Continous Uptime

Engineered Software and PUMP-FLO Solutions are and have always been, committed to our customer’s satisfaction, as well as their user experience. Along with offering the best support in the industry, we also look to implement proactive measures so our customers never have to use their support service or wait to use their web products from us. We are monitoring Continuous Uptime more closely than ever before using even finer detailed reports, and this month's blog explains what that means for you.

Our latest improvements are completely behind the scenes but the results can be felt throughout our product lines and website users. The term, Continuous Uptime might seem out of place in the technology industry but I assure you, it is just as important to our customers as it would be to a production supervisor in an industrial manufacturing plant.

 

What we’ve done

In additional to significant investments in our infrastructure to enhance the availability and scalability of our delivery framework, we have created a monitoring system for all of our PUMP-FLO and Engineered Software web services on Amazon Web Services. This includes metrics and warnings for standard server attributes like CPU, memory and disk storage. In addition, we have created custom metrics to monitor performance and response times.

The monitoring system is the first step toward a fully distributed and scalable web services environment, which is currently in progress.

Why we’re doing it

We understand pump selection is:

1. an integral part of how pump manufacturers communicate with pump buyers
2. an integrated part of their sales and quotation process
3. a key advantage for system designers
4. a valuable lead generation tool

PUMP-FLO web services and our Insight configurator are key to our customers’ business goals and their strategic initiatives to grow revenue, penetrate new markets, and improve organizational efficiency.

We’re advancing scalable, web-based and secure technology for pump selection to meet those needs and ensure a stable, continuous platform.

PUMP-FLO is a worldwide web services platform and as such, we strive for 24x7 uptime. By implementing this uptime monitoring system, we are able to provide more flexibility, reliability, quicker response times and additional security all while our services remain uninterrupted for our customers.

...Failure to Communicate

I am a big fan of Paul Newman, the actor and humanitarian that had a long and successful string of hit movies. One of my favorite is Cool Hand Luke, where he plays Luke, a prisoner in a southern chain gang that is continually bucking the system. 

During the movie the following dialog takes place between the Captain and Luke. Luke just finished time in “the box” after an unsuccessful escape attempt. In addition he was given a set of leg irons “to slow him down.” 

Captain: You gonna get used to wearing them chains after a while, Luke. Don't you never stop listening to them clinking, 'cause they gonna remind you what I been saying for your own good.

Luke: I wish you'd stop being so good to me, Cap'n.

Captain: Don't you ever talk that way to me. (pause, then hitting him) NEVER! NEVER! (Luke rolls down hill; to other prisoners) What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men. 

(Carroll & Rosenberg, 1967)

As a result “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” has become a common phrase in the American lexicon. 

Many of the problems we experience are caused by the failure to communicate. In piping systems, the failure to communicate causes pumps to be over-sized leading to increased operational, maintenance, and capitol cost and reductions in system reliability and overall output. One of the most common communication problems is the failure to accurately state the process requirements when selecting a pump. It works like this:

The owner of the system design provides a capacity requirement based on future system needs knowing full well that the system will be operating at a lower capacity for an extended period of time until the market need catches up with capacity. So instead of specifying the expected 500 gpm for process design flow, 1,000 gpm is given so as to plan for the future.

The engineer designing the system takes the capacity provided by the process group and adds a 20% design margins of flow (to allow for future capacity increases). In addition a design margin for head is added (to account for system uncertainties during the design process) when specifying the equipment. As a result the pump design point is 1,200 gpm and 200 ft of head.

The individual selecting the pump chooses a pump with the design point left of the pumps Best Efficiency Point (BEP) to allow the pump to better accommodate future system capacity increases. 

“What we've got here is failure to communicate.”

Each group in the process added their design margin, just to be on the safe side. Yet they fail to document or communicate their design margins to the entire group. This is the way things are done today because that’s the way things have always been done. We as engineers, have a tendency to add design margin just to make sure thing work. There is nothing wrong with that except that problems arise when we don’t consider the consequences of compounding design margins on the system operating costs, maintenance costs, capitol costs, and plant reliability. 

