Al Eliasen, CEO of SBS, Has an AutoCAD Add-On for Utility Design

We explore how 3D utility-centric design on top of AutoCAD speeds grid and fiber projects by connecting CAD, GIS, and SAP  by enforcing standards that prevent costly errors with Al Eliasen of SBS. We also dig into pragmatic AI uses that shorten proposals and enhance UX without risking safety.

• Origins of SBS and Autodesk utility heritage
• Competition with Bentley; partnership with Esri
• GIS as source of truth for underground design
• 2D input with 3D models for true digital twins
• Intelligent design rules for safety and standards
• Training designers fast with drag-and-drop workflows
• Pragmatic AI for planning, help, and materials selection
• Substation design in 3D with embedded logic
• Fiber design acceleration and strand peel-off handling
• Security and reliability realities for modern grids

Transcript

Setting The Stage: SBS Origins

Roopinder 0:19

Hello and welcome to FODES, the future of design and engineering software podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara. On the show, we will have guests that will discuss tools and technology that engineers will find interesting and useful.

Roopinder 0:32

Hey, Al, nice to meet you. Excited to meet you and learn more about the company because quite frankly, I've been covering this industry for some time, including utility design and infrastructure and other things, but I don't know much about your company.

Al 0:46

Well, we're working to be a little bit more powered-focused and tell people about it. But it's been around for a long time since almost 2002. The company was founded. In its current form, we acquired Autodesk's utility software in 2016, and that's kind of the current form of the company. I see, I see. One of your tools is based upon AutoCAD, correct? We sit on top of AutoCAD, Autodesk products, AutoCAD being one of them. And you know, we don't take away from anything AutoCAD does, but what we do is we add a lot of functionality on top of it. And we automate things, we compare against standards to make sure designs are done correctly. And so we we add a lot of capability to it.

Roopinder 1:23

So okay, yeah. Well, my most I'm subject to what information has fed me at times. And Bentley has been particularly, how should I say, helpful in supplying information? So I know all about their tools, but I want to find out more about what you guys do too now.

Al 1:38

We need to fix that. Certainly happy to be here. I'm really excited to be here and looks forward to the discussion.

Roopinder 1:43

Is Bentley systems your direct

Competing With Bentley, Partnering With Esri

Roopinder 1:45

competitor? And I imagine Esri is too.

Al 1:47

So Bentley is absolutely our competitor. Esri is a partner of ours. We interface with Esri. We bring CAD and GIS and enterprise systems for utilities like SAP or whatnot. We bring those together. And so we have a connected solution and there's a lot of power in connecting those enterprise systems.

Roopinder 2:07

I was watching the video that a lot of you use the nomenclature that would be common to people in the trade rather than use generic CAD programs.

Al 2:16

Yeah. When you go to Autodesk and their mantra is, you know, design anything, and that's great. They have powerful tools, but what we do is we make it utility-centric. And so utility designers can move on to our software, and in a couple days, they can be highly productive. It's utility-centric and they understand that. It speaks their

Utility-Centric Workflows And Adoption

Al 2:35

language.

Roopinder 2:35

I live in California. Is our California utilities customers?

Al 2:39

And almost all almost all the California utilities are our customer. So the Cal Edison, San Diego, PG &E, some smaller ones. We're still working on the others that are not yet our customers, but it's only a matter of time.

Roopinder 2:51

Grounding is a big issue here where I live. Is your software able to help

California Utilities And Underground Design

Roopinder 2:55

them with that? Absolutely.

Al 2:56

All our customers do underground designs with our software. So much of that's automated. And so you get automated bills and materials, you get the GIS interface. Design starts with pulling the information out of the GIS. The source of truth for that utility is their GIS system. We pull information automatically from that. And when you start a project like a grounding line, you pull that line out and then you design it from an underground perspective. So when the design is complete, we put it back into GIS, it'll connect back to the SAP or whatever the system so that they can buy the materials who

GIS As Source Of Truth In 3D

Al 3:28

run the project.

Roopinder 3:28

One of the things that amazed me is the software's ability to see underground, see what's under the surface. I imagine your stuff, your applications can do that, draw up upon an existing subterranean infrastructure and show it in place.

