March 6, 1998 - Albany, New York (USA)

Most service businesses know "the crunch" - those evaporating hours before a client presentation or sales pitch...pulling the pieces together...checking for typos or math mistakes...getting the graphics finished and putting them in place...and running off the needed copies. 

Then, the printer crashes or there's molasses in its semiconductors.  With five hours left, there's seven hours of work ahead. It's a lose/lose situation.  Either reschedule, admitting you couldn't get it together, or go with a lot less than your best - a lot less than the client expects. 

Nowhere are these situations more common and, unfortunately more acute, more stressful, and more damaging, than in the engineering business. It can take more than a half-day for a CAD plotter to spit out a meeting-size aerial showing new roads, power lines, sewers, property lines, and more.

Understanding that, it's no surprise that Clough, Harbour & Associates has joined into a strategic partnership with another Capital Region firm, PINEBUSH Technologies, Inc to refine and demonstrate computer software which dramatically improves the productivity of data-intensive CAD plotters. 

"This software program," says Bill Harbour, CEO of one of the nation's largest engineering firms, "will allow us to run drafts, check them carefully, make whatever changes are needed, and still get finals far ahead of when needed.  It makes it easier for us to deliver the highest quality product and for clients to get the information they desire and deserve.  Most importantly, because many of our projects involve public input, the ability to graphically and spatially present potential designs makes it easier for the public to assess a project and not fear the unknown." 

A large (275-megabyte) digital image can take more than ten hours to print. The new software reduced the printing time to less than a half-hour.  The software, HyperPlot®, was developed by PINEBUSH for use by computer chip manufacturers and is in use by more than 35,000 chip designers worldwide. 

"As chip designs became more complicated and involved," says David Kass, President of PINEBUSH Technologies, "it became harder and harder for the designers to see what they were designing. In fact, IBM couldn't even plot its design for a new 15 million transistor chip until they used our product. That's what drove us to develop the original software."

"Working with Clough, Harbour," the PINEBUSH President continued, "will make it possible to do for the engineering industry what was accomplished in the computer chip industry." 

PINEBUSH has already installed new software and hardware at the Colonie headquarters of the engineering firm and is working with Clough engineers to refine the system so it fully meets the demands of their industry. 

"HyperPlot® has an amazing potential for the engineering industry," said Brian Marx, Director of Information Services at Clough, Harbour.  "Because it will increase the speed of plotters by as much as one hundred times, it makes it easy to run 'drafts' and see work in full color and at higher resolutions than on-screen.  But also because of how the software is designed, the engineer can work on the computer while it's printing.  All in all, HyperPlot® will increase productivity exponentially." 

PINEBUSH Technologies is a software development company dedicated to imaging and visualization technology.  Clough, Harbour & Associates, which has sixteen regional offices throughout the eastern U.S., is widely known for being in the forefront of technology gains.