That is where PUMP-FLO comes in handy; it’s a great way to communicate. Anytime during the process the user can enter basic system operating information and the program calculates the static head and dynamic head. Combined with the pump curve you can see the interaction between the pump, process, and control. For example the following pump/system curve was generated with the PUMP-FLO program using a pump curve from the Crane Deming Pumps catalog. 

  
Notice the design point for the selected pump was 1,200 gpm with 200 ft of head based on the calculations performed by the engineer. The individual selecting the pump chose one with the design point left of the pump’s best efficiency point of 1,550 gpm. As we can see the pump is the most efficient at a flow rate that will never be achieved.

The blue lines represent the system curve. The upper blue line was used in calculating the system static head for the pump selection calculations; this represents the maximum static head expected even though the possibility of the system operating under this condition is less than 1% of the time.  The lower system curve shows the typical valve for static head. The pump was sized for the maximum static head that occurs infrequently and at a flow rate that is not expected to be needed for 10 years.

What is this costing us? Cost is a primary driver for most operating system, and one again PUMP-FLO is able to help you communicate how much the system costs to operate.  For example the projected pump operation during the first 5 years is 500 gpm resulting in a 72 psi pressure drop across the control valve.  When the system is running as described for a year it consumes 395,000 kWh and with a power cost of $0.10/kWh costs $39,500/yr to operate.

If the differential pressure across the control valve was reduced to a more reasonable pressure drop of 28 psid, by reducing the impeller diameter on the pump to the minimum allowed by the manufacturer, the pump will consume only 214600 kWh per year with an operating cost of $21,460/year.

The Captain was wrong, we don’t have to get used to the leg irons of system inefficiency if we just communicate our process and total cost to everyone involved. 

By the way if you haven’t seen Cool Hand Luke I would suggest renting in on Netflix® or Amazon.com® and watch an excellent story with an outstanding cast. And please let me know what you think about the article or about Cool Hand Luke.

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References:
Carroll, G. (Producer), & Rosenberg, S. (Director). (1967). Cool Hand Luke [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts

I Have a Problem with Issues

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds. Read Later

I have a Problem with Issues...

One thing I have noticed over the years is that the word problem is being replaced by the word issue. It seems no one has problems any more, we only have issues. (And don't even get me started on challenges.) For example, while watching TV the other night, I heard a news caster reporting on a Twitter outage as saying,

“Twitter users are experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Their engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

Since Engineered Software offers Software as a Service to our PUMP-FLO customers I understand the necessity for their website to remain up and running at all times. I also understand what it takes to maintain this up-time and what it means when there are unplanned outages. Knowing this, I would imagine that with their primary and backup servers down, and no activity on their site for more than an hour, the engineers at Twitter had a full-fledged problem on their hands.

I wanted to investigate the difference between problems and issues, so like all Internet aged people that want a quick “answer” to a question I did a Google search on "Problem vs. Issue." What I found was a lot of sappy crap written in forums that could be summarized as this; issues can be discussed and corrected, but problems were big and nasty and couldn’t be solved. (I once used that definition of problem in my differential equations class in college, but my professor took issue with that.)

The word problem, is still in limited use, but I have yet to hear a math teacher assign any homework issues.

I then decided to look up the definition in a dictionary so I went to Wikipedia®. They had usage examples of the two words but no definitions. I then clicked on their disclaimer page and found out they make no guarantee of validity. Since I feel as though my blog readers deserved a guarantee of validity, I decided to look up the definitions in a paper dictionary. Webster surely guarantees their definitions.

I went around the office and asked 15 people if I could borrow their dictionary. The responses ranged from, “Let me get my phone” to “What, is the internet down?” along with similar refrains. Only one person in our office of 35 had a paper dictionary and after he found a similar sized book to hold up his monitor he loaned it to me. It was a Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 10th edition. One good thing Merriam Webster’s has a Website that lists their definitions as well, so if you have difficulty finding a paper dictionary in your office I have provided the following links to their Website.