Al 3:42

So you pull it from GIS. Usually that's the source of truth of what exists. And we pull that out of GIS. And then when we design in 3D and do the underground, you don't have the conflicts with you know to move around and as opposed to go through objects that exist. If there's a sewer line, you'd go under the line as opposed to through it in your design. So that's an important part of the capability of the system. The analogy I used to use, when you use our software, it's like using a smart phone instead of a flip phone.

From Corner Store To Integrated Platform

Al 4:10

I'm not sure that's that does its justice. And so the newer analogy I use is you know, I grew up in rural Iowa in a firming community with an order store. There, there was Harold who was selling and ran that for a long time. They did everything manually. They wrote receipts, they bought material. If you fast forward to how that would be done today, it's not like 50% more efficient. It's 95 to 98% more when you use sales and the software and ordering. Design software for utilities is kind of like that. And there's a lot of utilities that are still kind of using that corner store approach or doing manually things where they download information, they pull it from field surveys, they rewrite it from GIS into their CAD platform. And so we take all of that information and we just bring it into our tool. We drive so much efficiency by integrating those pieces. And that's that's kind of our that's what we do. For utilities, it's really resonates with utilities, and we've had good success helping utilities do a lot more with less

Market Footprint And Growth Plans

Al 5:06

and just better quality.

Roopinder 5:07

It sounds like your penetration of the market is really good.

Al 5:14

Yeah, so we're we have a footprint in if you measure utilities by size. We're in 15 of the top 20 utilities. We have a footprint, doesn't mean it's a big footprint, but we we sell to them. Eight of the top 10 engineering companies, we're in three of the top five gas utilities that use our software. So we have a good footprint, but we have a lot of room to grow within that space still. But you know, to your comment to start with, you didn't know much about us. I've been here about three years, and when I started, I was kind of a common thread that we were a company that were a lot of big customers. We had a lot of presence in the space, but people hadn't heard of us. And so we're working to change that.

Pragmatic AI: Tools Not Autopilot

Roopinder 5:49

I always like the fact that software can be specialized to specifically meet the needs of the industry or the user. Are you getting pestered by using AI or not using AI enough?

Al 6:00

Well, we use it as a tool, so it's a tool we use in our day-to-day lives where we've built our own SBS assistant internally for employees. We use it in development. You know, we use a copilot to help us develop code faster, better. We're putting it into our products as a user experience. That's gonna happen in 2026. But I always make the joke when we're ready to ride on a plane designed by AI, we'll go ahead and put it in charge of our algorithms. Until then, our algorithms are deterministic and we're gonna continue to use those. But what AI can do is it can help us do things like look through data. If you want to find out, let's do the design with materials that we can buy today available in the next 30 days. AI can help us put the right materials in our designs. But if the design is still going to be done by the designer, AI is a great tool to help. And then we have also developed an AI platform that helps truly for planning activities around preliminary substation design and proposals so you understand what the cost is. Engineering companies, instead of spending a month doing that manually, you can spend a couple hours on our platform and do a good proposal that's plus or minus 15% cost, and it's good enough for permitting. So we're using AI for that kind of stuff. We're not using it as a replacement for our design tool. I think it's

Training Time And Ease Of Use

Al 7:13

really a great tool to add to it. Our designs are spatial. AI is not very spatially aware. Chat GPT and the LLMs are great to learn, different rules and whatnot. They're not yet spatial, and so we're leveraging what we can.

Roopinder 7:25

Sounds like a very pragmatic approach. How long do they actually learn the software? Do you have to do you take people in for classes or do you do online courses now?

Al 7:33

It's much simpler than learning AutoCAD. If you're doing AutoCAD, you know, if you're building a 3D object, you gotta learn to build the object, remove material to make a hole complicated. For us, you know, we'll see the demo, but it's really menu-driven, drag and drop. And so people can go to a class and in really two to three days, if you're a designer, you can be up to speed and productive. It's more for utilities. Their challenge is to teach new people what is a primary line, you know, where where do you bury line, where to use a concrete pole instead of wood pole. And even that, we simplify because we apply those standards and the rules configured into our products. It's a few days to get somebody up to speed. Sure, most utilities, it's just dramatically reduces their training time for new employees.

