HiCAD – From steel beams to complex constructions

No matter whether complex steel engineering structures or customized glazing constructions are required – with HiCAD you will always be on the safe side.

• Steel engineering support structures can be created in a very short time, aided by an integrated expert system providing thousands of standard parts, beams and profiles.
• Intelligent joints and connections can be modified at any time and, in contrast to most other functions of this type, even automatically adjusted to changed fitting situations.
• You can add stairs and railings using the corresponding tools, or insert glass and wall elements or other 3-D objects into your steel engineering beam frameworks. You use powerful automatisms for the creation of production, assembling and order documents.
• Workshop drawings and detail drawings can be created at the push of a button – individually configured if desired.
• Forward your data to the purchasing and production department. Standard formats such as DXF, DWG or STEP, direct interfaces to market-relevant systems, the SDNF and IFC interface as well as current NC export formats enable an error-free, smooth data exchange with CAD, structural calculation and production systems.

For your steel engineering tasks you can choose between two configuration levels of HiCAD:

• HiCAD Steel Engineering suite
  (3-D, Sheet Metal basic, Steel Engineering, Stairs + Railings)
• HiCAD Steel Engineering suite premium
  (2-D, 3-D, Sheet Metal basic, Steel Engineering, Stairs + Railings)

Combined with HELiOS Engineer the suites can be turned into powerful solutions for a professional data and process management in civil engineering. Use the functions of the Management + BIM module for Steel Engineering drawing management to directly store parts and drawings in the data and process management environment of our PDM system HELiOS with its central project database upon saving of your model drawing. In this way it is ensured that you will have always access to the most recent design data, drawings and bills of materials in your company. The possibility to recognize parts without drawing and to automatically update drawings, as well as index mechanisms and configurable, graphical release workflows provide you with additional safety during the realisation of your projects.  

If you are frequently dealing with cross-sectoral projects, you should also take a look at our solutions for glass, metal and facade engineering, mechanical engineering, plant engineering and sheet metal processing. Thanks to its modular structure, HiCAD can be customised and expanded to perfectly match your individual requirements, for instance, by our HELiOS PDM/PLM modules and our HiCAD extension modules. If you require further information, please feel free to contact us.

Donges SteelTec GmbH - Industry: Steel Engineering

The Donges SteelTec GmbH, one of the leading German Steel Engineering companies, uses HiCAD for its design tasks. The Darmstadt-based, internationally operating company constructs power plant buildings, bridges, sport halls, hangars as well as industrial and transport constructions. One essential factor for an economical project realisation is a powerful CAD system. In 2009, Donges therefore started a benchmarking aimed at the implementation of a new, optimal CAD system. After extensive talks with software providers and comparisons with other market-leading systems, the CAD system HiCAD by the ISD Group eventually prevailed, due to its outstanding range of steel engineering-specific functions and great user-friendliness. Decisive advantages were the efficient functionality, the 2-D/3-D associativity and the open architecture of the system.