Matthew Burton, principal structural engineer at AECOM, shared his thoughts about the latest SCIA Engineer structural engineering software release
Could you tell us about your experience with SCIA Engineer 21 and what your impression is?
Matt: There’s a lot of ways you can approach analysis within SCIA Engineer. So, for me that’s a positive because it’s versatile enough to use across the breadth of projects. The way we approach analysis is going to be directed to the search bar.
We’re not going to need to go looking for the functions we want and working out which bars they’re in. We’re going to search consistently and logically. It’s a different way of working and I think it’s going to make analysis methodology a lot more efficient and consistent without losing any of that versatility.
Which are for you the key highlights or the highlights that you found most desirable of the new release and new interface?
Matt: Well, that’s going to be SCIA Spotlight, the search bar, for the consistency. I like the thought that if I’ve got something I’ve been doing 100 times I’m just going to set a nice hotkey and go for it every time. I’ve never really liked the way you may look for things like averaging strips in concrete but you wouldn’t find them in analysis. If I’m looking for averaging strips, I’ll get to type it in and it’s there.
Anything I want as long as I can think ‘what is this in engineering terms’, I’m going to find it straight away in a consistent way.
It removes any reliance that I need to be looking in the right area to find something or to find a specific methodology. It’s going to keep things versatile by when I search for something giving me the full list of possible options to conduct the analysis without having to just stumble across it. I like that a lot.
Would you recommend SCIA Engineer 21 to others?
Matt: I would recommend SCIA Engineer 21 to long-term SCIA users who want to spend a bit more time on design and less in setting things up and for new users and the generations that have been brought up on highly visual user interfaces or programming and prefer simple searches to them this is going to feel really familiar.
I think it was a big challenge, a big leap and it offers a lot of benefits when you spend the time on it, so I think those who aren’t expecting this are going to be really quite impressed.
You can view the full interview here.
Please note: this is a commercial profile.
