From Finland with Love

By Luke Howells

Image Credit: http://finlandiyada.com

When I was first asked if I wanted to come to Finland, I jumped at the chance. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Finland other than being cold. I had been teased that all there was to eat would be Reindeer and Fermented Fish, neither of which I was keen to try.

My adventure begain with a flight first to  Helsinki and then a connecting flight to Vaasa in the North West of Finland, with a long wait between flights in the airport. Ariving late in the evening it was already dark and snowing, grabbing a taxi at the airport it was only a short journey into Vaasa to the Hotel. I had no local currency with me but luckily the taxi as well as most other outlets here all accept card payment and the majority contactless too.

The main goal for this week was to demonstrate the suitability of the software for a multi-national engineering company delivering projects in thousands of locations around the world. Interestingly these projects are concerned with industrial engineering installations on greenfield sites on a huge scale. This customer not only provides the machinery for the projects but also the buildings and infrastructure to service it. It is not uncommon for them to build a landing strip in more remote locations to get the people and materials on site. 

The training itself was different to a course delivered elsewhere in Europe. The majority of my training is supported by using specific country kits which makes AutoCAD Civil 3D relevant for each location, the UK one is called the UKIE Country Kit for Civil 3D. Each country kit has many of the standards and design objects already set-up which makes it very easy to get up and running with the product. For this organisation, I had to think out of the box because there wasn’t a specific country kit we could identify that would fit all their projects.

Therefore, much of the early part of this course was spent setting up and creating a base template with surface styles, description key sets and point styles, which we would then use for the duration of the training and then be further developed for live projects. The delegates were impressed with the adaptability of the product and true diversity of the projects that AutoCAD Civil 3D can support. I demonstrated that with the right data you can model simple access roads through to fully collaborative BIM models, regardless of where you are in the world.

The training went smoothly and the 3-day course flew by and I must say that I have been impressed by Finland and this particular group of people. And yes, I did end up trying the reindeer and it was amazing! Look out for the release of AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018 in the third week of April.