A day in the life of an 'infra consultant'

No day is the same

Digitization is essential to meet future challenges, also in infrastructure. ARKANCE is a partner in digitization and the company behind well-known applications such as InfraCAD, Drill Control and the Autodesk applications AutoCAD and Civil 3D. Applications that are in continuous development, and on which many specialists work daily. Han Loermans is such a specialist and works as an infra consultant at ARKANCE. We walk with him for a day.

Han has been with ARKANCE for eleven years, and since the beginning of this year he has been in charge of Drill Control. "As a product owner, I'm like the first point of contact for this popular infrastructure software application," he says. "The software is used specifically for designing horizontal directional drilling and processing the revision data of executed drilling operations. My job is, among other things, to monitor the application, but above all to manage future developments. We have drawn up a technical program of where we want the software to evolve. One of my tasks is to supervise and facilitate that."

Varied 

Consequently, Han does not have a typical workday. "No day is the same," he says firmly. "That is also the reason why I have enjoyed working for ARKANCE for more than eleven years." Doesn't take away from the fact that he does, of course, have some "regular" tasks. One of these is giving training courses on InfraCAD, Drill Control and Autodesk applications such as AutoCAD and Civil 3D, among others. Again, this proves to be extremely varied, as Han is not tied to one location. "We provide training at one of our five locations in Almelo, Oss, Veenendaal, Bodegraven and Amsterdam, or at our customers' offices. I also regularly visit customers for all kinds of consultancy services, where we think along with them about the efficient implementation of our software and the creation of the right methods, workflows, object libraries and support within an organization. And of course we also use the knowledge and information we gather from the market to further develop our software applications."

Software is always evolving

Every two weeks, ARKANCE's infra consultants sit together. "That way we keep each other informed and also learn from each other," says Han. "We also use that moment to dive deeper into the subject matter of new products. There is plenty of room for personal development at ARKANCE. And that's necessary too, because developments happen fast. A good example is Autodesk Construction Cloud. This project data management solution was less suitable for infrastructure until last year, but since the latest release we see many companies using it. Performance has greatly improved and the application works flawlessly with InfraCAD and Civil 3D. It definitely forms a strong combination. Furthermore, we have also made the necessary progress with the latest version of Drill Control (version 9, ed.). For example, we have made a major quality improvement in the area of revision drawings, where users can immediately refer back to the data table when a change is made."

What makes a job as an infra consultant at ARKANCE so interesting? Han: "Especially that you get to work for a lot of companies and make a serious impact. For example, a client was convinced he needed to start working with Civil 3D. After a thorough analysis, the conversation quickly took a different turn. Now they work there to their full satisfaction with AutoCAD supplemented with InfraCAD. That is the beauty of our profession, that you can really make a difference. And ARKANCE offers every opportunity to do so. We are very broadly oriented and there are plenty of development opportunities, both professionally and personally. It is all facilitated. And not unimportantly, there is a very nice atmosphere with colleagues who are always there for each other."

Interested in a job as an infra consultant or one of the many other positions at ARKANCE? Feel free to contact Mark Holm at +31 (0)6 51 53 97 51 or mark.holm@arkance.world. For the full list of vacancies, take a look at the ARKANCE website.