Roopinder 8:18

How 3D is your software? If

2D Input, 3D Models, And Twins

Roopinder 8:20

you talk about like digging a hole, am I going to get a 2D representation of a hole? Am I going to get a real three-dimensional hole?

Al 8:27

We have software that covers kind of linear asset design, so distribution lines, whether it's gas or electric, fiber, water. And so you draw in 2D, but we always build a model behind the scenes in 3D. There's a 3D model that is representative of the real digital twin, which is important. So when you're you have a 45-foot pole, you can place that line in a 2D top-down version of the design, but behind the scenes, it knows it's a 45-foot pole. And when you run to an underground line, there's a conduit that runs down the pole into the ground at the right depth over to a transformer. And we can calculate pulling tension because we understand the length of that line, the bends in the conduit, all the way the distance to the transformer. So we automate all of that. And you know, creating a 3D design is helpful for visualization, especially in things like underground. Generally,

Intelligent Design Rules And Checks

Al 9:18

you design in 2D when you're doing a distribution line. We also have substation product, which is designed in 3D. And so those are 3D first designs. And essentially, you kind of drag and drop the elements. You'll drag and drop a transformer onto a pad in a substation, you'll connect it with uh whatever the bus bars or whatever you're using to transfer the current. And you build that almost as if you're building it with Legos. You build it up in a 3D manner and you end up with a very detailed 3D model, you know, shows different conflicts and other things you can make sure that it's got the right spatial spacing to run the current and the load through it.

Roopinder 9:53

So you're not just making a hole or any feature, but it's actually a smart feature. It actually has things in it that you would need to, you would have to waste time drawing in AutoCAD that's actually already there.

Al 10:05

Yeah, we call it intelligent design, and people they don't really know what that means. They're glad it's not the dumb design. But when we say intelligent design, it means there's logic associated with the components. And so, for instance, in a some station, you cannot connect an electric fitting with, or I'm sorry, a copper fitting with an aluminum fitting because it'll corrode. So we provide logic, and you know, we won't let somebody connect a conductor that can't carry the load that is coming from the transformer. So there's a lot of logic that we built in to make sure people are doing the right thing. And so we call it intelligent design.

Roopinder 10:37

Okay. Back to AI just for a second, although I promise I'll

Natural Language UX And Help

Roopinder 10:40

leave it alone. The south AI, what I found to be very useful, it I I understand it's not quite there on spatial relationships or or 3D shapes of any kind, but I've found a lot of interest lately and a lot of usefulness in it being used to for natural language interface to the software itself. Yeah, things like you know, issuing a command in plain English and having the software figure it out, figure out what have AI figure out what the commands are in the software, actually do that command, which I think if you two to two to three days trading for software is pretty good, but that would reduce it down to zero. If a user, if a user like me never understood the program, just wanted to make a substation, they start with making like, okay, first draw me the lines, first draw me the underground lines, and it would figure out what commands it needed to do that. I wouldn't have to even take your through-day course.

Al 11:34

I agree, I agree. I think it's pretty quick. It's a little bit like if you watch, I don't know if you're a developer with developer background, but ME2. So but but to watch some programmers, like you know, they'll go command line where it looks like gibberish to me, but for them, it is so productive, you know, as opposed to a user interface where they're dragging and dropping. Command line for them is so much more productive. So, you know, I think the natural language model is great at interfacing with lots of data. And so what we've seen, like in

Founder’s Path: Controls To Utilities

Al 12:05

our platform, it's fantastic to say, okay, you designed a substation. How did you do this or why did you do this? And it will it will answer and it'll give you exactly the calculation it used. And so that interface is so powerful for us in our user interface. You know, I'm not sure we'll end up using it in that. We're using it for our new products. We're actually putting a user interface help bar right alongside the design. You know, it's possible that you could start to say, you know, what do you recommend here and have an AI bot that helps you make some recommendations? So it is exciting and it's a great tool.

Roopinder 12:40

It lends itself to natural ability to process vast amounts of textual data, such as exists in help files. And so a lot of companies, most companies are at the level where they're using AI LM type applications to their help. You can ask it commands. But the next at the next level, it's going to start interacting with the software, right? It's going to be not just a window outside, but it's to be implemented in the CAD program. I think one day, if I

The Grid’s Hidden Complexity

Roopinder 13:10

may dream, you won't have a menus or menus will exist, but menus and icons, but it'll be typing out commands at least. And speaking or speaking. Your colleague is gonna hear, like all you'd be hearing is undo, undo, undo. Did I read that you went to MIT? I did.

