AYS Engineering is a full-service, minority-owned engineering firm serving Austin and Central Texas. They offer mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and plumbing design services. AYS focuses on commercial projects ranging from restaurants and breweries to retail spaces to office buildings to medical/clinical and elder care facilities to manufacturing and warehousing.
Carlos Zarate, Electrical CAD and Design, has been with AYS for over four years and has used Design Master Electrical for three years. According to Mr. Zarate, AYS uses Design Master for all its electrical engineering projects.
“I spent my first year at AYS creating blocks and template circuit lines in AutoCAD—and it all became so much faster and easier when we got Design Master Electrical,” says Mr. Zarate. “The software was super simple to learn and is very smooth and easy to use.”
“For example, instead of having to visually look all over a large, multi-sheet drawing for a specific piece of equipment or light fixture, I can locate it in a second using Design Master’s project explorer feature—it’s perfect,” Mr. Zarate adds.
“Our engineers are always out on meetings or on-site, so they need me to get the design as close to 100% complete as possible on my own in Design Master Electrical,” explains Mr. Zarate. “Then they just quickly red-line it and I can finish it from there.”
“The software also really speeds up revisions, which is a huge convenience for us and our clients,” Mr. Zarate observes.
Design Master Electrical stores project data in a database separate from the drawing files. This enables users to save considerable time by copying and reusing part or all of the data across projects.
“When we’re working on franchise restaurants, sometimes the building might be a mirror image of another building, or have a very similar footprint,” remarks Mr. Zarate. “I can copy the whole database or just parts of it from one project to another—the time savings is incredible.”
“The Design Master lighting and panel schedules give our drawings a really clean, organized and consistent look-and-feel,” Mr. Zarate offers. “This makes them very legible, which is one of the things we all like best about the software.”
Improved readability also helps construction managers and others who are using the drawings in the field.
“Design Master is really on it to support us,” Mr. Zarate notes. “On rare occasions where we have a corrupt file or some other issue or question, I send the database to the support team and they email me back with a fix within a couple of hours or even faster.”
“Anytime we need help they give us a perfect, step-by-step process to solve our problem, which is very convenient and helps us keep moving,” states Mr. Zarate.
“I couldn’t work without Design Master, that’s for sure,” laughs Mr. Zarate. “I can’t even do electrical design in regular AutoCAD anymore—it’s too slow and the calculations aren’t integrated like they are in Design Master.”
“Design Master Electrical is the new way to do electrical design,” Mr. Zarate asserts.
