Moving from Land Desktop to Civil 3D... Instead of MicroStation

Besides the helpful Autodesk PDF 'Moving from Land Desktop to Civil 3D', would anyone be willing to share some information as to the inherent benefits of jumping to Civil 3D 2011 (C3D), which I can provide management later today in a meeting?

To be clear, I'm not just meeting with my manager, I'm meeting with my boss's boss, who make decisions for the entire region in which I work.

Specifically, I am making the case for authorizing C3D training ASAP, and need something more management friendly, as they don't understand the technical stuff.

Right now management thinks switching from Land Desktop to C3D is like switching from Adobe Reader 8 to 9 (exaggerated for effect).

Buzz words/phrases like: efficiency, precision, accuracy, dynamic model-based design, more profitable, etc. are great, but not having C3D 2011, I need more substantial examples... from real world experience, using C3D.

My company already had a tentative plan to roll out C3D enterprise wide (for US, CAN, etc.) by year's end, but that is being pushed back to early 2012 due to several acquisitions. In a similar time frame, they are also rolling out MicroStation V8i (MS) which my team and I are going to have cross-training on for out of state DOT work sharing (until the local economy picks back up).

I am trying to prevent myAutoCAD Transportation team from being converted into anotherMicroStation Transportation team.

I am presently Beta testing my state's DOT software for C3D, which the state has been working on now for two years. It is my opinion that C3D is the best platform available for the work we do, be it a municipal, or state projects... especially moving forward.

Unfortunately, you waited too long to post this thread. If you had posted it a few days before your meeting, you might have gotten some good talking points.

I work for a Survey-only firm, and can only speak from that perspective. I've heard countless complaints about "Civil 3D is not for Surveyors", and "I don't need all that stuff in C3D! Why should I bother learning it when the software I've been using for the last 15 years still works just fine for what I want to do?"

And there is some basis for those complaints... C3D is definitely geared more toward Engineers than Surveyors, it has a very hefty learning curve, and it takes third-party help to really turn C3D into a Surveying powerhouse. But if you can get through that, it is quite the powerhouse... It is not uncommon for me to now take 1/2 hour to do something that used to take the better part of a day. Before, we used to have a roughly 1:1 relationship between office CAD techs and field crews. Now I work four days a week, and provide full support for three field crews that have each been working 50+ hours per week, and I keep up with no real problem. And that's not even counting all the "fancy" stuff we now do... We have clients that like to use us exclusively, because they like what they get from us. We've been told by multiple clients that they've asked other Surveying firms to provide stuff like we do, and they describe what they're talking about, and they see a "deer in headlights" expression come over the other Surveyor. We're slammed with work right now, even though we're in a down economy, and we're hitting the "winter slowdown". Much of that is due to the extreme speed with which we can turn out consistently high-quality work, and much of that is because we use most of those "fancy" features in C3D that we hear other Surveyors say they don't need...

Unfortunately, I've never used Microstation, so I can't really compare the two. But I know many of our competitors use either Microstation or Carlson (or even [gasp] Land Desktop). And I know the Carlson guys can do some stuff a lot easier than we can. But that cuts both ways, and we can do a lot of things they can't, or would find much more difficult. We also have a lot more control over the appearance of what we do. It's a mixed bag. But we think Civil 3D works better for us, all things considered. (As for Land Desktop, we don't even consider that to be usable software anymore... It can't even come close to either Carlson or Civil 3D.)

bentley is a disaster for people who are already familiar with autodesk products... however, bentley people tend to have less issues going to autodesk. autodesk is a command based program whereas bentley requires you to push a button for everything and there "layer" system is archaic and poor at best... I mean you say microstation and most of the people i know just cringe, from revit people down to the most basic autocad users

You can show them in 20 seconds why bentley sucks and autodesk sucks less... really, just show them how to "draft" using microstation, then show them the plotting process, THE OLDER bentley stuff is even worse, but inroads has won people over, which is too bad, because bentley's business plan is a glorified version of a sucker punch or a seduction.... then you start to use it.