Al 13:36

I was attended MIT, and I was part of a program called Leaders for Manufacturing, which is the Leaders for Global Operations. It was a great program, and uh learned a lot. I feel like Iowa State prepared me well for it. But MIT was such a fantastic experience.

Roopinder 13:52

It is, yeah. Were you on campus?

Al 13:54

No, I lived off campus. I was married at the time, so lived in Burlington.

Roopinder 13:57

I that area definitely. Companies

Fiber Buildouts And Speed Gains

Roopinder 14:00

that I worked with also. My father went to Harvard, so it's a hallowed place IT for engineers. So what led you into your this business though?

Al 14:09

No, well, it's interesting. I was always control centric, so I always did controls and manufacturing is where I started. And then we ended up working in the semiconductor industry, building capital equipment for a long time. And, you know, the controls piece of capital equipment, it's a high density, high complexity, lots of controls environment. You know, the controls piece always was interesting to me. And then one of the companies I worked for ended up, you know, managing uh as a general manager. We did the high purity distribution systems and we did a control system that was really life safety for these semiconductor fabs. And uh, you know, it was a really complex control problem. I did that and it was a manufacturing company, loved it. But I really thought if I'm gonna move into software, now is the time. And so I ended up went to this little company that worked in a utility space called Open Systems International, and they did real-time controls for utilities. My background was good enough

Adapting For Fiber Standards

Al 15:05

to be the project guy there. I ran all their projects and ultimately became the COO. When we sold the company to a public company, I took over as president, and that was great. Loved that. Was planning to retire there. I got a call about this little company in Denver called SBS. The most fun part of my career was helping build OSI from small to big and all the challenges that went with that. And so I decided I was gonna move to SBS and do that again as the president. And it's just been so much fun building, you know, a trusted customer base, building, you know, products that make a huge difference. And, you know, for me, working for utilities in that space is so meaningful because it impacts everybody, whether they know it or not. It makes a real difference in the world, keeping the power on and helping utilities deliver reliable power to everybody.

Roopinder 15:52

I've always admired civil engineers for the amount of things that they do on the scale that they do it in. I think it's a kind of injustice that we take so much of our utility design and maintenance and everything for granted, right? There's people that just expect electricity to flow and water to flow and gas

Telecom Stacks And CAD Automation

Roopinder 16:10

to flow. And it takes a lot of engineering and a lot of work to make that happen. And that's just taken for granted, right?

Al 16:16

I think it's the most complex control problem on the planet because it's zero sum. If you take electricity out of the group, somebody somewhere has to put electricity into it to manage. And it's a mesh network where everybody's connected to everybody in that region. So complex, and people take it for granted for sure.

Roopinder 16:34

There was a big trillion dollar push for civil engineering projects. I don't hear much about it now. I was most interested in fiber optics for how our country is doing with that.

Al 16:43

There's a lot of work going on with fiber, and we're just starting to get into that space. And you know, for us, productivity, you know, that we drive will make a big difference in that space. So we just had a customer that did a 60-mile run. The designer did a 60-mile run in 10 hours that would have taken him more than two weeks to do before. And so we think we're helping that process as people

Reliability, Security, And NERC

Al 17:05

designed and ultimately build that fiber network out.

Roopinder 17:08

I mean, what's what specifically is involved with because I would think the software that you have would be you just use the same commands pretty much to lay a fiber network, right? What's different?

Al 17:17

What's different? So for us on the fiber, 99% was the same. We had to do a little bit of functionality add to deal with the fiber line of kill as you progress down the fiber, you start to peel off, and so we had to add a little bit of functionality to be able to do that so that you start with a big fiber, and as you go, you peel off different strands that go to houses and businesses. But the distribution and design layout was exactly the same. And so it really becomes configuring it with people's SAP or whatever they however they buy their materials. So we had pull those materials out with those into our drop-down menus, which is pretty easy. And then basically also we had to build standards into that platform. And so we built and we pulled in a there's a company called Utopia based out of Utah. They do a lot of work that has kind of become part of the standard across the US. And so we configured that into our product, and then we basically demoed it and sold it. And you know, the first deployments have been

Designing For Physical Security

Al 18:15

great, really, really productive, and the software works really well. And then at the end, it connects back into your SAP system so they can buy the materials that they've just designed on the on this electronic format.

