Pimansoft.com: About author

Business environment
for desalination and water treatment projects

About author & project

I am very glad you visited my site. And I hope your curiosity will eventually turn into steady interest to this subject.
I started this project in 2003 privately while working for IDE Technologies, just in the middle of its big technological leap leeched by the data management deficiencies, to the Ashkelon seawater desalination plant (100 Mton/year, commissioning 2005), by that time the biggest in the world. Later while working as a senior designer of the Palmahim seawater desalination plant (35 Mton/year, com. 2007), I felt the data management problem had grown even bigger because a number of companies were engaged into engineering, procurement and construction phases in parallel. Then by hard work we all learnt the vital importance of collaboration activity tracking, cross discipline communication and information integration (which was painful and far from seamless one). With ever-narrowing project margins and compressed schedules neglecting these issues may result in millions of dollars losses and dissatisfaction growth among the project partners. The latter is very common in the projects performed by international teams.

At the beginning of the project only one humble task was set - to develop basic principles of the P&ID development automation. Many P&ID programs had been analyzed and rejected by 2 common reasons - they all neglected internet as collaborative activity media and offered customization framework not adaptable to the water treatment project tasks.

Such an analysis helped me identify another point crucial to the success of the whole project. It was boiled down to a simple question - to draw or not to draw? To follow the pattern set by the graphics-driven programs like AutoCad P&ID or not?
Quest for right not-to-draw answer was painful and came as a result of use-case observation and the industry trend analysis.

Engineers are accustomed to high graphics standards introduced by Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, Google, and other world-dominating companies. To follow the same standards in any engineering software means to invest 80% of the project time in the second-in-importance objectives. Not to follow scares away many unsophisticated users.
Average engineer has very low level of graphics skills. As a result in most cases the graphics "masterpieces" produced by engineers are ugly.
Any engineering company extensively uses "copy-and-paste" approach to projects. Legacy graphics reusability is a standard productivity booster. If compared by usage frequency, AutoCAD is now competing with Photoshop permitting easy modification of images.
World economy is based on integration and unification. Any project hosts a range of graphics standards offered by multiple product manufacturers and subcontractors. Which graphics standard to follow and why?

The year 2003 was nearly lost in trying to formalize the functional requirements for such a framework and to build a prototype system. At that time the solution found seemed an obvious overkill - the framework should be intelligent and mimic the real world - to understand language and physical parameters - and to be self-learning - to perform tasks "by example" without formal hardwired algorithms. There had been many doubts about the IT design choice - the newly emerged J2EE 3-tier architecture. Many consultants dubbed it an 'overkill' and warned about project possible failures due to required high level of expertise. Having found "mortar" - framework and technology - I already had plenty of "bricks" - factual material and use cases - my own vast knowledge and experience acquired over 20+ years of work as a process engineer in the areas of power generation and water desalination.

Thanks to my math backgrounds and self-made proficiency in programming (C++, .NET, J2EE, HTML and JavaScript) I was blessed with opportunity to turn my intangible albeit deep professional experience into something solid – P&I Manager (Piman).

Working on Piman proved very remunerative and problems exciting. They entirely changed my priorities and judgments - I started hunting for monotonous jobs so despised by my fellow workers. By the end of 2007 the database design had been completed - more than 110 tables (!)
Since then there was no a single break in the work on the project even during my return back to the IDE Technologies to catch the last train to the Hadera project (100 Mton/year, com. 2009) where I was engaged in the heavy equipment selection, negotiating and purchasing.

In the fall of 2007 I got a new assignment - the Cape Preston Iron Ore seawater desalination project (50 Mton/year, Australia) - and a lucky chance to test the Piman software in the battlefield. It ran on the intranet with up to 6 users, showing stable and fast performance. Users found Piman simple, friendly and highly productive tool. This is the best prize for the author.

Full-scale test of Piman made me move away from broad but low-efficient “toolbox” concept of software development to direly-wanted “business environment” one targeting specific business niche. So in the spring of 2008 Piman started its new life as a Project Engineering and Management Automation Standards and Software Laboratory (PEMASSOL) for water treatment projects.

Twice I mentioned the "overkill" word, and this is the point where, I think, all the IT community may benefit from my experience. Real life surpassed all expectations, and the J2EE "suite" now fits Piman perfectly. Its workability is an important milestone on the way from CAD (computer-aided design) philosophy to revolutionary HAD (human-aided design).
It is still driven by the Orion server licensed as Oracle OC4J and Apache Derby RDBMS.

Sincerely Yours,
Dr.Victor Dvornikov,
victord@pimansoft.com,
tel. 9723-952-1843