Software Story: Overcoming Resistance to Change

Because if you base your design on unknown and untried software, and it's a disaster because the s/w is bogus, and $millions are lost and people die as a result, it's not a good thing for your career.

And every engineer knows that salesmen lie, so we rely more on the experiences of our colleagues to guide us toward something shiny and new.

This is untrue, much of the time firms have the mentality that even if they do twice the work, they do not get twice the pay. And some firms get a lot of Cost-plus jobs, so the longer the job takes, the more funding they get. It is a little rash to assume that the software proposed has not been proven, as we do not know the track record of the software. He said that it has been widely used in Ohio, so there may be proof in that. Also, I doubt that any Engineer would be so lazy or irresponsible to not check plans, even if they are guaranteed, for errors. The case of millions dying and lives lost is an extreme example, with new software being very little cause for such disastrous effects. Even if such software were faulty, engineers would catch it, and if not engineers, then the good people constructing it would. Blaming it on software being used is a way of avoiding responsibility.

I think I need to clear up some confusion, our software is DRAFTING software, not DESIGN software. It only draws the plans. Instead of 2-3 weeks of usual drafting work, it shortens it to just a few minutes. Our service is delivered in 2 business days or less. And yes, it has been tried and is proven, with over 300 projects in Ohio.

What features and benefits does your software provide? What happens to all of my legacy files? How long will it take us to implement a new system? Why should I bother to change from a known product to something that is "revolutionary" (a word that some associate with terms like "unstable" and "untested")? What will happen to my career if I try your software and the whole project fails?

These are just some of the questions - and fears - that you must address, Guest. Your software may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you need to provide a very compelling reason for change.

There is a simple answer to all of these questions: we provide a service that provides the firm with files in AutoCAD and Microstation formats, we don't sell the software.

Therefore it doesn't take any time to implement the system, nor does cost anymore money to do it. The plans are already in formats that are standard for firms across the nation, and fully adjustable just as though you made the plans yourself. A transfer to our system is a way for companies to focus on design and quality of the plans, not the tedious process of drawing them manually on the computer. On average, drafting takes 2-3 weeks for a single structure, or more if it is very complicated. With our technology, even the most complicated of structures for our software will take less than 60 seconds a sheet, not to mention Culverts which take less than 60 seconds a set.

Also, with our free trial, there is nothing to lose. Our software has been used on over 300 bridge projects in Ohio, all of which are of excellent quality, and the profit margin on each of the projects was unattainable with manual drafting.

The process is very simple: You input the design parameters into a data file we provide, send it to us, and we send you the detailed plans, including the calculation report, within 2 days. All you have to do is modify them yourself to meet personal preferences, such as headings. That's it. We even redo the plans for 10 days with new inputs if there were mistakes by the user.

The bottom line is our service makes it so professionals no longer have to do grunt-work and can spend their valuable time on designing and quality control. Whether you're an engineer or a CAD technician, our service is for assisting engineering professionals to provide the best product they can for public use.

I design machines (automatic tack welders, among others) and can't imagine how I could possibly do the design without doing the drawings to see how the various parts fit... Please elaborate.

1. A lot of people see spending $10,000 worth of internal time being cheaper than spending $1 on an external service because many people in governments and companies are denied any chance for independent spending.

2. Most companies make a product and sell it. People are used to that. They try it...they buy it and they have a fixed cost. With you the cost is a function of use and most organizations have tight controls on peoples ability to get into open ended costs.

3. Cost. ...Greed This might be a simple package and your company wants to treat it as a cash cow and even free milk samples will not overcome the perceived cost. For example, I cam buy autocad light for $750 or so and do a lot of work on it and every piece of new work is just wages. With your company we may end up with a cost of $10,000 a year due to aggressive pricing that is based on what your company sees as my savd cost of your software.

People do not see wages as a cost and they do not see wages saved as money saved because people with things to sell often chat a loy about savings, which are somehow elusive.

Any idea why your company does not sell it? How long before someone sees your companies method as a fools errand and develops and sells a package that does the task as a product and not an endless cash cow.

Alpha: vested interests.

Omega: fear

In california, both following recent scandals in Sacramento where multiple billions were lost (and misappropriated)--and had to be refunded--trying to implement software services...needless to say, that state is gun shy for the foreseeable future.

The way you are trying to market your product is a big problem. Whilst most will not see the savings as has been previously described there is a further serious problem.

The problem is that anybody that uses your services is totally at your mercy and the fate of your company. For example if companies decided to use your services and at some time in the future, for some reason or other, possibly outside your control, you removed the services, it would leave them very exposed. They would need to modify the way they operate and re-skill workers to do the in the tasks that they were outsourcing. This almost certainly be a rush job and would therefore be costly and fraught with danger.

Another negative is liability, what happens in the event of a serous stuff up? You can bet that the lawyers would have a field day at finger pointing leaving the company that used your services stuck in the middle without a safety net.