Problem: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problem

Issue: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/issue

The first thing I notice is that problem has only two uses, and they both relate to questions raised for inquiry or an unsettled question. This is a straight forward definition that can be understood by all.

Issue on the other hand, has NINE uses of the word, ranging from: the proceeds from a source of revenue, the action of coming or going, a means of going out, a financial outcome, a final conclusion or decision, a discharge of blood from the body, something coming from a specific source, and the act of publishing or officially giving out or making available. Item six on their usage list is “a matter that is in dispute between two or more parties.”

So how did we get to the point of calling our problems issues? It surely wasn’t to make the sentence easier to understand. For example, if someone says “I have an issue with my eye,” do they mean they are having a bloody discharge from their eye, or are they saying their eye is having a matter of dispute with their nose? More than likely, they didn’t want to upset anyone around them with their (possibly serious) problems.

I think people have stopped using the word problem because of our phobia with math. Just ask any parent of a high school student taking first year of algebra. Unless the parent majored in math, a physical science, or engineering, the typical response is “I really have issues with math.” What they are trying to say is if they must think too much about their kid’s math assignment they may overload their brain and have a bloody discharge coming from their ears.

So in the future I will always strive to use the word problem when it relates to a question raised for inquiry or any unsettled question. I will still strive to arrive at a solution to my problem, either by by conducting research (Wikipedia and Google don’t count unless the citation can be documented) or until I gain an understanding of my problem and arrive at a solution. I also may sit down with a group of people to discuss the facts of the problem and strive to arrive at a solution that is agreeable to all.

I will leave the word issues to bloody discharges from a body, when a stamp or stock is released, or when I want to have a never ending discussion about something that is ill defined and has no point. Those are my only issues with this word problem of clarity. When I was in the Navy we called them “Sea Stories.”

So this is my stand against jargon, incorrect language usage and unclear communication. I am tired of my industry skirting around problems by calling them issues, so I am taking a stand with this blog post. Let’s all be honest about our Problems vs. Issues and call a spade a spade! Because you can't solve a problem until you admit there is one.

Who’s with me?

You can leave your comments below or send me an email to blogger@eng-software [dot] com. We really do read every one!

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Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation. 

From ESCAPE to Premium

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes 42 seconds. Read Later

In my last post, I discussed the creation of PUMP-FLO and its transition from a DOS application to a Windows application, developed and first released as E.S.C.A.P.E. by the Aurora Pump Company. With the completion of E.S.C.A.P.E., it was time for us to release PUMP-FLO as our MS Windows pump selection program.

The major difference between PUMP-FLO and Aurora's E.S.C.A.P.E. at that time was that PUMP-FLO could select pumps from ANY supporting pump manufacturer’s catalog. E.S.C.A.P.E. could only select pumps from the Aurora product lines. In other words, PUMP-FLO could select any centrifugal pump provided the manufacturer had an electronic pump catalog for use with our program.

After a couple of months of development, we released PUMP-FLO for Windows version 1. Upon the release, we had one pump manufacturer onboard, Aurora (the Aurora catalog ran with both PUMP-FLO and ESCAPE.) Now it was time to get some more manufacturers onboard.

Once again I got out my list of pump manufacturers and sent them all a letter describing how they can use PUMP-FLO as their pump selection program simply by creating and adding an electronic pump catalog. Once again, we were overwhelmed with silence. Crickets.

Since we had firsthand experience with the Aurora sales group, we knew the value PUMP-FLO held for a pump sales team and we would not be stopped. So I decided to start calling the pump manufacturers on my list to tell them the story first hand.

After a couple of months I had over 90 pump manufacturers identified in North America, complete with their company address, markets served, along with their sales manager. I discovered that many of the manufacturers had multiple brands they sold their products under (Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs).

Once I got the pump market sorted out I decided it was time to go visit them and sell them on the idea of creating their company’s electronic pump catalog for use with PUMP-FLO. What was really disappointing is that we were offering to create the manufacturers’ pump catalogs for free, and we still didn't have any takers. All a manufacturer had to do was to supply us with their pump curves in paper form, we would create their catalog, and send it for their review and approval.