Roopinder 18:26

Is a different set of customers? Are you competing with the telecom companies? Is it their software, whatever they have?

Al 18:31

So telecom companies have their own homegrown systems where they design with their homegrown systems. And yeah, I guess we're competing with that homegrown system. But for the most part, almost everybody designs with a CAD product, most of it's AutoCAD. The drawings themselves are layered and complex, and so we just automate so much of that. We automate all the annotation of different if you drop an asset and you know we can annotate what it is, and then we can also bring the bill of materials for the design into SAP or wherever you want.

Roopinder 19:00

Because it's glass fiber, do you have to have special large bends that you have to do with that? It's like what is that minimum radius?

Al 19:08

Feet? I don't know what that minimum radius is, but yeah, the bends are much different, and so that's part of the standards. You've got to follow those standards. And it's not like gas where you can have a long radius bend that is got a lower pressure drop.

Roopinder 19:20

These bends have to be basically can't have T junctions with the fiber optics.

Al 19:24

Yeah, there's no such thing as a T junction.

Roopinder 19:26

You can junction it, but then there's a lot of work to go ahead and do that. I have a beef with this because the fiber optic cable stop like a block away from our house, and we cannot get them to continue. What do I need to do to get fiber optics to my house? A while ago, where there was a attack on a substation where they were actually a sharp, it was actually a sharpshooter, just like knocked off with substation, just firing guns at it. And I thought, whoa, substations are really vulnerable to this sort of attack. They're large, they're unguarded, they affect so much of what. We do that it would be an ideal terrorist target. And I almost hate to talk about it because I don't want to suggest the idea, but it's already become a target once. And I'm wondering if your applications are at all able to address the security issue.

Al 20:13

Yeah, well, there's a lot to that question. I'm not the expert. And I will say that when you look at reliability of the grid, most people think about transmission. So it's really the transmission level that drives reliability. Your house goes out, it's not the same as if a transmission substation goes out, it drops a whole city. So in terms of physical protection, that's a real threat that utilities and the government have to deal with. And so NERC, North America Reliability Corporation, I think, is what it is. But it's it's it's what mandates a lot of the security requirements. It reports up to FERC, regulatory agency. And physical security is one of the things they worry about. I think dealing with high-caliber rifles, shooting controls, I don't know how they deal with that. I do know that there's a lot of steps they take from a cyber standpoint to protect that sun station. And so the controls are all encrypted, the commands in and out, and there's a lot of steps taken to make sure that someone can't hack into the control system of a transmission network. And those cyber security, given my previous lines, dealt with that a lot. There's a lot of things in place to protect that. The physical piece is always the part that's kind of a wild card. And it's something that I think they're trying to figure out and do a better job. You know, redundancy, you know, at the transmission level, it's a little harder. It's redundant within that site, but it's often they don't you have sites that back each other up per se.

Roopinder 21:36

Absolutely. In your application, it'd be uh menu choices for us, the sort of things like perimeter, perimeter fencing or cameras, that sort of thing. Yeah.

Al 21:46

So those are all part of our design and scene. It goes in and it's all based on the standard, you know. So they're all protected. That's part of the design. Doesn't stop a high caliber bullet from showing over the top of it.

Roopinder 21:56

Let's just try the bad guys don't listen to this podcast. Al, it's been great. I appreciate the time. And uh yeah, thanks so much.

Al 22:04

Yeah, well, thank you. Appreciate your time and look forward to talking more. Thanks so much. All right, talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Roopinder 22:12

Thank you for listening to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software show, brought to you by ENGtechnica. I hope you have learned of a new application or technology that will help you with your job. If you have an application you think would be of interest to other engineers, please let me know by emailing me at roopinder at engtechnica dot com

Closing And Listener Invitation

Roopinder 22:33

or message me on LinkedIn.