Demand for web applications
There is a huge potential in web based applications catering to engineering companies in the present times. I realized this when I happened to attend an internal presentation on weight control in my company last Friday.
Weight control report is an active log system that monitors changes in engineering weights as the engineering process goes through a cycle of revisions. This is a very important document that tracks revisions of weight changes. It also governs many aspects of fabrication and installation processes such as choice of specific cranes or crane-barge vessels and their mobilization for the task intended.
Weight control is a record maintained by individual engineering disciplines in a given project. In an offshore project, typically, we have weight related to these: Electrical and instruments, piping, mechanical, safety and structural that contribute to the overall weight of a given module or a structure.
Many a times, we have disciplines working from various offices in the world. In such a scenario, working with live-data in realtime saves us precious time and provides us a grip over our estimates and schedules resulting in saving costs and thus, an effective management. A huge and significant leap in our mundane and otherwise time-consuming work. At the moment, we use outdated methods like offline spreadsheets to maintain discipline-wise sheets doing simple arithmetic, but major disadvantages of this type are: we spend an awful amount of time discussing weight optimization offline; since structural division maintains the overall weight, most disciplines are in the dark about the global picture, and are usually unaware of the overall impact until they’re presented in the revised weight control document.
Putting weight control in a dynamic way via a simple web-application provides each discipline with their imaginary boundaries and a sense of responsibility in their contribution to weights.
In the presentation I attended, I saw a desktop app being mobilized for this task using MS Access and access to central db via the intranet. Hell of a clumsy way of doing it! Eeeks! I wish they had used a web-based system for inputs, SQL systems and server side scripting for such a task. It could have been a lot more simpler, easily accessible and very very fast on a network. But, I have no choice but to shut-up and just listen. I am not a developer, but I know what’s good for the industry I work for, thanks to some inherent knowledge that I possess and open ears to new things, and technologies, web-semantics for one as an example.
This is where the opportunity lies for the infotech community. There are thousands of such mundane tasks in an offshore industry, like weight control, that are very essential in our core workings. I can cite a few:
- Project management (I love the idea of Basecamp)
- Fabrication and construction management
- eProcurement (steel, vendor based products, services)
- Timesheet management
- Realtime monitoring of installation sequences and enabling engineering help on standby.
The problem with engineering companies, I’ve noted, is that they do not realize that they could get a simple custom-based web-based app that they could let loose over their intranets and reap enormous benefits from it, unlike desktop applications (Primavera for example) resulting in generating more paperwork or limited to within an office. There is no opportunity for dynamic updates to external parties here.
If web-applications like Basecamp hold court (and they should; because they’re so good), then products like Primavera either would go out of business or will be forced to upgrade, resulting in advantages to users and industries at large.
So, if you’re a web-applications developer, think of the opportunities that you may have, and no, they’re not just limited to providing communication or setting-up corporate blogs or developing websites. There’s a hell-lot more.