As an engineer I never had a business class, nor did I know how to sell, but now I was on a mission. I took my 10-pound laptop on the road with me and demonstrated the program to manufactures, pump distributors, to pump buyers at trade shows, in airport waiting rooms and even on a cross-country flight. Based on the positive response I knew that we had a winner, but we still had the problem of getting the manufacturers on board with their electronic pump catalogs.

After 18 months, PUMP-FLO still only had the Aurora catalog available for selection. Getting the manufacturers to commit was much harder than I originally thought. I then had a great idea, we would create mini-catalogs (25 pump curves of our customers choosing) for our PUMP-FLO customers for free. The PUMP-FLO customer would send us a copy of the manufacturer’s paper catalog pages they wanted, we would enter the data, and send them a disk back in the mail that could be used with PUMP-FLO. To make it even more valuable we would merge previous curves from the same manufacturer into the catalog so over time we would have a bigger catalog for the manufacturer.

We did this for about six months and in no time we had a collection of manufacturer’s catalogs. We then started sending out press releases announcing the availability of the each manufacturer’s catalogs. One of the manufacturers found out that we were distributing an electronic pump catalog for their products and had their New York lawyer send us a letter wanting to know how much money we were making so they would know how much to sue us for.

Needless to say we got our lawyer on the case and after spending a week in study he gave us a lawyer opinion. He said there was precedence in favor of what we were doing, and precedence favoring the manufacturer (just what you would expect from a lawyer). I then asked him what he would recommend and after 30 minutes of disclosure, precedence, and hemming and hawing he suggested we write a letter to the manufacturer "Asking for forgiveness and promising to sin no more." I spent the weekend writing a very contrite letter; it must have worked because they said they would drop the suit if we never sent out their pump data ever again.

Finally our luck changed and after two years of trying we finally got our second manufacturer to sign. I wish I could say that it was because of my excellent salesmanship. It turns out I was out of the office when Don Smiley of Weinman Pump called.

Since I was out, Carolyn Popp, (our President & Chief Technical Officer) answered the phone and had a nice talk with him. He said they were really interested in getting added to PUMP-FLO, but they didn't want their pumps listed next to their competitors. She said that was not how the program worked.

She explained that our mutual customers would buy PUMP-FLO from us, and get the Weinman electronic catalog from them. Don then asked how the customer got the electronic catalog. Carolyn explained that we would create their electronic catalog for them from their paper pump curves. Once we create the catalog they would review it, and once approved they would get a master catalog disk that they could freely copy and send out to their customers with PUMP-FLO. She went on to explain that since they sent out their catalog they would know everyone who had their electronic catalog.

The next day Don flew up from Conway, Arkansas and signed the agreement in person. Finally we had our second manufacturer committed. From then on I made sure that the pump manufacturer understood they were in the loop and their electronic pump catalog was their property to give to any PUMP-FLO customer they wished.

A couple of weeks later we got a call from Brian Tims of Paco Pump (then located in Oakland, California). Brian was calling from one of their pump distributor’s office and said he saw one of their pumps selected using PUMP-FLO. He wanted to know what we were doing.

Paco was one of the manufacturers that we had created the “free” customer requested catalogs and had many of their pumps already created. Fearing another unpleasant letter from their lawyer, I let them know we were not doing that anymore. Sensing the fear in my voice, he asked how the program worked. I gave him the discussion about how we worked with them to create their electronic catalog, and once reviewed and approved it was their property for them to distribute. He then asked how long it would take to get their catalog created and I confessed that we had previously created their entire pump catalog because of the initial response from our PUMP-FLO customers. Once again, swearing that we no longer send it out.

