Company Profile

The use of Computer Aided Drafting within the construction industry over the last decade has caused a revolution in the documentation for commercial construction projects. Drawings need to be produced faster and more accurately than ever before, however the majority of drafts-people tend to treat CAD systems as little more than an "electronic drawing board", rather than a powerful database manager that happens to have graphical output in the form of drawings.

Maxcad places a strong emphasis on collaboration with other users of the data contained within drawings by using innovative techniques in the structure and production of the drawings. These users can range from the designers through to other contractors working on the project, fabricators, commissioning engineers and finally facilities management staff for the ongoing management of the building services.

We aim to produce drawings quickly, accurately and under budget, while merging the skills of the traditional draftsperson and the "IT" specialist to leverage the power of technology. By solving engineering and co-ordination problems at the documentation phase of a project, costly manufacturing errors and site modifications can be avoided, improving the bottom line for our clients.

Rather than rely on the vagaries of email we provide a secure FTP server for our clients to log-on via the internet and collect their drawings as they are issued. This avoids potentially costly delays in issuing of drawings throughout a project, as the client can have the drawings downloaded and plotted in their office within minutes of completion. For larger projects we also provide a project specific log-on for the FTP server for collaboration of all the services contractors. They have full and complete access to all our drawing data 24 hours a day seven days a week. The FTP server is automatically updated every hour from our working data set to ensure that the publicly available data is as up to date as possible.

We prefer to receive project information electronically wherever possible. This allows us to work remotely from our clients while eliminating delays in information flow. Instead of having large format drawings printed and sent via courier, they can be scanned to a file and uploaded directly to our project FTP server, once again eliminating delays and saving on courier costs.

We can provide drawing files in almost any format required by our clients. The primary format used is PDF. This allows quick and easy file sharing in a format that is well understood by all. Our preferred format however is DWF (drawing web format). This is a very compact file format that is quick to download and allows easy viewing on screen and plotting with the free "Volo View" software from Autodesk. This format can also be electronically "red-lined" for revisions. We can also provide DWG, DXF, HP/GL-2, TIFF and many others if required.

Our focus is on the provision of excellence in drafting and documentation through the use and development of technology.

Maxcad's principle, Andrew Dunn, has been drafting in the air-conditioning industry since 1981 and completed diploma level engineering qualifications in 1985. He has been using and programming AutoCAD from Release 2.18 in 1986. We have five staff with combined experience of over 50 years in the building services industry.