Engineers Are Too Valuable to be Data Entry Clerks

Structural engineering is supposed to be about solving problems. Yet, for many engineers, a large part of the day is spent copying numbers between sketches, spreadsheets, and emails. The engineering itself may only take a few hours, but the admin surrounding that work seems to take double the time. 

Most firms are so used to it they don’t realise how much is affecting them.

The typical workflow for an engineer is surprisingly manual, even in the presence of advanced analysis software. They look at drawings, analyse reports, run calculations, compile their own report, then do most, if not all, of it over again when something changes within the design brief.

Structural design is an iterative experience and changes are a natural pathway to an optimised design. However more often than not they also become a major source of efficiency. For example in a three-storey residential project, the architect would like to shift a load bearing wall on the ground floor such that the girder truss on the roof level now does not have a continuous load-path down to the foundation. It may also change the load distribution to the bracing walls on the ground floor. The engineers then have to rerun the calculations and updated the drawings and report, which will have knock-on effects on the project timeline. Imagine if that occurs across multiple changes.

This creates costs, unnecessary admin, but also leaves gaps for errors and inconsistencies. This opens up even more problems with things like council RFIs and peer reviews.

Engineers are too valuable to their firms for all of these problems. Senior engineers with years of experience end up spending hours formatting reports, and manually typing in repetitive calculations. They copy data back and forth, compare previous and current design, and manually coordinate their work. This is a waste of a firms valuable time. Everyone loses out in this situation. The engineers suffer from burn out over repetitive and boring admin. The firm loses out on revenue by having to pay their highly trained engineers to spend most of their day being expensive data entry clerks. The clients end up with more money spent due to avoidable human errors that come naturally with repetitive tasks. 

Nodey’s goal is to make engineering workflows more connected. Instead of moving the same information between drawings, calculations, and reports multiple times, updates stay linked throughout the project. That means less duplicate work, fewer inconsistencies between documents, and better visibility over revisions as designs change. Rather than replacing engineering judgement, the focus is on reducing repetitive admin so engineers can spend more time on design, coordination, and problem solving.

We founded Nodey on the belief that engineers are too valuable to their companies and to society as a whole to be stuck repeating the same processes over and over again. We want to help them with the easy boring stuff, so they can focus on what really matters