He then asked how he could get a copy of PUMP-FLO to all his pump distributors, so I told him it was available for purchase. To sweeten the deal, I mentioned if he bought enough copies of PUMP-FLO we would give him the Paco Electronic Pump Catalog that we created for no additional charge. He asked how many they would need to purchase (I assumed that 100 would be the maximum number we could ever possibly sell to pump company), so I said 50 (may as well go big, right?). He said, "OK, I'll send you a check for 50 and once we get the catalog reviewed and approved we'll send in a bigger order." I was elated!

After that we knew without a doubt, that PUMP-FLO was a winner. Re-doubling my sales efforts, I started visiting every pump manufacturer I could. With all the long plane flights, I decided to read some sales books. Every book suggested listening to your customers to find out how their sales and selection process worked, and ask about their current challenges. So I started listening, and began to learn how pump sales groups wanted to use our program in order to do their job better. This allowed me to focus on their needs and show them the existing PUMP-FLO features that best meet their requirements. This in turn, allowed me to determine what new features we should add in the future. Once I started listening and helping them streamline their internal workflow we started signing up pump manufacturers left and right.

In the mid-1990s, the Internet gained in popularity and wide use. Before you knew it, all anyone was talking about was the paradigm shift (remember that buzz word?) and how the Internet would “CHANGE THE WORLD FOREVER.” Before you knew it everyone I talked to, wanted to know when PUMP-FLO would work on the Internet. We then started examining what it would take to create a Web-based version of PUMP-FLO and based on the requests from the pump manufacturers we decided we needed to make the shift.

This time we partnered with Big Machines, an Internet startup based out of Silicon Valley. We started working together so PUMP-FLO could select the pump, and the Big Machines configuration program could help the pump sales person price the pump. After going to a short training course on developing Internet application we were once again on the bleeding edge of technology. After a few months we had PUMP-FLO running on the Web and started shifting pump manufacturers pump selectors to their own Websites. This allowed the manufacturer to send their customers to their company website and have online pump selection that looked like their own brand.

In early 2002, shortly after the dot com bust, we still had pump manufacturers and end users using the program to help them select and specify pumps for their needs. We had survived the bubble and even began to thrive in the next generation of the Internet, Web 2.0. We continued to develop the programs features both on the Windows and Web versions, and now we have more than 115 pump manufacturers using PUMP-FLO to select pumps for their customers. They are even using PUMP-FLO on their mobile devices now. Here are some interesting statistics about the success of the Web version of PUMP-FLO.

Since we started the PUMP-FLO.com website, we have over 243,700 registered users with an average of 2,000 new registered users per month. Every day, over 1,000 people use PUMP-FLO.com to select a pump for a pumping application.

I don't know if this is a paradigm shift, if pump manufacturers have frictionless commerce, or if we have changed forever the way people buy pumps. I don't think so, but I do know that PUMP-FLO is able to bring pump buyers and sellers together. Using PUMP-FLO, pump buyers are better able to understand how a particular pump will operate in their system. The pump sellers can now explain to the pump buyers why the choice they made was the best one for their application. After all isn't that what business is all about, listening to your customer, and giving them what they need to make their life easier?

Do you have any questions for me? I would love it if you left a comment or even sent me an email to blogger @ eng-software.com. In addition, we are currently welcoming guest bloggers. If you are interested, just send me a message about becoming a guest blogger, and what you would like to write about. Thanks for reading!

PUMP-FLO Beginnings: ESCAPE

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 25 seconds. Read Later

Since we started the countdown to the Engineered Software 30th Anniversary, I have gotten many requests to describe the development of some of our programs. The subject of this blog is a short review of the creation of PUMP-FLO.

It was after an upgrade of our PIPE-FLO / NET-FLO programs (footnote 1) (in DOS) that we started calling our customers, asking how they used the software. The main response was, it helps in calculating the design point needed for centrifugal pump selection. After the 5th or 6th such call we had a good idea that our next program should help in the selection and evaluation of centrifugal pumps.

In 1985, we started program development and in two months, PUMP-FLO was finished and became the fifth in our FLO-SERIES (footnote 2) of piping software. This first version was a DOS program where the user entered the pump performance data, and the program calculated the power requirement and the Net Positive Suction Head available. In addition the impeller diameter and speed could be adjusted and the program calculated the new pump performance data.

