SimpleDim CAD Add-in for PowerPoint: Conversation with Paul Lukehart

      
Paul Lukehart is founder and managing principal of PL Programs LLC, a project consulting firm founded in 2020. His background is in distribution and fulfillment operations, capital project management, and he has authored a book, Practical Floor Supervision on front-line operations leadership. Paul and his family live in Indiana, and in addition to slide decks for client needs, he works on projects like SimpleDim.

In this conversation, Paul discusses SimpleDim, an add-in that lets you work with CAD within PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Paul, tell us about your background and what led you to create SimpleDim. Why did you choose PowerPoint as the home for a CAD-style tool, instead of building something new from scratch?

Paul: My background after the US Army was working in distribution and fulfillment operations, first with Target Corporation, then Amazon, then XPO Logistics, then founding PL Programs LLC as an independent consultant. At XPO and as an independent consultant, my team and I managed projects. These projects include working with warehouse layouts, which are needed when purchasing automation or designing the operation.

One thing I noticed during design and concepting phases was that the engineers worked in CAD but everyone else used PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a universal document type; everyone can work in it, send it, and receive it. This is unlike CAD tools, for which only a small number of people know how to use and can have expensive licenses.

We’d often end up presenting operational concepts in PowerPoint with screenshots from plan PDFs or CAD drawings. And PowerPoint is right there in the meeting: While giving the presentations, we were often doing manual calculations of areas, distances, or cutting-and-pasting drawing bits to make to-scale representations of different ideas.

This was extremely painful! It felt to me that there had to be a better way, but I couldn’t find any PowerPoint tools to tell me distances. That led to building the first versions of SimpleDim (for Simple Dimensions), which was just a slide-scale and linear dimension tool. Thereafter, I added more comprehensive functionality and improvisations, based on customer feedback, and here we are!

Geetesh: How has SimpleDim helped users in the ways you expected? Have there been any surprising uses you didn’t originally plan for?

Paul: I’ve seen users in a wide variety of industries. While the original use case was in distribution and logistics, the tool has found a lot of different users.

We’ve seen logistics users yes, but also customers with government entities, fastener companies, property management, consultants of various types, private equity groups, lawyers, hobbyists, architects, manufacturers… the list goes on.

The most unexpected use case was an ocean ship captain with YWAM, an organization helping with health efforts in Papua New Guinea; he sent this feedback:

“We operate a non-profit and volunteer medical ship around the coast of Papua New Guinea.  Sometimes I also make PowerPoints of coastal areas from a navigational perspective.  If SimpleDim allowed measurements in nautical miles, that would be great.”

I didn’t anticipate SimpleDim would be working in coastal charts! But now it has nautical Miles included as a unit.

This diversity in users really speaks to a few things:

1. The Universality and Versatility of PowerPoint
2. The need to communicate real units and distances
3. Not everyone has or can use CAD

Geetesh: Can someone try SimpleDim before buying it? If so, what would you suggest they try first during the trial to get a real feel for what it can do?

Paul: Absolutely. I took a cue from some other great add-in vendors who allow free trials. Someone can try the full SimpleDim add-in for free for three days, with no credit card required (only an email address) from simpledim.com.

We’ve seen a lot of one-off users from the free trial. That’s fine; someone might just need it to lay out their living room. It’s fine. We want people to use it.

To get a feel for what it’s good for, a good universal trial might be to copy a screenshot of your living room floor plan into a slide. Measure a known distance and set the scale to that line distance. Pin the screenshot using the underlay tool. Then you can add shapes that are the relative size of your furniture, move them around, set dimensions from windows and find how much floor space you have available. This will get you used to scales, shapes, and other tools.

Of course, if you’re a professional user who does things with floor plans, do the same thing but with a facility or project you’re working on. I think you’ll like what it can do!

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.