Several years ago, we developed a solution for the leading drilling rig-moving company in the United States. Rig moving involves heavy equipment (cranes, etc) to disassemble and re-assemble a drilling rig, trucks to move the pieces down the road, and people to operate it all. There were many issues when developing the system, among which: * how to get the cost of the resources (people and equipment) to individual jobs when the jobs were of short duration (typically two to five days) and the expenses did not lend themselves to job posting (equipment repairs and maintenance is a good example). * collection of historical equipment cost information for repair or replace decisions. * management by exception on jobs - the sheer number of jobs in a month requires a special tool to identify which jobs were problems and why without having a large analytical staff. * and many other related issues. Anyway, the company was recently purchased by a downstream customer and folded into their Oracle ERP system and so the customized Navision application is no longer used. Even though it was conceived and built over five years ago (originally developed in 1.10A – one of the first 100 installations in the US – and since upgraded to 3.1), it remains the most sophisticated tool in its industry. I would love to see this functionality installed in another company, not just for sales reasons, but because I still get excited about its ability to capture business intelligence about operating equipment, and job costs for a difficult industry. This functionality would be appropriate for a company that: * disassembles large pieces of equipment at one venue, transports it to another and re-assembles. * has jobs that are of relatively short duration (several days to several weeks). * has many jobs, and resources need to be scheduled aong them. * requires constant repairs and maintenance of equipment, and the repair authorization is often given in the field, requiring a multi-tiered authorization approach. If any of this sounds familiar, or you know of an organization that might benefit, send me an e-mail. I’d hate to see this gem fade into obscurity.
Although it might seem a stretch, these functions sound a lot like what we had to do in convention management. Frequent breakdown, move, and setup using both employees and local contractors. Granted the asset values are smaller, but the functions sound the same. A large convention management company or even a division of a large company might use it to manage their convention and seminar business.