Working Software

It had been quite sometime since I last updated my blog. For the last week or so, I have been in a training for 2 new software that my company is launching for our use.

Last week, we were introduced to an accounting software which is so powerful, it can track the progress of the project from the very beginning to all the vendor status to their payment status to the customer's payment status. However, being an American company and due to user licensing issues, the company house the server with this software in the US server.

Therefore, the access is very slow and for the fact that we are approx 12 hours ahead of the US, when we started working in the Pacific, it is still in the night in the US, therefore, if we were to stumble upon some issues that we needed backup, we have no choice but to wait for the US to response to it some 12 hours later.

The advantage of having this software is for the Top Management to view all the progress and activities for all the project the team here in Pacific is executing with a click of the mouse. All real time, online update.

Then, yesterday again we are introduced to another new software which is so powerful, it can simulate the running of a water treatment plant, from a conventional raw water to high end ultra pure water with all the processes in-build to it.

All the user need to do is to select the equipments listed in the pre-set table and connect the equipments together, the software is able to calculate and predict the final water output quality at every point of the way.

It seems that the software took about 10 men years, i.e. either 10 working men for 1 year or 1 working man for 10 years time to complete and until yesterday, it had became so powerful that the predicted water output quality in the software is about plus or minus 5% of the actual real plant.

Now the software had also developed to be able to simulate a whole power station - turbine, cooling towers, boilers, air emission etc. All the functions that you need to build a power plant and its facilities. However, as my division is mainly focused on water, we are only taught to use the water process side of it.

With this software, even those who do not know how to use any CAD drawing software can easily produces a Process and Instrumentation Diagram for customer with reasonable accuracy and not worry of making process mistakes as the software is so intelligent that it will give warning if you couple the wrong equipments together.

So, engineers out there, please be aware of the development of software's out there. It will greatly reduce your workload but, of course it will come with a hefty price tag with it.