Building on deep foundations

So you want to measure from electronic drawings. To do the job accurately, on time and on budget, you need a tool specifically designed for the task, quick to learn, easy to adopt, wrapped within an easy to understand framework. It needs to be more than a simple file viewer or CAD program and it can’t afford to be a jack-of-all-trades. You’re searching for what’s called a killer app. You need a champion.

You need OnSight™.

Building on the knowledge, designs and the DNA of its predecessor, EasyGrid™, over 25 years of experience in the business of drawing measurement has been encapsulated in a single product. OnSight™ delivers the ease of use and speed required in the very time-sensitive arena of competitive tender measurement.

Users now have a suite of measurement tools able to handle all the common formats of electronic drawings including scans, CAD and PDF files.

So what does it do?

Plenty, but before forging forward with a list of features and functions let’s consider what we considered when developing the system - you.

You want an easy to learn system, one that delivers confidence by the bucket load and makes good on all the promise you know the system has to offer. You want a system that takes the stress and inaccuracies out of the measurement task. You want a system that impresses - impresses yourself, impresses the client, impresses management - after all, you were probably an instigator in the purchase so you want a system that proves you make good recommendations and decisions. You also want to go home on time at the end of the day rather than staying over to catch up.

You want OnSight™

So what does it really do?

In short, it allows you to take accurate speedy measurement from a variety of files, both CAD based AND scanned, even PDF’s, direct from your screen. Projects can even have multiple drawings, even of mixed format and scales - an industry first.

Whether you’re measuring for a Bill of Quantities, measuring for a tender bid or even for a Cost Plan or budget estimate, you’re still measuring and it’s a lengthy and exacting task. Putting aside pricing and description selection, when analysed, the measurement task is the biggest part of any document production so you need to get it right and you need to cut the time down it takes (of course, you know this already, else you wouldn’t have read this far).

However cutting the time down doesn’t mean cutting corners. You still need accuracy. This is where your investment pays for itself many times over. Using OnSight™ is a point-and-click procedure. If you’re measuring from a raster image (BMP, TIFF or JPG) the procedure is as simple as clicking at each defining corner or at ends of lines. Curves are dealt with equally as easily and answers are reported to screen and stored in an easy to understand results table along with icon size pictures of each object. A master ‘picture’ area showing the project in total keeps you in touch with the task as a whole and multiple drawings can be stacked or tiled into the project as needs dictate.

When you’re measuring from a CAD file it gets better still. Now objects have ‘intelligence’ and absolute accuracy, allowing OnSight™ to automatically pre-measure many aspects of the project ready for user selection with all the usual CAD type tools like magnetic SNAP.

These of course are simple tasks and the system is full of additional tools to manage even more complex measures and tasks. The list is impressive even by our high standards including joist layout measurement, stud wall measurement, and the ever-tricky pitch roof measurement (even mansard’s are easy).

Is it easy to use? You bet!

Using the system is just as easy as you might hope, no knowledge of CAD is required. Load a file, pick a tool, click on the objects corners or ends and watch as the scaled answer is written to the results grid. With CAD files it's precisely accurate and fast  too.  It’s like digital tracing but better. 'Point-click-answer' is a good way of summing it all up.

Of course OnSight™ is also loaded with lots of tools to make measurement even faster.  If you’re dealing with a CAD file, OnSight™ can automatically measure defined areas straight from the file and can even create objects not present in the original work (like working space). Flexibility is a watchword, productivity is the result.

Flattening the learning curve

But delivering all the new features we’ve built into the latest version is only half the story. Drawing on our experience with our other systems we have enabled our new systems with multimedia based Help rather than a simple flat file help system and paper manuals. Now, instead of fumbling to understand what you need to know, users watch real-time video with narration. Uptake of information is almost immediate and the learning curve is flattened, leveraging more profit from the investment right from day one. No other system is as easy to implement as OnSight™.

Nested layers

Like our other measurement solutions, OnSight™ continues to make use of the well adopted approach of measuring in layers. But even this technique has been re-engineered with unlimited layers and even nested layers (layers within layers) are possible giving yet even more flexibility to a great approach and allowing every user to keep control of a growing take-off, allocating their measures to the right ‘pigeonhole’. You can even move and clone objects from layer to layer and even whole layers making multi-floored take-offs simplistic! Each and every layer and each object also has its own colour and line attributes giving the user finite control over both screen presentation and final print output. Teams of users haven’t been overlooked either – all user preferences, common data, styles, descriptions and colours can be shared, allowing the system to deliver uniformity across the team as well as making hot-desking a reality.

3D as standard

Take-off doesn’t stop at 2D though. Even though the plans you’re measuring are ‘flat’, OnSight™ offers every user the ability to develop 3D models right out of the box. Walls can be effortlessly extruded to give them height, doors and window openings can be cut, even pipework and ductwork can be measured vertically and developed in a visual 3D model. Objects can be volumised by giving them thickness or depth, so even volumetric take-offs are easy, with every object visually in the right place in a slick looking 3D model built to impress

HotLink™ and Excel™

And to top the system off, OnSight™ comes with HotLink™ as standard allowing single button clicks to fire results back into any other application. We’ve even armed the system with a host of preset HotLink™ profiles for Word™, Excel™, QSExpress™, LaunchSite™ even other vendors estimating systems, so you just select the target you want and the job’s done (and of course you can easily make your own HotLink™ macro’s for all your other favourite applications). Errors just can’t creep in - no memory errors, no typo’s, no stress and what’s even better, the HotLink™ to Excel is dynamic, meaning revisions flow seamlessly through to your linked spreadsheets for instant and effortless updated reports of your own design.  It’s how it should always be - it’s how it is.

Making the most of print

So you’ve measured your project - now you need a distribution route. As standard, OnSight™ can export to Excel™ at the click of a button but you need more. You need easy to read graphical printouts, you need hatch control, line control and total colour control right down to object level - and OnSight™ delivers it all.

Specialist hardware

And to make users even more efficient, OnSight™ supports twin-screen set-ups as standard, allowing non essential tools to be moved to a second screen making way for bigger drawings and therefore less zooming/panning, speeding up the user and forcing even more efficiency from the system. But the engineering doesn’t stop there, OnSight™ is also out-of-the-box ready for a selection of wide screen hi-definition touch-screen monitors squeezing even greater returns from the investment (up to twice as fast).

OnSight™

Professional on-screen takeoff software