when neers'work. They realize that we don't just draw lines and an opportunity arises we have to clean circles—we make it work." our pens and search for tools."■ BROWN AND CALDWELL QUARTERLY 6