North Dakota Industrial Commission

The North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) is a public company that creates land surfaces and subterranean rock formation maps to provide geological information, such as mineral and natural resource locations, in the state of North Dakota. The company has been in existence since 1898, and two years ago, they began to automate their map and design process to produce land usage maps, geologic soul maps, and civil maps.

Before this automation, geologists and petroleum engineers for the NDIC Oil and Gas Division manually produced maps, with an average of 8 to 9 layers per map, using a fairly complicated and labor intensive process. It would take approximately one week to complete each layer of the map. Since, each layer displayed a different type of soil surface or under ground rock mass and a "well log," the entire map was very involved and would take almost 9 weeks to complete.

To cut down on the time needed to produce maps as well as the associated costs of labor and materials, NDIC decided to purchase AutoCAD to automate new map design projects. To create new maps, NDIC had to digitize old land base drawings of North Dakota, rough drawings of subterranean geology, and the well log into AutoCAD for editing and retrieval, but was not satisfied with the results. "Digitizing was time consuming and there was room for error because you had to look back and forth from the digitizer to the computer monitor screen", said NDIC CAD manager.

In November of 1994, Autodesk major accounts team invited Open Archive Systems, Inc. to present the market leading AutoCAD/GTX solution, to an audience of 25 users from various departments. In conclusion, the group had never seen raster handled as effortlessly as the AutoCAD/GTX solution provided. A week later, Open Archive Systems, Inc. was invited to present the same technology to the head of Navy commercial procurements, the funding source for the project.

The Solution

To solve this problem, NDIC purchased GTXRaster CAD for their Unix Sun Station, along with a scanner, so that changes could be made quickly using the scanning and raster editing process instead of the time consuming process of digitizing. GTXRaster CAD is a tremendous time saver according to NDIC CAD manager. "We've cut our man-hours and material costs in half."

GTXRaster CAD helps save hours in labor because the land base maps can be brought into the AutoCAD environment and edited with GTX commands instead of the timely and costly manual method. GTXRaster CAD saves additional time because its command structure is identical to the AutoCAD command structure. There is no additional training required when using GTXRaster CAD with AutoCAD.

The quick editing features and ease of use has saved NDIC time and money. "GTXRaster CAD has paid for itself in about 12 months and we expect to double the number of projects we receive in the next year," exclaimed the user.