'As AutoCAD designer for Green Trust I get to make drawings for wind and solar projects. Think about drawings that show where the wind turbines should be placed but also drawings of the substation, the cables in the ground and the roads for the work vehicles which temporarily need to be made to carry out work. I don’t do this alone, but together with the Solutions team,' Bojan tells. Team solutions shares a lesson learned every quarter, and today Bojan talks about automatically implementing names of parcel owners in drawings.
In wind and solar projects we make use of cadastral data to see which piece of land belongs to which owner. In these projects we are regularly dealing with dozens or hundreds of plots. There could be several reasons why we need to know which plot belongs to who. For example, the fact is that wind turbines have to be placed at certain distance from one another. Roads that connect them cross a lot of parcels and during the construction phase we transport big parts of turbines hence a lot of space is needed. Therefore, we need to know who’s plot we must use for transport to ask for permission.
Previously we used to extract cadastral data in AutoCAD drawings manually parcel by parcel. We copied the names and information of the owners from an excel file into the drawing one by one and after doing so, we experienced that tis way took way too much time and more importantly mistakes could occur.
So after some time of working this way, I tried to see if there was any way to automate things. And that’s when I found out how to automatically import text and place it on the exact position with the right coordinates all at once. This improvement only meant a reduction of 60% in the time we spent on this task and thereby also eliminated any potential errors. After positioning the names of the parcel owners on the correct position inside the belonging parcels, the only thing we still have to adjust is the rotation of the names to follow the parcel orientation and be clearly visible on the drawing. I’m looking forward to finding a way how to improve this and also make this action even faster.
This and other improvements showed us how important is to always search for better ways of working and not solely rely on knowledge we already have. With this attitude we speed up the process of making drawings and prevent mistakes in drawings. Step by step we make improvements and learn how to become better.