Catenary BOM and Quotation application

Client: Catenary

Our role: DesignDevelopment & Technology

Timeframe:  released in September 2010

Our client's problem...

Catenary BVBA is a consulting company specialised in the Design, Supervising, Commissioning, Auditing & Testing of the Overhead Catenary System (OCS) for high speed train infrastructure. As many governments/countries today are in the phase of public tendering (Malesie, Brasil, San Fransisco, Florida, China, Middle East countries), it is important for the participating engineering companies to have an as detailed as possible view and understanding of the catenary systems and materials that will be used. The better understanding of the material used, the more accurate the financial proposal will be. Preliminary designs for tenders are done on an AutoCad or in a MicroStation environment.

The BOM application

We developed, on top of the standard design environments, specific modules to calculate the BOQ = Bill Of Quantity. The trajectory is defined by a limited number of input parameters like cantilever system in use, #km single track, #km double track, upper obstacles country specific parameters, .... Once the system is configured, the module calculates the material needed to construct the OCS, together with the design budget that is required to complete the design of the railway.

Apart from this calculator, the designers from Catenary can select specific parts to calculate the budget for a specific or more restrictive Bill of Materials. These different modules are all based on a comprehensive and extensible data model we built. Design supervisors are given specific rights to manage the data model. They can for example adapt the modules by replacing old parts by newer ones, change prices, design time, update pictures... All functionality is incorporated in a single user interface, where sections are only visible if the user is authorized to access them.

Added value

Some key advantages of the automated BoM calculator:

For Catenary:

• The application includes a design parts manager. Drawings, pictures and documentation can be linked together with a single reference. An efficient filter function gives a comparison of selected parts.
• Quotation time is seriously reduced. If for any reason the catenary type chosen for a project must be changed, it takes only 2 clicks to generate another bill of material with appropriate time and price estimation.

For the customers of Catenary: 

• The customer service of Catenary can now answer faster to quotation demands and all quotations will get the exactly same format, regardless of the contact person.
• Offers for different Catenary types can be tied together and they are easier to compare.

Further extensions

In the future, the BoM and quotation modules will be included in a global track lifecycle management tool. From the quotation, the designers will be able to generate a railroad track model, with  different browsing possibilities. The track will also be attached a geo tag to locate it. On a global level, it will be possible for designers to select a specific part and check where this part is in use on one or several tracks. The complete tool will also be able to track and plan maintenance and replacement operations.

We sat together with our client who defined a complete scope for where he wanted this project to go. The complete wish list is much bigger than what our client is using at this moment but that has been a choice that we made together with our client.

The end-goal is to get an application which can do much more than simply generate the BOM. But because the generation of the BOM already solved some of our customers business needs, we decided to release directly after phase1. So in a short period of time our client was able to see some results as well as use them to already make his life a bit more pleasant. To be continued…

Added value

As we had already mentioned, the generation of the BOM is still a process that asks for a lot of human intervention. This means money and time has to be spent. The idea is that our client can save a lot in that domain as soon as he uses the application.

By using the application directly after the first release, our client already has some benefits after a minimum of investment.

Project Size: small

Release Year: 2010

Category: Web Application & Web Site

Technologies: AJAX HTML/CSS Java/J2EE