Case Study - A Company with Vision
Exploiting a growing demand for high quality visualisation
South African company GESS - Graphical Engineering Solutions and Services (Pty) Ltd - might initially look like any other conventional small civil engineering consultancy. However, a closer look reveals a very different kind of animal - highly specialised, focussed and with an interesting and highly unique business model.
Founded in 2001, the company targets the built environment market with a very clear objective.
GESS aims to exploit their graphic engineering solutions and services in order to add value
for their clients - infrastructure owners, civil engineering consultants and designers.
The company has four main offerings. First and foremost, they operate as engineering IT specialists. They are also resellers of professional engineering design software offering sales, training and technical support to a growing client-base of more than 100 customers across sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, they are highly skilled engineering consultants in their own right, and back this up with additional technical support and training.
With the emphasis on developing solutions to help clients win business, becoming players in the civil engineering visualisation market was seen as a strategic opportunity. It was obvious that the sector was growing in importance in the industry, and GESS' founders accurately predicted the role that it would play in their market in the future. Today, visualisation has become an integral part of the planning and design phases of many projects (to check sight distances for example) as well as an essential element of the marketing process, from environmental feasibility studies and initial bids through to final design presentations for planning authorities and the public at large, as part of public participation programmes.
Since the introduction of visualisation services at GESS, their clients have been quick to realise the potential of the company's offerings - and a look at GESS's list of visualisation projects and clients bears this out. These include the Gauteng Province Department of Public Transport, Roads and Works; the National Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, Gautrain; Kumba Resources and schemes such as the De Hoop dam and road realignment; the Luanda Waterfront Rehabilitation scheme; and the K90 interchange at Johannesburg International Airport.
GESS understands the importance of synchronising the visualisation with design changes as the scheme develops, and the overall significance of achieving these objectives in the most cost-productive way possible.
When applications engineer, Mark Parkinson joined the company from New Zealand in 2004 he immediately saw the potential of visualisation package Dynamite VSP. Compared with the other systems available, it offered exactly the tools and utilities that GESS needed, and featured strong integration with many other software packages that they already used.
Dynamite VSP is developed exclusively by 3am Solutions, who specialise in high-end visualisation solutions for the civil engineering industry. The package is tailored to the needs of professionals working in this field and has been specifically designed to integrate with many leading civil design, survey, and CAD systems such as Bentley Geopak, MX, MicroStation, and InRoads; and AutoCAD, 12D Model and Civil 3D.
Mark illustrates just how Dynamite VSP has been put to use on the visualisation of the K90/K157 motorway interchange at Johannesburg International Airport.
"The design of the K90 interchange was undertaken as part of a larger project to investigate the possible use of digital media and new technologies in the development, reporting and management of preliminary designs for the Gauteng Province Department of Public Transport, Roads and Works. The K90 interchange is particularly significant as it will support the development of a new industrial zone to the east of Johannesburg International Airport.
"In terms of the CAD software used it was a multi-tool approach. The detailed design was carried out using Bentley Geopak Road and Bentley MicroStation. The triangulation meshes of all the motorways and ramps were then transferred to Dynamite VSP via LandXML files. Just to add to the mix, the orthographic photography was manipulated in Bentley's Descartes and additional 3D features were modelled in AutoCAD and Autodesk VIZ.
"This was our first Dynamite VSP project and we really benefited from the software's ease of use. It was so intuitive that we were up and running producing high quality results almost from day one because it uses familiar terminology and engineering rationale.
"We also have specific road marking and road feature requirements in South Africa and creating these in Dynamite VSP has been a breeze. This means that we can now work with our own customised library of objects such as bridge barriers and sign gantries, which adds that extra 'local' touch. This has proved very important when showing visualisations to clients, planning authorities and the public.
"The automatic synchronisation with our design data also saved us a huge amount of work as we didn't have to rework any of the visualisation when the model was changed. Add to that the time-savings we achieved using its in-built automation, and the ease of data transfer with the number of different packages used, and there is no doubt in our minds that Dynamite VSP was the right choice for the job."
On the back of this success, a second project quickly followed: visualisation of the preliminary design for the upgrade of the Luanda Waterfront for presentation to Baía de Luanda PMG SA. This involved the re-development of the bayfront area of the central business district as part of a wider project to clean-up and dredge the bay itself.
Because of the nature of the project the timescales were very
compressed - GESS had only two weeks to complete the
project. The original design had been carried out using Bentley
Geopak Site and Bentley MicroStation, but because of time
pressures, it was especially important that much of the
visualisation process was automated. That's where Dynamite
VSP's unique feature interpretation system really proved its
worth. It's one of Dynamite VSP's most powerful utilities and
meant that more than 330 vehicles, 1300 car parking bays, 500
road markings (with 10 different marking styles), 250 lane
markings (in 14 styles), 80 traffic signals, 400 specifically
located lights of five types, hundreds of concrete bollards,
twelve bus stops and 1000 individual trees could be added into
the visualisation model with a few key presses. These items
were even tailored to local Angolan standards.
The final visualisation of the waterfront was presented in interactive video form to Baía de Luanda PMG SA to seek approval to proceed to the implementation stage. As a result of this, permission to proceed was granted in April 2006 and the project was scheduled to go to tender in March 2007.
GESS has received extremely positive feedback from many of its clients, including Vela VKE Engineering Consultants. Neil Slingers, project manager at Vela VKE, had this to say about an earlier visualisation project, and specifically about Provincial Administration of the Western Cape Department of Roads' decision on the construction of cycle lanes: "On seeing the visual effects of the proposed cycle lanes, the client decided to have a cheaper, combined walkway/cycle path completely separate from the road; one could argue that the visualisation assisted the client to make more informed decisions as well as savings on construction costs."
In describing another recent project - the redesign of Zimbali Golf Course - Mark adds: "We used the visualisation phase to tie together all the different disciplines of the design - golf course grading, roads, bridges and cadastral information. We even included environmentally sensitive wetland areas and buffer zones. The result gave the client a very clear picture of what would actually work. The golf course designers were also impressed with the results, and were quick to spot the areas where their own designs would benefit from additional work.
Recognition for the quality of GESS's visualisation work has not been limited to their own client base. GESS received two award nominations in 2006 for their visualisation capabilities, and their visualisations formed part of a prize-winning presentation for best Civil Road Design Project at the Bentley User Conference in the same year. This is no mean achievement as Dynamite VSP was the only non-Bentley visualisation product acknowledged in this way.
Brett Forbes, GESS's managing director, comments on how they have benefited from their successes in visualisation: "Visualisation gives us a competitive edge in order to gain access to clients, projects and other opportunities for our professional services and software sales divisions. Using Dynamite VSP for visualisation, integrated with our other 3D technologies, we are able to offer a better service than our competitors, and with a level of productivity which makes it a very good business proposition. In turn, our clients receive a value-added service which enhances their relationship with their own clients and creates opportunities to win future bids and projects."
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