Module 4 lets you number and document steel components from end to end, from placing them in the model through to the finished bill of materials. At its core is SuNo numbering, which together with the automatic derivation of drawings and lists forms one continuous workflow.
For support and steelwork design this makes a noticeable difference, because documentation is traditionally the big, error-prone time sink in that area. This article explains why steel documentation takes up so much effort in day-to-day project work, which parts of it Module 4 takes over, and what that changes for quality and deadlines.
Why steel documentation costs time
Support design easily produces several hundred components per project. Each one needs a unique number, a drawing, dimensions and an entry in the bill of materials. Taken individually every one of these steps is manageable, but together they tie up a great deal of time, especially when they are carried out and maintained by hand.
The real effort is not the first pass. It is the changes that follow. If the model is adjusted after the first derivation, and over the course of a project that is the rule rather than the exception, the numbering no longer matches the drawing and the bill of materials no longer matches the model. Anyone reworking that by hand often spends more time on it than on the design itself, and every manual correction is a new source of error. What remains at the end is the uncertainty of not knowing whether the documentation really reflects the current state.
What Module 4 of SuCri takes over
Module 4 generates the steel documentation out of the model. Numbering follows a rule that is defined once and then applied to the entire project. If something in the model changes, the documentation is derived again instead of being laboriously corrected. The work therefore shifts from repeated manual effort to a single, clean rule definition.
In detail, Module 4 covers these steps:
- Numbering of steel components according to a scheme you define yourself. Drawing name and component number can be combined freely, so the numbering fits the conventions you already use.
- Automatic views and orthographic drawings, derived from the model instead of being built up one by one. That removes the need to create every single view by hand.
- Dimensioning of the derived views, including how many decimal places are rounded to, so the drawings meet your specifications.
- Bills of materials and quantity calculations that match the numbering and the drawings, because they come from the same source.
What these steps have in common is that single source. Because numbering, drawing, dimensioning and bill of materials are all derived from the same model, they cannot drift apart in the first place. It is exactly this connection that makes manual reconciliation unnecessary.
What changes in the project
The visible gain is the time saved. The more important one is consistency: when numbering, drawing and bill of materials come out of a single run, there is no version lagging behind. In projects with several parties involved in particular, that is the difference between documentation you trust and documentation that has to be checked once more before every hand-over.
This reliability has an effect beyond design. A bill of materials that demonstrably matches the model is a sound basis for purchasing and fabrication, and drawings generated automatically from the current state reduce queries and rework on site. The larger the project and the more frequent the changes, the more clearly end-to-end derivation pays off.
Setting it up is a one-off task. Project templates and bills of materials are configured during installation, after which the automatic derivations and quantity calculations run without further intervention. The effort therefore sits at the beginning, while the benefit accompanies the project for its whole duration.
Where to read on
The full description is in the SuCri® manual: installation and setup, the structure of the user interface, the settings of Module 4, and troubleshooting for when a drawing view does not look the way you expected. If you would like to see Module 4 in your own project, talk to us. We will show it to you on your data rather than on a prepared example.
