Mathieu Soulard is a design technician at Coanda Energies, a company specializing in HVAC engineering. Using various Trimble tools since 2020 has enabled him to transform the way he works, and to take on new challenges to bring his company's projects to fruition.
Coanda Energies is a French company founded in 2013. Specializing in HVAC engineering, it currently employs around twenty people who work on numerous projects involving air conditioning, ventilation, heating and plumbing for tertiary buildings.
Mathieu Soulard works for this French firm. After spending ten years in a design office, he joined Coanda Energies in 2017 as a design engineer. For a long time, this design technician was used to producing his plans in 2D using AutoCAD. But in 2020, he decided to turn to new tools offered by Trimble, this time oriented towards 3D. A personal choice that subsequently led other company employees in the same direction.
Switching from 2D to 3D, a real opportunity
For years, Mathieu Soulard's experience was essentially focused on the design of 2D plans. But after a while, he began to see the limits of the process. Indeed, on previous projects, he had come to realize that 2D was not always appropriate, and that it could generate highly problematic errors. "I had a complex project to manage entirely in 2D. It was a real disaster," he explains. "On the same plan, there were different ground heights, and I hadn't seen that. The low points were in two or three places, I couldn't see anything, I didn't understand anything."
This inspired him to train in the creation of 3D plans. In 2020, a niche opened up for him, with the opportunity to make the transition from 2D to 3D. At first, the design technician was a little hesitant: "At a conference, I attended a presentation on Trimble Nova, a unique software package. Then, next to it, there was Stabicad, which also required mastery of Revit. Everyone said, 'It's up to the person, there's no one better than the other.'"