I realize that there is a current trend for companies to outsource of recent but I believe this is a short sighted attempt at profit maximization and will ultimately be a temporary trend. Outsourcing is based on the flawed concept that an external person or persons can do the work cheaper and better than you. Since the only way of surviving long term in business is to do your job better and cheaper than your opposition, by outsourcing you are removing your advantage and it will ultimately result in your downfall. Thirty odd years of engineering in both the private and public sectors has shown this to be the case every time outsourcing services has been employed.

If your product is that good then I can see the only way to get a descent slice of the CAD market is to build a reputation as a reliable business and then sell the software so companies can use it them self. You can still generate an ongoing money stream with upgrades and training. You may also be able to generate a portion of you income the way you plan, especially for smaller companies that do not have full time drafting personnel but I can't see it working as the sole basis for your income stream.

One final piece of advice is that every market is finite and is subject to product saturation so never believe an accountant that there is a thing called sustainable growth, there isn't, never has been and never will be. If your product is that good it will sell very well initially but sooner or later the market place will saturate and there will be no more growth. The trick is not letting you market share and company grow too rapidly in the beginning as it will result in you over staffing and when you do reach market saturation the only solution is layoffs. Very few companies survive layoffs as it not only demoralizes staff it destroys your customers confidence in your company. If you ever find yourself involved with a company that needs to lay off staff make sure your parachute is on and get ready to jump as the writing is on the wall and its written in indelible ink.

To add one more point from Masu's reply:

3) Some company feel that they don't want other people to know about their design (too much thief and illegal copying), so they rather have their own software and do their own drawing than to outsource it to a third party.

MidniteFighter

When I made an attempt several years ago to introduce a similar service, I was amazed at the number of companies charging for the service of providing design and design drawings that were using illegal copies of unlicensed AutoCad software.

Making major changes of any kind requires some drastic changes in thinking by those who initiate, implement and replace accepted existing thinking.

"The Ordeal of Change" by Eric Hoffer goes into detail as to what is involved if changes are to be made and accepted.

The savings we speak of do not come from savings on wages, but the improved quality and reputation for saving time. If a firm were to use our service, it would enable them to take on a larger workload, and also keep the same level of quality, or better, than before on each project!

This is how:

With our service, drafting errors are no longer a grueling process of remaking plans, but instead just rerunning our software (which is free for 10 days). This makes it much easier for a firm to catch errors and fix them cost-effectively, even at a later stage. If a design parameter is wrong, then it will be evident in the outputted plans, and it can be changed much more easily by simply rerunning.

As far as reputation goes, unless the jobs are cost-plus, faster, high quality jobs give firms a reputation of being reliable and fast. This may even give America the competitive edge if outsourcing becomes prevalent in the engineering field. (We are lucky that in this service, unlike most other services today, America is in the position where we can be faster and of equal or better quality than other countries workers. Maybe I will make a blog on this as well).

Being at the mercy of our company is a somewhat nihilistic thought. Our service is best used for getting the "rough draft" done, and then cleaning it up yourself. All clients are still urged to know how to use CAD manually, as quality control will require it. We like to say that we get the drafting from 0% to 60-90%, depending on how complicated the structure is. For culverts, the outputted plans will be mostly done (70-99%), but the finishing touches must be done by a human. We're not here to destroy jobs, we're here to help.

A service instead of selling the software is a decision we made because of a call for it. Some firms or counties liked the software, leased it, but then did not have the volume of work to get their money's worth. So instead, by making it per project usage, firms can just use our service anytime they like for an affordable fee (a small fraction of the money saved). We may offer leasing again in the future, but we now just want to make sure that the software is not pirated. powerful software like this is likely to be illegally copied, especially if we end up going international.

For a project done using this service, go to the website in my profile.

I looked at the site and the company site.

It might be useful software, but it also might be a manual operation.

The design is submitted and 2 days later and after $2000 payment you get the finished files. Many people can design a culvert in-house for less and faster.

Analyzing all this....

I think you need a marketing person with skill in this area whose first language is English.

This is a response from a senior engineer in our office:

First, I assure you that we do not manually create the "first draft" plans. For culvert-type structures, we use our culvert software, one of the five automated detailing and drafting software packages that we developed over the last 10 years, to create the plans. (We use different packages for different types of bridge structures.)

Secondly, you said "many people can design a culvert in-house for less (than $2,000) and faster (than 2 days)". I believe some clarification is in order. If what you meant is putting some DOT standard drawings together for some small pipes or box culverts (spans less than 12 feet), then I agree that what you said is possible. But in many states, such as Ohio, the culvert sizes are much larger (rise - up to 30', span - up to 110'), and many details are required (such as the Culvert & Wing-wall Layout, the Inlet & Outlet Views, the Wing-wall Reinforcing Details, the Footing Reinforcing Details, etc.); for these, 2 days is humanly impossible. Even 50 Indian technicians working together in India cannot make it in 48 hours, not to mention 16 normal office hours.

