Computer Software for Steel Professionals
Structural Material Manager Version 17.2 Upgrade
Additional Estimating Fields: Version 17.2 introduced Equipment Hours and Crane Hours as two new estimating fields. These new fields are tallied by the Estimating Module in the same manner as the existing Shop Hours and Field Hours fields.
Like the Field Hours field, the new Equipment Hours and Crane Hours fields benefit Structural Material Manager customers who don’t strictly bid fabrication work but who must also estimate installation and erection work.
Increased Nesting Safety Buffer Clearance: Even prior to Version 17.2’s release, Structural Material Manager already had a Safety Buffer value that the Length-Nesting Module subtracts from each stock length. What has changed under Version 17.2 is that the Safety Buffer can now be very large (up to 15 15/16" maximum).
One common use of the Safety Buffer value is to compensate for mill tolerances and the material lost when removing the stock length’s mill edge. As an example of how the Safety Buffer is used in this scenario, suppose one of the stock lengths entered by the user is 20’-0, but the actual items received from the supplier are as short as 19’-10 (especially after cleaning up the mill edges). This is a case in which a Safety Buffer of 2" should be specified in order to ensure that the nested items will actually fit into the stocks, and systems prior to the Version 17.2 upgrade could already handle such a small value.
If the actual lengths of the stock items are known to be at least their nominal lengths, even after accounting for mill tolerances, the Safety Buffer value might be left at its default value of 0." However, there may be another reason to specify a non-zero Safety Buffer. Some CNC equipment has a clamping area that must be treated as an unreachable "dead zone." After processing an item, such equipment might even make an end-cut and remove that entire clamping region which is unfortunately wasted. Here you may need to specify a Safety Buffer of 14" or more depending on the actual size of the CNC equipment’s clamping area, and that was the rationale behind increasing Version 17.2's maximum Safety Buffer to 15 15/16".
Upgrade Price Quote and Ordering Info: If you are an existing customer with an older Structural Material Manager version, please e-mail us at Sales@ejeindustries.com to obtain a price quote on the latest upgrade. You can then use the Online Upgrade Order Form to conveniently place the order for the latest Structural Material Manager upgrade.
Other Upgrade Versions: This page specifically covers Version 17.2 upgrade features. For information concerning other upgrade versions, visit our main Structural Material Manager upgrade page which contains links to pages describing improvements in each software release from Version 10.1 (circa 2007) to the present.