Budget

[moreland.pljbd]

What is a reasonable budget per CAD station?

I been out the the Cad Management role for 8 years plus and I recently became
the "manager" by default.

We run Architectural Desktop 04. I am just curious if companies are budging for
hardware and software upgrades or just waiting for software retirements
and system crashes.

[RobertB]

Software is on subscription. We view the subscription cost as just part of the basic cost for running our type of firm (MEP). So it is a known annual expense.

Hardware upgrades are "budgeted" on a 3-year retirement process. "Budgeted" because I just buy what I need to replace workstations older than 3 years. All I need to do is inform the bookkeeping department when I will be making the purchases. I know this is far better than what most CAD Managers have to go thru.

To run ADT effectively, look at Autodesk's published recommended requirements as a minimum for a workstation with 3-years of planned life cycle.

[rclayton]

I also run hardware on aprrox a 3 year life-cycle. We have 8 production stations and 3 administrative stations. I try to budget for 1-3 new workstations per year with the latest going to the most heavily used stations/users and rotating the others down. Every few years we can skip the hardware purchases and budget that money towards software subscription renewals.

My general budget for a new CAD station is around $2,000 (without monitor). This usually gets me an Intel platform (latest processor), with 2Gb RAM (upped from 1 Gb last year) and 80 Gb local drives. Each station also gets a DVD+RW drive (upped from CD-RW last year). We single source through Dell and get 3yr onsite NBD warranties so that Dell handles hardware failure/replacement which frees me up to handle only software management and support.

Our plotters/printers are usually handled on leases with approx 5-year terms and traded in on latest models at term so that we can keep up with the technology.

My yearly budget for IT (not including my salary, of course) for a 12-15 station network with 2 servers is less than $10,000 per year. Some years are higher than others, but it averages about $8,000 for the last 5 years since I started single sourcing through Dell and not dealing with all the piddly little hardware issues/purchases like hard drives and RAM. This includeds software upgrades and subscriptions.