The country's vibrant construction industry has adopted software for various purposes, from design to project management, and the use has increased in recent years.
Software solutions are now available in different price segments, and some of the major construction firms have developed in-house products too.
Drawing is an activity that makes a wide use of software tools. There are products that can be used not only for designing but also for some estimation purposes by reading the drawing.
ADVERTISEMENT
Warmbluke, a Coimbatore company, has developed Atlas, an estimator software. Warmbluke provides in-house deployment for large enterprises, and the product is available on the cloud too, to cater to those who want the pay-as-you-use system.
It calculates the quantities directly from CAD drawings and provides cost estimation and material requirements for the entire project.
ADVERTISEMENT
In the case of drawings that have not used layers or objects, the user has to perform a minimal mapping by selecting a portion of the drawing, and it can provide the quantification. For drawing revisions, the quantity estimate of the older version will be transferred to the current working version of the drawing with the changes.
Platform-independent
Gireesh Subramaniam of Warmbluke says that since customisation of the software is important, especially for material estimate for these finishes, the component library in the product can also be modified. New components can be added to it according to the materials used.
“One of the reasons why we went in for the Open Source platform is that we wanted this to be a network software that is platform-independent,” he adds.