Bentley Podcast: Hear Bentley Channel Partner Discuss MicroStation’s Role in Manufacturing Facilities

The Bentley team recently recorded a podcast in Italian with one of our channel partners, CAD Connect, to discuss recent projects using MicroStation.

In this podcast, Simone Spinaci and Daniele Podda from CAD Connect discuss a project they collaborated on with Geico Taikisha, a leading company in the design and manufacture of turnkey automated systems for car body painting all over the world. Because the podcast is in Italian, we have created a transcript of the podcast in English for our English-speaking readers. For those who want to listen to the podcast, it is available below.

 

Podcast Transcript

Damiano Vezzosi: Greetings to all and welcome to "Bentley Stories" the new Podcast by Bentley Systems. In this new format, we will share Bentley products – the stories of Bentley products, in fact - through the voice of the users who use them in their daily work. So far, you have had the opportunity to read case studies on bentley.com in the form of articles describing the use of Bentley solutions in various projects. Thanks to this podcast, you can now hear Bentley users talk about their own experience. Some of the many users who have achieved their business goals thanks to Bentley's software will tell you how a particular software helped them in a project.

I'm Damiano Vezzosi and I work at Bentley as Task Innovator. I deal with the Italian content. I will lead this series of podcasts interviewing users.

In each podcast, you will listen to ONE Bentley user, or as in the case of this first episode, to a channel partner, and talk about ONE particular project. That is, we'll tell how a software product has helped, simplified, decreases the costs and increases the productivity of an infrastructure project.

Today, we’ve invited Simone Spinaci and Daniele Podda. Simone Spinaci is from CAD Connect, who is one of Bentley's Gold Channel partners and the only certified training partner of the Bentley Institute in Italy. Daniele Podda is a freelance expert in MicroStation and OpenBuildings, and a CAD Connect collaborator.

Let's start this off with Simone Spinaci. How long have you been working with Bentley products? How did you get to know Bentley’s ecosystem?

Simone Spinaci: I’ve been in the industry for quite some time as I started working as a user in 1993, at first, as a designer for MicroStation. After a couple of years, thanks to my passion for MicroStation, I became a trainer, i.e. I took courses. In 2000, I started working with partners here in Italy and, in 2006, I was hired by Bentley Systems Italia, where I stayed for 10 years. In 2016, I decided to become a reseller. In the past twenty years, I have seen all the aspects of MicroStation and all the applications that have been developed over the years, always maintaining this bond and this passion for the Bentley world.

You've known Bentley products for a very long time, then?

Simone Spinaci: Yes! I started by accident. I did an internship because I had always been passionate about the CAD environment and I also loved programming. In 1992, we were talking about AutoCAD 12 or 13 as a new thing and I went to do an internship in a company where the owner had discovered Bentley in the U.S. He showed this other CAD software, which was MicroStation. I fell instantly in love about MicroStation.

I was used to work with AutoCAD where the interface was not yet graphical – it was pull-down. MicroStation (I remember version 4 was just out) had a graphical interface. On computers equipped with a 386 processor and 8GB of RAM, we could even do rendering, which was completely new, never heard of at the time.

MicroStation had rendering, 3D capabilities, where you could manipulate a drawing by changing perspective, switching layers on and off, even using dual monitor and the graphics tablet… it was just so cool and futuristic. Since then, MicroStation never ceased to amaze me. It went from Version 4, to J and then SE. In 2000, that’s when everything changed with V8 and the Connect versions. Well, I've known it all my life and every time a new version comes out, it's a surprise and a pleasure at the same time. We're always proud when we go around companies to show how far Bentley and MicroStation are ahead of everything in the CAD world. With all its advantages and disadvantages, we are always identified as those who use one system ahead of the others. And clearly, it’s thanks to MicroStation.

In this podcast, I would like to focus on MicroStation, Bentley's modelling, documentation and visualization software. I would especially like to do this through the description and analysis of a specific project in which MicroStation has been played a key role. Do you have one in mind?

Simone Spinaci: CAD Connect collaborated with Geico Taikisha, a leading company in the design and manufacture of turnkey automated systems for car body painting all over the world. More precisely, we collaborated on a project with Mercedes automotive group in Brazil.

I guess it’s better to let Daniele Podda talk about the technical analysis of this project. As I said, he’s a freelancer and a real expert on MicroStation, and I imagine he has been involved in this project since the beginning and in a very deep way. Good morning, Daniele.

How did you use Bentley's MicroStation in this project?

Daniele Podda: Good morning. You could say that MicroStation was a non-choice, or that it was an obligatory choice. The DGN format is in fact the standard format used in the German automotive market and, as a result, the whole project had been adapted around it. The client, Daimler, is very much in love with the solution MicroStation: its technicians know it very well. As a result, he has imposed it on everyone involved. Geico Taikisha took note of this and contacted CAD Connect. They were already using MicroStation in the Advance office, so the implementation was smooth and simple.

Damiano Vezzosi: Thank you, Daniele, now we really understand the usefulness and capabilities of MicroStation in this important project. I would like to thank Simone Spinaci from CAD Connect and Daniele Podda for this precise illustration of the project that Geico Taikisha did in Brazil for Daimler.

Learn more about Geico's Success Story and how they use Bentley software to design an automotive shop.


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