FabTrol Insights

FabTrol is blessed with many wonderful customers and it’s always great to see them and hear how they are doing—even when they give us grief about something.  It was particularly exciting this year because of all the buzz about our new product, which they will receive as part of their normal support and maintenance.  We presented the software many times each day at the booth and to as many people as we could cram into the room we booked for lunch. We should have booked a larger room! We ran out of time before we covered half of the software and had no trouble holding their interest well beyond the scheduled time (of course the meal arriving late could have contributed to that. Sorry).  Customers were particularly pleased with the drawing log and multi-job nesting and all seemed to grasp the power of the deeply integrated custom filter and reporting system.

The show was a bit slow this year but our booth stayed busy and I noticed a couple of other booths seemed to have some good activity.  My sense from the fabricators we talked to is that they are still cautious about the economy but some have decided to open up and invest a bit.

Model-based estimating has been a buzz-word at the show for years—before it was overwhelmed by BIM.  BIM was everywhere, of course, but I talked to several fabricators who had moved beyond brainstorming and were actually getting underway with model-based estimating in FabTrol. If you are interested in model-based estimating, it’s actually pretty easy to get started. Read our white paper. We’re also preparing a quick cheat sheet of all of the extensive estimating shortcuts/automation in our system so everyone can be reminded of what we can do with the information in your estimate whether you import it or enter it manually.