KCS Consultants: Civil Suite Software

KCS Consultants is a civil engineering firm specialising in project and asset management, civil and structural engineering, as well as allied engineering software development and support. It offers a wide range of solutions to problems that rural and urban communities encounter.

At KCS Consultants, we strive to have excellence and ingenuity built into every design. It is our passion to create innovative, efficient and economical engineering solutions of the highest quality that exceed the expectations of our clients.

Our staff are able to meet a diverse range of client needs by gaining skills and insight from Southern, Eastern and Western Africa, as well as the Middle East.

Our team has overall expertise in civil and structural projects such as transportation and roads, stormwater management, urban and regional rural water and sanitation schemes, housing, sectional title, agricultural developments, IDZ establishment, and asset and project management.

We are also the developers of the Civil Suite Engineering Design software, which includes modules for CAD, GIS, terrain modelling, sewer, road, stormwater, water and pipeline designs.

Civil Suite Engineering Design Suite

The Civil Suite started development in 1996 and is the brainchild of the director of KCS Consultants, Keith Simon, PrEng PrCPM. At the time, Keith noted a lack of suitable civil engineering design and training software.

Thus, the idea of creating a user-friendly design software package that would meet the needs of the civil engineer was born. He created a state-of-the-art software package with a common interface that provides users with the functionality to undertake their terrain modelling, road, sewer, stormwater and water network designs in a CADbased environment.

The integrated interface not only allows the designer to work with their DWG/DXF drawings natively (without the need for a separate CAD license), but also includes a terrain model capable of handling up to 22 million points at unbelievable speeds.

Furthermore, the suite includes a sewer model that effectively does around 99% of the work automatically, and competent road, water (based on US EPANet engine) and stormwater (based on EPASWMM) design modules too.

Our software tools are widely used by various consultants to assist with the planning, design and management of municipal infrastructure, underlying the usefulness of the software and its functionality. The software is constantly being updated and currently allows the user to complete 100% of the CAD functionality including dimensions, hatching, etc.

Civil Suite Online Courses

KCS Consultants usually runs two two-day courses per year hosting users at its offices in Port Elizabeth. In November 2019, we started developing online courses to assist users by reducing their travel and accommodation costs when attending our courses.

As the Covid-19 pandemic reached our shores, we recognised that the demand for online learning would be heightened even further. Thus, in keeping up with the challenges of an ever-changing world, KCS Consultants created a series of online tutorials that speaks to the seasoned engineer, as well as the fresh civil engineering or technical graduate.

These tutorials are hosted on the website and the KCS team is currently finalising submissions for CPD certifications of the courses for the following modules:

• Terrain

• CAD/GIS

• Sewer

• Water

• Roads.

The Stormwater and Pipeline modules will follow next.

Software for Civil Suite Online Courses

As part of our Civil Suite offering, we will be making available a fully functional version free for use as part of the coursework. This version has a limited time period during which the courses should be completed. Under no circumstances will we extend the runtime period.

All the online courses are fully documented using instructional videos and tutorials. We believe our product presents excellent value and we will discount the product to those users interested in purchasing the software on completion of the courses.

These instructional videos are hosted on YouTube; however, the courses are hosted in-house at our data centre, which is connected to the internet by 200 Mbps fibre-optic lines, so uptime and performance are always guaranteed. The software has to be authorised online and the courses themselves require an internet connection. Users can undertake the training in the convenience of their own time and space.

We believe that once we obtain CPD certification for the various courses, we would be in a unique position to offer excellent training opportunities very competitively; however, we will note that it could take a considerable amount of time to complete all the various modules due to the complex nature of the content.