Global Business Environment
for desalination and water treatment projects

GBE software philosophy: tuned for success

According to new research, success in 68% of technology projects is improbable right from the start; poor business analysis, understated requirements, and low level of competency being named among the major causes. So why is GBE different?
GBE uses the J2EE technology and is based on three-tier architecture. Its standard components are shown in the figure to the right. The servers and database implementations are the Orion server and Apache Derby RDBMS. No other third-party software is used.
There had been many doubts about the IT design choice. Many consultants dubbed it overkill and warned about project possible failures due to required high level of expertise.
Indeed, they were not wrong. By all criteria, GBE is a huge net application, including 500.000 lines of code and more than 150 tables in the relational database.
GBE strictly follows best traditions and canons of the object-oriented programming. Most of GBE data objects are tree structures. This is a challenge for net-deployed programs as such objects transmission is inherently slow and they consume a lot of memory. Branch cutting, transaction optimization and heavy usage of asynchronous programming make GBE fast and light.
New feature of GBE is the object garbage collection. This is a crucial point for success as by my estimate about 75% of the information stored in the project directories is raw material used for learning or outdated one. This disease plagued practically all PLM programs.
Having found "mortar" - 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. My personal and vicarious experience with ATVIEW, SWORD, ENOVIA, MS project manager, PSNext, and Smart P&ID (Autocad) was another source of invaluable ideas and paradigms.
GBE tasks, scope and implementation were selected and tailored to the following seawater desalination mega-projects.

1. Palmahim, 40 Mton/year, Israel, 2007
2. Hadera, 100 Mton/year, Israel, 2010
3. Cape Preston, 50 Mton/year, Australia, 2011
4. Vasilikos, 60 Mton/year, Cyprus, 2011
5. Sorek, 150Mton/year, Israel, 2013

1. 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.
2. An average engineer has very low level of graphics skills. As a result in most cases the graphics "masterpieces" produced by engineers are ugly.
3. 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.
4. 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?