There were two problems with that first version preventing wide use of PUMP-FLO: first, it did not display a pump curve, and second the user had to manually enter the pump data. There were provisions in the program so manufacturers could supply their data in electronic pump catalogs for use by the program. We set out working with pump manufacturers to create their electronic pump catalogs; we offered to do it free if they would make the data available. I got a list of 80 centrifugal pump manufacturers sent out mailing to all and got zero takers.

In 1987, I was a panelist at the Society of Plumbing Engineers session discussing the availability of engineering software for piping calculations. Tim Smith, from TACO Pumps was also a panelist, and was demonstrating their new pump selection program. The user entered a design point and the program search through the TACO catalog and presented a list of pumps meeting their needs. It could display the pump curve on an IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), or the Hercules Graphic Card (HGC).

In talking with Tim he said the majority of the development work was writing the device drivers for the two graphics cards, and the Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. After seeing this I knew PUMP-FLO had to display a pump curve, but we didn't want to have to write device drivers for every new monitor and printer.

In 1988 we were developing an AutoCAD interface to our NET-FLO program and I needed a mouse pointing device. The mouse I purchased was bundled with Microsoft Windows Version 1. After using the mouse with AutoCAD and really enjoyed the ease of use a mouse pointing device for CAD applications.

During that time period Microsoft had a strong marketing push saying program’s written using their Windows environment did not have to write their own device drivers, Windows took care of that for you. I realized that if we made PUMP-FLO a Windows application we could display and print pump curve without the hassle of writing device drivers.

In 1988 we decided to make PUMP-FLO a Windows application, now all we needed was a launch customer. Once again I fired off letters to 80 manufacturers stating what we could do for them, and then waited. This time we got 1 response from Aurora Pumps in North Aurora Illinois. It seemed their sales people were getting asked by their customers when they were going to have a pump selection program like Taco.

We showed them an example of our DOS version of PUMP-FLO; they were interested but said their program needed to display and print the pump curve. I then showed them a mockup of what a Windows based pump selection program would look like (developed using MS Paint) and saying it could support all available graphical displays, printers, plotters, and pointing devices. I was giving them such a sales job I sounded like I was working for Microsoft.

The discussions continued, they sent one of their sales engineers to our office to discuss what the program needed, then asked us for a proposal. We gave them a rather optimistic schedule for delivering the program, and they said we had a deal if we could chop two months off the schedule so the program would be ready for their annual sales meeting in early February.

At the time, we thought the money was good, and in June 1988, we signed the deal. After signing the contract, Carolyn Popp (the other founding principal at Engineered Software), signed up for a two day C programming class, and a three day Windows developers course.

After attending the C class, she said it was just another language and should have no problem picking up the language. The next week she went to the three-day Windows programming class. The instructor was one of the original Windows developers, and many of attendees in the class were Microsoft employees learning how to support and write their application tools. She came back saying Windows was much harder than estimated, and was concerned about our 6 month schedule. Yet, in a couple of weeks, she was able to get her program to compile and display a crude menu, so she felt a little better.

Aurora had approximately 600 individual pump curves that needed to be entered into their electronic catalog. I was the lead on this effort. It took approximately 90 minutes to enter a pump curve into the catalog, and with 600 curves to enter I quickly realized additional help was needed. Enter the interns, we hired two drafting interns from a local technical school and started creating the catalog. While entering the pump curves we streamlined the process and cut the time to 60 minutes per pumps.

To meet our schedule both Carolyn and I were working 12 hour days, 6 days a week, on Sunday we cut our day down to just 8 hours.

By September, the catalog was being built, and the program’s menu structure was established. Carolyn was working on the pump selection engine and displaying the selection list on the screen. Aurora was having a sales manager meeting that month and they wanted us to show what we have accomplished to date and how the program would work.

