Customer Success Story

Tony Murgia and Nick Brearey --
Transit Engineering Services

Until buying Alibre Design, TES only used AutoCAD LT for design and drafting. The company's engineers felt their work didn't warrant spending thousands of dollars on 3D CAD systems. With that in mind, Tony says, "We kept our eyes open for a package to come along at the right price." They had tried an evaluation copy of Solid Edge, but found "it took too much time to get up to speed. Then Alibre Design came along."

In October 2002, their colleague Jim Rue received a demo CD for Alibre Design in an issue of Design News magazine. According to Tony, "We were at the beginning of a new project that was nothing like anything we'd done before. We had little legacy data, so it was a perfect time to try new software."

Nick and Tony bought Alibre Design and began learning it, especially Tony who had previous solid modeling experience with Pro/ENGINEER.

Tony was able to easily learn Alibre Design on his own. "I found Alibre Design easy to learn. The online training tools really helped -- I really liked the tutorial documents and videos. I watched the videos at home where I have a high-speed Internet connection. And I went through the tutorial documents, plus the manual. I just started doing design, little by little, until I got up to speed.

Tony also called Alibre customer support frequently with how-to questions. "I have had very good experiences with support. One time I was working from home and started a chat session with the Alibre Assistant at midnight. I liked being able to do that." [Note: The official schedule for the Alibre Assistant is 8:00 am to 5:00 pm Central time, Monday through Friday, although the Assistant is sometimes available at other times.]

TES designs its own equipment, but its newest project involves the installation of customer's equipment into an existing vehicle. "This job is to integrate various pieces of our customer's equipment into a fleet of light rail vehicles presently in service," Tony says. The integration design, therefore, involves presenting various "what if" scenarios to the customer and "Alibre Design lends itself to this very well".

Finally, TES presented its design to the customer and used Alibre Design for the presentation, which made a big impression at the meeting. "My customer's customer saw us using Alibre Design in our presentation and he was very impressed. I gave him our demo CD so that he could try it."

Now Alibre Design is integrated into TES's daily design activities; Tony and Nick have been pleased with its performance. "Alibre Design has been a good value -- a very good tool for conceptual design and an excellent tool for conveying designs to customers. I would recommend Alibre Design -- it was really easy to learn," Tony says.

Nick agrees, "We're extremely happy with Alibre Design -- it was a great move for us."