Customized Selection Software Vs Packaged Selection Software

Manufacturing companies invests considerable amount of time and money for their selection program. Before this investment is done, the topic of “Customized VS Packaged” is always discussed to evaluate the right choice for their company. The obvious difference that comes up is the initial time and cost investment. In terms of initial time and cost investment, Packaged selection software is the easy winner. But looking beyond these two parameters, customized package comes with many other benefits in the long terms which should not be overlooked.

Following are my five cents:

1. You own your selection program: In case of customized application, you are building everything from scratch. You know how everything is implemented, you are co-architecture of your selection program. In short, you are in full control of each and every aspect of the program. This control is not only applicable for present feature list, but also you can decide on the changes required in future without worrying about its feasibility and prohibitive production cost.
2. Flexibility to change: In case of Packaged solution, software vendor implements over whelming list of features in order to satisfy the needs of multiple manufacturers. This results in a very heavy, under performing and inflexible applications. In this situation, if you need some changes in your application, vendor will either refuse your change request or present you with huge financial bills which completely offsets the low initial investment.
3. Honor your identity: If your selection program will be used by users from outside your company as well. It is very important to maintain your corporate identity in your selection program as well. In case of customized applications, specially designed user interface, user experience and report formats can take care of branding, positioning and corporate identity of your company. In case of packaged solutions, although these things can be taken care by some minor settings, still, the application reflect more of software vendor’s CI rather than manufacturer.
4. Unlimited user license: Another cost trap for a packaged selection software can be licensing model, which restricts the number of users who can use the software. In case of customized application, number of users is not a restriction as the company owns the selection software. If you have a large user base, total license cost will easily offset the low cost of packaged applications.
5. You are your own master: Another tail for a packaged software is training and technical support which can be a very costly and time consuming depending on the complexity of program. In case of customized application, your own team member from manufacturing can easily handle these concerns, as they have best knowledge about application.

Conclusion: If you are more of a visionary and looking for a long term IT solution, having a customized selection software will reap you more rewards in long term. And with the right choice of software development partner, you can easily offset the initial time and cost with tons of benefits in the long term.

For any queries, please contact me at durgesh@mechartes.com

An Introduction to Fire Simulation

In real world, it is never acceptable to set fire inside iconic and large commercial buildings or facilities. But if you are working at Mechartés, you will come across buildings & facilities that are set on fire routinely to simulate real and potential fire scenarios on computers to assess their impact and methods of controlling these fires.

The destruction caused by fire in urban establishments is known to human civilization since the time in antiquity when Rome burned for six days continuously. But in modern times, fire engineering practices have reduced causalities & infrastructure damage exponentially. Today, the scope of fire safety is not only limited to extinguishing fire but covers wide variety of disciplines like early fire detection, smoke management, provision for escape facilities; even during building space & layout planning and last but definitely not least, proactive use of dynamic fire modeling to assess risks to life and property and to develop effective fire protection & evacuation strategies for scenarios that cannot be predicted by conventional wisdom.

Even with modern engineering and safety practices, the threat of accidental fire cannot be negated in modern building and industrial infrastructures. This threat brings the necessity of fire modeling to the forefront of large building and industrial facility design & development. With advances made in computer hardware performance and numerical algorithms, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software are routinely used by engineers to come up with ingenious & effective solutions to minimize damage to life and property.

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is one such CFD software actively developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to simulate fire driven fluid flow in situations of varying complexities. The hydrodynamic model, combustion model, thermal radiation model, sprinkler model etc, that are incorporated in FDS are continuously verified and validated by the active community of academic, scientific and professional interest group. This community effort has developed FDS into a robust and reliable software to model and simulate fire & smoke propagation inside buildings and facilities. Apart from dynamic fire modeling, numerical simulation methods are also actively used to simulate evacuation and predict indoor air quality inside buildings. Modern evacuation modeling software have reached the capability to incorporate psychological responses of human beings to fire inside enclosed spaces. With software like CONTAM, important information about exposure of occupants to airborne contaminants can be modeled and simulated for eventual risk assessment.

Modern design practices for fire safety are increasingly adopting numerical simulations to study the behavior of a fire protection system without building it. The results are accurate in general, compared to analytical model, especially when applied in complex situations. These simulations are also helping fire engineers to find unexpected phenomenon, behavior of the system and easily perform “What-If” analyses. Mechartés has been enabling our customers to address the following design & safety concerns:

• What locations inside a building can be described as the “worst” location for a fire incident?
• What is the minimum response time required during evacuation in a given “worst” condition?
• With the proposed fire safety & evacuation methodology, what changes can reduce loss of life and property?
• What is the effectiveness of smoke extraction fans and equipments?

Finally, do take out 5 minutes to view our presentation on how fire simulation services can be used to engineer your buildings and facilities for fire safety.