September 3, 2005 -- Indian CAD drafting service provider The Magnum Group recently completed 14,000 technical drawings for a 1,250-Cabin cruise ship under construction in France.
“ Our customers were certain their schedule was going to disintegrate and that the ship’s owners would impose harsh penaltie... ”
The large French air conditioning contractor outfitting the cruise ship with its HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) system chartered TMG to create the set of complex diagrams.
It took a drafting team of 12 people four months to produce the drawings. Each drawing represented a 10-foot piece of metal ducting that carried cold air, exhaust air or fresh air through the ship. The 10-foot pieces included bends, T-joints, reducers, expanders, silencers and flexible couplings; they collectively formed the approximately 60 kilometers of ducting required to control the temperature of the ship.
The drawings were isometric representations, which are three-dimensional schematic diagrams. Each drawing included detailed dimensions of components, a bill of materials for the duct piece as well as the piece’s coordinates in the maze of ducting that pervades the ship. Most notably, all text notations including the bill of materials were in French.
Executive Director of TMG Mr. Lucky Balaraman says, “We forced ourselves up a rapid learning curve at the beginning of the project to master the hundreds of French technical words the drawings contained. To our joy and delight, these words quickly became second nature to us.”
TMG created the drawings using state-of-the-art software and computer systems. It uploaded approximately 200 drawings to its FTP server every two days using one of its broadband connections for the French customer to access them.
Each company assigned primary responsibility for its participation in the drawing project to a skilled technical manager. These managers spoke frequently, often several times a day, on the telephone to maintain exactly parallel thinking on all aspects of the project.
Mr. Balaraman adds, “Halfway through the project we received a panic call from our French customers … one of their suppliers had made a mistake, all the drawings we had sent them over the last two months had to be redone and they were at their wits’ end. Our customers were certain their schedule was going to disintegrate and that the ship’s owners would impose harsh penalties.”
TMG put more people on job, worked overtime and redid the drawings with hardly any impact on the schedule.
“Our customers were deeply appreciative of how we rallied to assist them in their hour of need,” says Mr. Balaraman, “They have said they will be sending us larger, more complex work in the near future.”
TMG also provides CAD drafting services to several prestigious architectural firms worldwide.
