There are a number of criteria that can be specified by the user while in RAM Steel Beam Design. By setting these criteria, designs can be obtained that conform to the design philosophies of the engineer without requiring extensive member size selection modification. Once a design has been performed, these criteria can be modified to further refine the design.

Note that the default values and selections used in new models can be specified with the Defaults Utility command in the RAM Manager. Changing the criteria there does not impact the defaults used in existing models; for those, the criteria can be changed on a model-by-model basis using the Criteria commands in the RAM Steel Beam Design module.

Making changes to any criteria after the beams have been analyzed and designed requires that the optimized member designs be removed from the database. New optimized designs using the new criteria will replace the old designs. Upon issuing a criteria command, a warning message is displayed stating that the old design will be cleared and providing the user an opportunity to cancel the command. Note that user-specified sizes (beams to which the user has assigned a specific size) will not be cleared, this must be done with the Process – Clear Designs command or the Process – Clear Sizes command. (See Section 2.14).