Carolyn was getting the program together so I could practice my demonstration before heading off to Aurora. I heard a blood-curdling scream coming from her office saying, "The program doesn’t work anymore!" She tried to recreate what she was doing, but she couldn’t get the program working again. By this time, it was after midnight and I needed to get some sleep before my flight to Aurora at 6 later that morning. She stayed at the office and said to stop in the office prior to going to the airport. At 6:00 am the next day I saw a single disk on the desk, a mouse on top of the disk and a note saying “It works. YOU MUST USE THE MOUSE, whatever you do, don’t use the keyboard.”

When I arrived in Chicago, Aurora met me at the airport with a town car and took me to their offices for the demonstration. I had no idea why the program crashed the previous day, I use only the mouse and everything worked OK. Since we had not completed the graphing function of the program they were treated to an MS Paint generated sample graph window. They liked what they saw, then re-enforced the need to meet the schedule because the program was the highlight of their meeting. They then thanked me for coming and I was on my way.

By mid-January 1989 after spending hundreds of additional hours developing and testing the program, and entering and checking their pump performance data we had a working program. At their February 1989 sales meeting, we demonstrated their pump selection program called ESCAPE (Engineer’s Selection & Computer Aided Pump Evaluation).

After demonstrating the program at the keynote meeting, we got a standing ovation. There were plenty of handshakes and back pats to go around and everyone was all smiles.

That afternoon we had to train over 100 sales people on how to use ESCAPE. We had four, one hour familiarization classes with 25 attendees per class. We had everyone go through a pump selection and evaluation and it was amazing how easy they were all able to pick up the program.

When the last class was finished at 4:00 PM, we still had a crowd of 30 to 50 sales people waiting to use the program to select pumps for their customers. Finally, at 6:00 PM we were exhausted and had to lock up the computer room. At the happy hour with an open bar, (after all it was a sales meeting), we were introduced to the President of Aurora Pump. He congratulated us on ESCAPE and thanked us for saving him so much money. Since the program had not yet been released, I ask how we saved them so much money. He said normally the sales people continued their discussions at the open bar, and that year’s bar bill was $10,000 less than previous years because so many of the sales people were using the program.

Once the Aurora ESCAPE program was completed and launched, we started working on our PUMP-FLO program. We started working with other pump manufacturers to create electronic pump catalogs for their products. In the next blog I will be talking about the trials and tribulations of creating pump catalogs for use with PUMP-FLO.

Do you have any questions for me? I would love it if you left a comment or even sent me an email to blogger @ eng-software.com. Also, we are currently welcoming guest bloggers. If you are interested, just send me a message about becoming a guest blogger, and what you would like to write about. Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes

1. Prior to the release of our windows version of PIPE-FLO 4, the functionally of our piping simulation software was broken into the PIPE-FLO and NET-FLO programs. The DOS version of PIPE-FLO was used to design single pipelines and save the designed pipelines into a pipeline database. Using NET-FLO our hydraulic network analysis program; people would build a network by connecting the individual pipelines from the pipeline database into a total system complete with pressure sources, pumps, components, controls and demands. The reason this was done was that in the early days of microcomputers (even prior to DOS) programs were limited to 64 kilobytes of both memory and program space.

With the release of Microsoft Windows version 1 with its improved memory management and larger addressable memory we were able to combine PIPE-FLO and NET-FLO into a single program called PIPE-FLO Professional. Back to top

2. Prior to the release of Microsoft Windows, we had separate programs to handle various functions needed for piping system design. We called our group of products The FLO-SERIES. PIPE-FLO was used to design or enter individual pipelines into a pipeline database. All the other programs in the FLO-SERIES could read design information from the pipeline database. Our SYS-FLO program calculated how a system of multiple pipes and pumps in series would operate. Our NET-FLO program was for multiple looped networks.

We also had utility programs that could run as a standalone program or read pipeline design data from the database. This program included ORI-FLO for flow meters, PUMP-FLO, CON-FLO for control valve selection, INS-FLO from calculating insulation thickness and FLO-MANAGER. We marketed these programs as The FLO-SERIES. Back to top

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