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Client Success February 3, 2024

Ranhill Chemical Plant Building

Integrated workflow for concrete and steel building design allow Ranhill Berseku to delivery efficient, practical, structural building design.

Ranhill Bersekutu is an iconic multi-disciplinary consultancy providing comprehensive engineering (Geotechnical, Civil, Structural, Mechanical and Electrical), Project Management and Ecologically Sustainable Design/Green Building technology services. Headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia they have executed work in more than 20 countries throughout Asia, Middle East and Africa.

Since its inception over 50 years ago it has been at the forefront of engineering design excellence. Among many significant engineering acheivements include the PETRONAS Twin Towers & Suria KLCC Shopping Complex, The Penang Bridge 2nd Crossing, Maybank Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Telecom Malaysia and both the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport) and KLIA 2 airport terminals.

As one of Malaysia’s largest engineering practices Ranhill also brings significant experience in delovering roads, bridges, railways, water supply, wastewater, drainage, irrigation, flood mitigation, storm water management, coastal engineering, power, telecommunications, townships, ports, airports, hospitals, universities, high-rise offices, hotels, resorts, condominiums, shopping complexes, recreational facilities, other industrial schemes and environmental-impact assessment (EIA), management and monitoring.

Business Challenges

Ranhill were looking to improve their project design and delivery strategy Lead Structural Engineer, Nur Farahain Bt Mohd Idrus, explains;

“Before using ProtaStructure, my engineers needed to learn a range of different modeling techniques using different software in order to complete our modelling and design for RC and Steel building projects. We often had to spend additional hours manually inserting steel loading reactions from other software into our previous RC design software. It was very messy and required a lot of checking.”

“We also faced significant issues with drawing production – my drafting teams had to spend plenty of time in arranging detailing into drawing title blocks. They had to manually cut the excessive detailing to fit the title block and manually rationalize the grouping for columns and beams. Moreover, we do a lot of steel connection design and detailing, which traditionally has been very time-consuming to handle – especially as it requires engineers and detailers to think in ‘3D’ to imagine what these look like.”

“Many of our projects also necessitated working with BIM which we found almost impossible to facilitate in our old software.”

We were wasting a lot of time with processes and software which were out of date.

Solutions

We researched the market and found our ideal solution in ProtaStructure

We now use ProtaStructure to model and design both RC and Steel Projects in one solution all using the same modelling techniques. We can then produce all detailing of RC and Steel in one go – of course we can still design just steel, or RC structures in Prota as well.

ProtaDetails helps to automate the detailing arrangement which includes title block, long beam truncation, columns and beams grouping, components design (such as retaining wall, staircases) and it’s great that we can also use as alternative drafting tool like other CAD tools (with full DWG drafting capabilities) to minimize software and workload.

Personally I also use ProtaSteel which provides quick steel connection design and automatically generates the connection detailing within a few clicks.

whereas ProtaBIM allows the data transfer bidirectionally between ProtaStructure software and other BIM platforms including Revit.

 

 

Success

In my opinion, Prota Software is very user-friendly to learn and use. It naturally integrates modelling, analysis, design and detailing all into one it has saved us some much time with project delivery.

It’s a very versatile platform which has enhanced our building structural design services.

It fulfils all the local authorities’ requirements including the design codes for both British Standards and Eurocode. It also incorporates automated seismic design and wind loading and provides efficient design especially with accurate load distribution which reduces the design cost compared to other software.

Last but not least, Prota technical support team are also very friendly and responsive to any queries too so I can quickly proceed with design without delays. They have also been open to our suggestions for future software enhancements – it’s been a great relationship.