We will continue to improve our web pages.

Part of what you say is true. An experienced company who has made hundreds of culverts in the past on a CAD system will have a database from which to draw to create a new design and that will save them 80-90% of the time involved. A company with no data base will indeed work longer and harder.

This may be why you cannot achieve penatration. Roads tend to have certain widths and culverts carry water of various flows with various valley depths and that means a convergence of designs around a few basic ones.

I am sorry to say you are mistaken again. (Rather, we did not explain our service clearly enough.) Experienced CAD users know that modifying existing drawings into new drawings would never save 80-90% of the production time. For example, let's say you have a 12'(span) x 8'(rise) culvert structure with headwalls and four wing-walls in your "database". Now try to modify the drawings for a new project that requires a 16' x 10' culvert, and for which all of the wing-wall configurations (lengths, heights, flare angles, etc.) have changed. You will be lucky if you can save 15% of the plan prep time (by Ohio DOT plan requirements).

We need to think out of the box. The most effective way to save plan prep time is to let the computer process all the commands that you would enter in a "batch" fashion, rather than interactively. Any CAD command, AutoCAD or MicroStation, would take 3-8 seconds to enter (not including the thinking time), but today even an $800 desktop has the computing power to execute hundreds of such commands per second. You figure out the math (speed ratio). With our culvert software, the entire set of plans (seven sheets), complete with the Quantity Calculations and the Re-steel List, can be created in about 60 seconds, real time. We offer 48-hour turn-around time because we do perform some QC/QA on the generated plans, and we may have other business to tend to. A video of our software working at real time speed is available on our website in the introduction video, as well as our free client CD, which we send to anyone who e-mails us and asks for it.

Seeing is believing. We will be glad to send you a CD, in which the movie can show you how the design details are created before your eyes. Just e-mail us on our website <www.TAdrafting.com> or our blog <infonews.TAdrafting.com>.

Also, in addition to being used for drainage structures, culverts have been used for short-span bridges (over waterways or roads), underpasses (for vehicles, trains, and pedestrians) and storage facilities. There are many such photos in the CD mentioned above, and on our website.

Dear Guest,

Analysing and synthesing the whole situations from different perspectives/angles or with change in some of your basic fundamental assumptions (if you think your are current best target market is USA ... then thinking as to can it be INDIA as my market???) might give you insight or new idea which might be your ideal solutions. Like for example do not give to companies for trial version but give it to training institute of AUTOCAD or so where participants are more willing to change and in better environment to look at new things and try.

Can you provide website or more information on your product/software/service to enable to understand it better and possibly suggest direction which could be of practical steps you can take to get sustainable benefit?

It seems from your posting and as suggested (rightly) by all earlier replies it could be not one but many reasons like "cause - effect - cause" (why your potential customers not showing interest in your work) which unless you find out root-cause addressing on trial and error basis is not good method (however which may give you result at times!!!). Resistance to change or psychological inertia surely is one of the biggest obstacles.

Often people do not want to say right things for many reasons so they disguise in shade of plausable reasons, leading to less than ideal path for solutions.

Hope this helps...

I appreciate your forward thinking on this. For you to better understand it, you can visit our website <www.TAdrafting.com>. We are thinking of foreign markets, too. In America, we provide seminars to interested companies to show our software, but we cannot travel outside of the country to do so at this time.

very strange. you revealed you had developed a greater software which can save much of labour, another side, you will not show us your achievement. You plead fear of illegal copy of software. So you dicided to serve for people instead of selling it. However, It's a good way to solve the problem. But on another side, Im afraid you are aberrance. As you are software company not a marketing company. That's the way of what a engineering company will do.

Autocad is a good software, even more and more new software has been developed on the market for particularly object. They have strong function at its area. And format can be compatible rightly. Autocad still has a strong life and many people is using it. You would learn from them.

there are lots of firms to contract project for clients and they have also very good relevant software for paticularly task. These software can be concernning infrastructure, industrial plants and construct, decorate, install. And so on. Of cause, most of them are based on Auotcad. This is what needless to say.

My friends can also take these project. So If there will be any clients out there who has projects contact them and they can finish them according to your requirement fast and good quality.

First and foremost, we are an engineering firm who has developed this software for internal use. We are marketing our service to other companies now because we believe it is the future of engineering and would like to help the progress of a historically conservative field.

Secondly, our culvert service should be readily applicable in China. You will be able to create a set of design plans for a traditional high-arch bridge in just 60 seconds (after entering all the required data). Our website is <www.TAdrafting.com>, and our blog is <infonews.tadrafting.com>. We also have a fluent mandarin speaker as our President.