COVID-19
Supporting our customers during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) impacting communities and families around the world, this is a difficult time for all of us. At Symetri, our priority remains the health and wellbeing of our employees and customers, and we are committed to supporting you and your business as you adjust to these rapidly changing circumstances, now and into the future.
Fully enabled to support you from home and when visiting our training centres
We have actively reviewed our readiness for business continuity and can achieve business as usual activities when working from home and when training in the classroom.
Full details of what we have in place to ensure we can continue to support you while we work remotely can be found HERE.
When attending training at our centres, our top priority is your health and well-being. We have implemented a number of social distancing and cleaning measures, so you feel safe when developing your skills with us. Find out more HERE.
How we can help
Whilst all our working situations have changed in recent weeks, our team is here to support you in any way we can. Here are some of the areas we can support you:
Did you know that your Autodesk subscription enables your users to work away from the office and use their licences from home? How this works varies depending on your current licence deployment. Our customer services team is always available to help you explore your licensing needs and to provide guidance on how to remain compliant whilst working from home.
To speak to them call +44 345 370 1400 or email customer.services@symetri.co.uk.
Check out our blog post Autodesk Licensing and Working from home.
We also offer some general guidance on remaining compliant in our blog post Licence Compliance, Scenarios to Watch Out For.
With the possibility that your entire workforce is currently working remotely, you may need to consider several elements to ensure your teams remain productive and your network secure.
Our IT Solutions team can provide advice and guidance in a number of areas including: secure remote access via VPN; laptops and workstations; remote connectivity software such as Microsoft Remote Desktop, Team Viewer and VNC; and platforms that enable collaboration on large files from disparate locations.
For further information read our blog post Ensuring your business continuity during the current COVID-19 outbreak.
Or watch the recording of our Remote Working YouTube broadcast where we discuss and answer many of your questions on the challenges of working from home as an architect, engineer, manufacturers or contractor.
Autodesk’s BIM 360 has the potential to make it easier for designers, and anyone working with drawings, to do their jobs more effectively whilst enabling remote working. BIM 360 Design enables effective Revit Worksharing connecting design teams via the cloud regardless of their location. Whilst BIM 360 Docs helps manage access controls, coordinate project deliverables, navigate changes visually, simplify review management (issues and mark-ups) all the while tracking internal and external interactions against a project timeline.
To better support its customers facing the new reality of working remotely, Autodesk has introduced a special Extended Access Program for several of its cloud collaboration products, including BIM 360.
This program allows for free commercial use of the participating products until May 31, 2020. It is available to both new customers, as well as existing customers who need to quickly expand use of these products to accommodate teams working remotely.
Symetri offers a range of set-up services to help you rapidly gain maximum benefit from the software and this program. For further information please speak to your account manager or call us on +44 345 370 1444.
Find out more about BIM 360 by reading our blog post Support Revit Homeworking & Business Continuity.
Or listen to our recent YouTube broadcast, How BIM 360 can get you mobilised.
Engineers spend, on average, 15% of their time managing data. Then, when you need to share this data with colleagues, you have to release and track a series of PDFs, spreadsheets, and design files, and it only gets more complicated when working with 3rd parties. Much of this waste is due to the simple fact that Windows Explorer wasn’t made for engineers. And it certainly wasn’t made to manage and collaborate with CAD files. Couple this with the additional challenge of working from home and manufacturers can face an uphill struggle to remain productive during these times.
To help our customers with this, we are offering a free 1-hour productivity health check to ensure you are working optimally in your current situation.
For further information about what we’ll cover in this session please visit our webpage Product Design & Lifecycle Productivity Health Check.
Autodesk has a number of solutions to help manufacturers collaborate across multiple locations and store and access project data, including Vault, Desktop Connector, Drive and Fusion Team. To better support its customers facing the new reality of working remotely, Autodesk has introduced a special Extended Access Program for several of its cloud collaboration products, including Fusion 360 and Fusion Team. This program allows for free commercial use of the participating products until May 31, 2020. It is available to both new customers, as well as existing customers who need to quickly expand use of these products to accommodate teams working remotely.
Symetri offers a range of set-up services to help you rapidly gain maximum benefit from this solution. For further information please contact your account manager or call us on +44 345 370 1444.
We look at a number of remote working solutions in more detail in our blog post Supporting Manufacturing Homeworking and Business Continuity.
We also discuss a number of ways for manufacturers to share data across their supply chains including Shared Views, Fusion Team and Inventor Pack in his blog post Working with External Teams Remotely.
In these unusual times, some of us may find we have that extra few hours a week free to brush up our skills or learn about that new piece of software we’re needing for an upcoming project. We may have taken the difficult decision to furlough some of our employees, and be worrying about how to keep them connected, feeling valued and ready to return to work.
To help our customers address some of these challenges during these times of social distancing, we’ve adapted our comprehensive classroom training schedule to a virtual model.
To make sure you get the best experience, we will keep our course numbers to no more than 4 people per group, so the class can be interactive, with lots of opportunity for you to engage with the trainer and have your questions answered.
Look at our full range of scheduled, private or bespoke courses HERE.
e-Learning
For those preferring self-learning or to gain tips and tricks as they need them, we also offer an e-Learning platform called Pinnacle Series.
Pinnacle Series has been specifically designed for architects, engineers, construction specialists, and product designers, offering training for a large range of software including Autodesk, SketchUp, CIBSE, Ideate, Rhino and more. It is a great platform for keeping track of staff development and managing your own content.
For further information on Pinnacle Series please visit the product page HERE.
Our technical consultants come from a wide variety of industry backgrounds which make them well qualified to support your business.
Here are some of the services we can deliver virtually:
- BIM Level 2 adoption and maturity
- Digital transformation
- Operational efficiency gains
- Technology implementation
- Standards and workflows
- Transitioning to cloud working
View our full list of Product Design & Lifecyle services HERE and Buildings & Infrastructure services HERE.
Accessing data can be challenging in our normal working environments, but when we’re working remotely it can seem virtually impossible.
We can provide guidance around how best to deploy and use platforms such as Autodesk’s BIM 360, our own document management solution Excitech DOCS, and our recently launched Excitech Mail which makes it easy for you to find project related emails and correspondence.
Further details can be found on our blog post Staying in the know whilst out of the office.
Our CAD and IT Support Teams are fully set-up to support you from your home offices. We have added extra resources to our helpdesk and extended the working hours of our engineers.
In addition to this, if you have our IT Support cover for users (e.g. laptops/workstations) we are now, as a temporary measure, extending that coverage to include your employees who are working remotely during the current COVID-19 outbreak.
If your employees have to use personal devices to access your network remotely, we will assist your employees as much as possible with any connectivity issues to the corporate network, connections to cloud services (i.e BIM 360, Office 365) and email configuration. However, there will be limitations to the services we are able to provide, for example, we will not be able to install software to home workstations, change settings on home routers etc.
Support cases which require a site visit by either Symetri or any of our vendors will be handled directly with each customer on a case-by-case basis, and in accordance with the latest government guidelines and each company's policies.
Here are some of the frequently asked questions we have received recently.
If you require technical support please do not hesitate to get in touch, call +44 345 370 1400 or email support@symetri.co.uk.
We are updating our website regularly to provide useful tips and tricks, customer case studies, and industry insights. You can view more of our content HERE.
Contact Us
We are available if you need advice or support, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
- For Support:
- Call: +44 345 370 1400
- Email: support@symetri.co.uk
- For Sales Enquiries:
- Call your account manager or call us at +44 345 370 1444
- Email: info@symetri.co.uk