Senior Project Manager in Engineering at Clark Dietz, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We design highways. I feel ORD is a failure and it does not allow you to predicted time and cost. From my experience, you have a working model one day then the next day the model is corrupted upon opening. We feel we spend more time debugging and fixing problems than we spend on actual production. We open a model to preform a 5 minute task and due to ORD failures it will take 8 hours to get the model fixed before you perform your 5 minute task. In my opinion ORD is garbage. Stay away.

Pros

I feel ORD fails at being reliable.
I feel ORD fails at being useful
I feel ORD fails at controlling production time
I feel ORD fails at controlling production cost

Cons

Reliability
not corrupting work
having a UI that does not require a minor in computer science

Most Important Features

at this point we have not found reliable features.

Return on Investment

In my opinion, negative impact on schedule
I feel negative impact on production cost
In my experience negative impact on reputation

Other Software Used

MicroStation, Autodesk Civil 3D

Warren McLachlan

Engineer in Engineering at SMEC South Africa (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Integration with other disciplines. If one uses Bentley's companion products like OpenBridge Modeler or OpenSite Designer, there is no need to export any design information to other disciplines as the .dgn files can be directly referenced into other applications.
Visualisation - ORD comes bundled with a free version of LumenRT which produces amazing engineering and architectural renderings and can even be used in VR applications.
Design Environment. Being based on the DGN file format is brilliant - being able to have multiple models within a single file has so many advantages over the DWG file format.

Cons

This may only be applicable to South Africa, but training and product support definitely need a lot of improvement.
Some tools are over complicated and no simpler tool is provided. There is a bit of an obsession with preserving design intent to the point that making simple geometry edits is a really tedious task.
Usage of hardware. The software has mostly been programmed for single thread operations - so if you have 8 cores, only 1 will be used. It's a real shame of system resources to not use all of those cores to cut production time!
Drawing production - especially exporting drawings to DWG format is a massive pain.
Graphics Engine - seeing what game engines are capable of in their 3D working environments makes me wonder why all engineering software can't perform similarly.

Return on Investment

Efficiency in designing (and visualising) alternative designs. Huge positive as clients are expecting this to be standard now.
A negative would be the learning curve (as mentioned, training material is a bit lacking). The time taken to learn the software when the pressure to produce designs is on sometimes hurts the bottom line.
It's helped us win projects where we were competing against other consultants who didn't have software that could produce alternative designs to the same level of detail as quickly.

Alternatives Considered

AutoCAD and Autodesk Civil 3D

Other Software Used

MicroStation

Tejsingh Rana, P.E.View profile

Project Manager and Business Development Lead in Engineering at Highway Studio, LLC (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

Comprehensive Design and Modeling tool
Model Centric Plan production connecting 3D model to 2D Plans
Great tool for Digital Design Delivery to Construction
Great Clash detection with all proposed and existing features

Cons

Buggy at times and crashes
Requires a lot of training to use the tools effectively
Model management requires some work

Return on Investment

Positive definitely as all projects I work on require OpenRoads Designer
Helps us meet the deliverable requirements set by our clients

Other Software Used

Box

Lina Monica Ali View profile

BIM Manager in Professional Services at Surbana Jurong Private Limited (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Creating linear models, since the app is based on alignment models and templates to extrude along the alignment.
Precise long section/profile along horizontal alignment. The app practically flatten the horizontal alignment for profile generation.
Template control. Though the template creation takes a bit of effort to create due to the point rulings. However when done right allows the model to be specifically modified with use of functions like super-elevation, point control, widening, parametric etc.

Cons

Creating data. Currently will need to create data tag (e.g. volume, length, material type, material engineering criteria etc.) of component manually. Some of the commonly use data in AECOsim should be preset in OpenRoads.
Ability to link geometric data values to geometric properties. Currently not linked (e.g. volume value, length value etc.) and had to be keyed in and/or changed manually.
Opening (eg. for MEP interface) creation and modification still manual. There should be a smart opening creation that would create openings at interface location and auto enclose the mesh opening so that the volume will take into account the opening(s) created.

Return on Investment

Drawing creation from model have speed up drawing delivery by 80%
Model creation for linear project based on simple design speed up model delivery by 80%
Capturing model change due to alignment change have help speed up change capture by 80%

Other Software Used

Bentley ProjectWise, MicroStation

OpenRoads Designer

What is OpenRoads Designer?

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