Meet July CET Designer User of the Month Richard Schreuder
Richard Schreuder, application administrator at Maars Living Walls in Harderwijk, Netherlands, first encountered CET Designer when he joined the team that, in addition to support, training and helpdesk, has been responsible for implementing Maars’ products into the company’s new CET Designer Extension, Maars4D.
Design, Develop, Draw and Details are the “four Ds” in Maars4D. CET Designer will be used for visualizing the company’s wall systems and for drawing complete projects. Using CET Designer and the Maars4D Extension, Maars sales staff will be able to draw their offer with pricing, materials, elevation views and details included automatically. The change will allow the company to merge its sales, estimation and pricing departments.
Richard started at Maars five years ago as a production worker where he learned how to draw in AutoCAD. A year later, he transitioned to production engineer and made drawings for customer specifications that were then used in production. As a member of the Maars4D team, he now uses CET Designer to implement the Maars product lines into the software – a vast undertaking that has been ongoing since late 2014.
“We started out by describing every product line – behavior, materials, xml output for the ERP system and details – every single part had to be defined,” he said.
The implementation has been a learning process both for Maars and Configura teams working on the Extension. One challenge has been to define various product lines in logical rules while keeping the software user friendly. The big variety of products adds complexity and requires close collaboration between the teams.
“For one type of door, we needed 15 pages of text to explain what the options and rules are! And that’s just one type of door,” Richard said.
Testing has been a main focus in switching over to CET Designer to ensure a good user experience. Since users will need to be able to seamlessly combine all different wall systems, a designated test group has used the Extension – extensively – to discover and fix as many bugs as possible before release. With the Extension available for internal use since April, Maars is now ready to make the external release of Maars4D at the end of this quarter.
Richard’s best CET Designer trick is using “click it and flick it,” which helps to speed up the work process.
He also likes the combined 2D and 3D view in drawing mode, a view that instantly shows him what he’s getting and thus prevents a lot of potential mistakes.
