Our customers love the fact that the Framework for Civil 3D works in Civil 3D production environments in multiple releases of Civil 3D right out of the box. Afterall, that is why we named the Framework desktop and basic Civil 3D user tool collection InstantOn. There are InstantOn production pretenders out there in Civil 3D Land. There are really no affordable Framework for Civil 3D contenders in the marketplace to date. There are reasons for that.
Focus Matters
Most of the US Autodesk Resellers see the Framework for Civil 3D as direct competition to their sales of customization and other services to you. Few will even mention the Framework exists. This is not very enlightened. The Framework is built to help the skilled Civil 3D expert get that work done faster and better.
Once upon a time I too was a major Autodesk Reseller. The Reseller position is understandable. From the short term Reseller sales perspective if customers pay less, they get less. I contend there is more important, value-added work to do for civil engineering, survey, and public agency customers than the mission critical content essentials and development and maintenance tools included in the Framework for Civil 3D.
Civil 3D Templates and Civil 3D Style Libraries are an important and affordable commodity today. The implementation of them in production is a significant competitive advantage in the wide marketplace of civil engineering and survey projects.
Your Civil 3D is The Framework Competition
The most significant InstantOn product contender is your own customization of Civil 3D. Your current customized Civil 3D demonstrably gets your work out the door or your organization could not be in business. Hat’s off to you – you succeeded to one degree or another.
Excuse me if I ask you to consider that bit more carefully…
We All Want Civil 3D to Work
We all learned that the hard way that Autodesk Civil 3D doesn’t work in production civil engineering and survey organizations without a significant investment in planning, design, and execution. There are a lot of required resources that must work together well for a Civil 3D user to get project work accomplished and consistent deliverables produced.
The Autodesk Myth tells us that you can have your Civil 3D your way. Autodesk purports to deliver the tools to help us make better hamburgers so to speak. We don’t get killer burgers until we do a lot of upfront work. Frankly, we appear to be required to build an entire Civil 3D hamburger stand to produce a reasonable deliverable.
Managed Systems Matter
Do we need a backyard Weber, a burger truck, or a chain of burger and beer house franchises?
What if we must quickly deliver fried chicken sandwiches that are now all the rage?
The Framework is designed, built, and maintained as a Systems Management Toolset to address this critical business and professional services problem of adaptability in projects and for even specialized tasks within projects.
The can in “You Can Have It Your Way” is not a must. We Must Have It Our Way is silly when you must customize the entire car to drive over there just to get lunch.
Updates and maintenance man-hours for a customized Civil 3D are often worse than the initial Style and other resources create and edit hit. Autodesk is continuously rebuilding the tools and their flagship civil engineering toolkit under our feet.
Most recognize this as a painful fact of life in Civil 3D Land. Therefore, we don’t install new Civil 3D Releases and Updates because our current project work depends on our old and now potentially out of date customizations. You know the drill.
We might not want to be on the Civil 3D bleeding edge, but none of us wants to come in last. It is far worse to discover that the reason there is no one else around running the race nearby is the later not the former.
The Framework aims and manages by rules, conventions, and structure – the best practices to make all of that Upgrade and Update nastiness a lot less painful and expensive for our customers. We deal with the QAQC of all the silly details, so our customers don’t have to.
Oh. Framework customers still have to do the work – a lot less work. They can focus on the more important work. They get to employ the new Civil 3D tools and production benefits quicker and with less hassle.
What’s not to like about that?
Civil 3D Implementation is No Cakewalk
Implementation is baked into the Civil 3D cake. Sooner or later we all wind up with a managed system for Civil 3D or not. Without one we experience an all too familiar set of frequent symptoms that are too painful to list. If Civil 3D hurts you, your Civil 3D users, and your projects a good bit of the time, you catch the drift.
Sadly, it is possible to build an effective Civil 3D production environment that traps you into old and very specific ways and means of doing the project work. An all too common example - You mastered production Site grading with Feature Lines but most of the rest of Civil 3D is unusable or seems to be useless rocket science. Honestly, most of folks with this problem are unlikely to read this post.
Standard Systems of Measurement are vital to production improvement in the real world.
A copy of the Framework for Civil 3D is a great affordable way to see how well a managed system for production Civil 3D work is built and relatively performs under pressure. It is tough to measure and compare what you cannot see and touch.
The Framework for Civil 3D begs my familiar post question:
“Can your Civil 3D Templates, Civil 3D Styles, and other resources do that?”
If We Can, You Can
You would not be alone. A significant number of our best customers took a while to adopt parts and pieces of the Framework for good reasons. The useful and important thing is the Framework resources are built to be used and implemented exactly that way.
What works for you is what matters.
Civil 3D 2021 Upgrade Protection
Autodesk Civil 3D 2021 is on the way. Let’s make this simple…
We already guarantee that a Framework for Civil 3D product for one release of Civil 3D will upgrade to the next release. Usually fixes are not required. We do deliver fixes if they are required. We do have more than a decade of practice systematically managing Civil 3D Upgrades and Updates. This demonstrably works for civil engineering, survey, and public agency customers large to small.
If you purchase a new copy or upgrade to a latest flavor of Jump Kit Release 8 for Civil 3D 2020 between March 10, 2020 and the official Jump Kit Release 8 for Civil 3D 2021 release date, we’ll give you a free Upgrade to the Jump Kit Release 8 for Civil 3D 2021 when that product is available.
See the The Civil 3D 2020.3 Framework Release post for details about the flavors of Jump Kit and purchase and upgrade options available to you.
The elephant in the room is overwhelming. That’s a fact. If you want help implementing a Managed System for Civil 3D with the Framework for Civil 3D, please give me a call.
We understand and know a few things about how to cook and enjoy the big Civil 3D beast in tasty, bite-sized pieces.
Together We Make Civil 3D Work
Get the Framework for Civil 3D