Ecophos is the world-leading business solution provider of innovative technological solutions for the phosphate industry. Ecophos’ Industrial Services department is an essential part of the company’s global vision. For their designs and projects, they use BricsCAD Pro and BIM.
Erik Jacobs, Sales and Outsourcing Manager at Ecophos, says: “Ecophos Industrial Services is the engineering division responsible for the design of all industrial plants with Ecophos technology. We produce all designs using BricsCAD. It is paramount that we use the same file format and that we communicate and exchange designs.
We do all the engineering for the group, as well as for our partners. Actually, everything we do is based on a (3D) model. So, we need a very reliable tool that allows us to create that model and to show our clients and partners what that model will look like in the real world and how it will actually work.”
TESTING OUT BRICSCAD
When Ecophos Industrial Services first looked into moving to BricsCAD, Dario Pibiri, Mechanical Engineer at Ecophos, was appointed guinea pig and as all good CAD testers will understand, he did his best to crash it as quickly as possible. This was to “test BricsCAD’s stability” he assured us. He remarked that his first impressions of BricsCAD were that it “has very large limits,” was “user-friendly,” and that he could “work very fast in 3D while modeling.”
THE ONE-ON-ONE MATCH
Pibiri adds: “BricsCAD is really a one-on-one match for us, and it guarantees us smooth importing and exporting of CAD files. BricsCAD delivers incomparable speed in 3D modeling and allows fast zooming, rotating, moving and scaling of items in an isometric view.”
“Clients usually have some difficulty reading 2D lay-outs,” explains Maaike Mertens, the Head of Piping and Mechanical Department. “When we walk them through a 3D model, things become much clearer and comprehensible. It gives them a more realistic idea of what the plant will look like. On top of the product, BricsCAD also delivers fast support responses when we have questions or issues. It may sound like a cliché, but time really is money to us. So, BricsCAD’s fast support system actually saves us money.”
THE SMOOTHEST TRANSITION EVER
The native DWG format is the most common format used within Ecophos’ industry, as they typically supply these files to clients. Using BricsCAD means that they don’t risk losing data
converting between different formats and that there is no time lost exporting or importing. Ecophos Industrial Services also uses CADWorx to design the piping and mechanical elements so it is extremely important that BricsCAD is fully compatible. They were impressed to discover that BricsCAD worked just as well as their prior software. This made the change “very smooth.”
“Adapting to BricsCAD was really easy,” commented Pibiri. “Without exaggerating, I can say that within one day, our team was productive with the new BricsCAD system. And within one week, we’ve made a full migration to BricsCAD. It’s as if we’d never changed our CAD platform at all.”
(Update) Since 2020, the activities of Ecophos have been taken over by Sweco Belgium.
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium
Plant design and construction
Ecophos Industrial Services
