JEMS: Jōb Engineering Management System
About Jōb Industrial Services, Inc.
Jōb Industrial Services is a multidisciplined engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company. In addition to traditional engineering disciplines of process, piping/mechanical, civil/structural, electrical & instrumentation, Jōb also provides automation engineering and PLC fabrication services to our clients across the country. With capabilities ranging from front end design through commissioning and startup, our team executes both brownfield and greenfield projects in addition to providing maintenance and turnaround support. Our niche, expert offerings cover typically small to medium size projects as we are equipped with the infrastructure and experience to effectively manage from start to success.
Company Awards:
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2019 Associated General Contractors of Utah Energy/Industrial Project of the Year Award
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Ben Rand: Top Speaker list at Autodesk University in 2017, 2018
The Application: JEMS: Jōb Engineering Management System
JEMS is a data platform used internally to facilitate the exchange of data amongst our various engineering disciplines. Key goals of the system include maintaining, linking and reporting critical project data across disciplines, while eliminating duplicative data entry. At the same time, JEMS also drives and automates many of our work processes, helping our employees adhere to company standards to deliver consistent, high quality deliverables to our clients.
Describe Your Biggest Development Obstacle
When I joined Jōb Industrial Services in 2013, I had already built a similar system at a previous company using WinForms, so I knew roughly where I needed to go, but I wanted to learn something new, and decided to use WPF and MVVM for the new project. The learning curve for WPF/ MVVM was steeper than I imagined, especially as a solo developer. But I'd been using DevExpress controls for WinForms for several years, so that part was familiar and easy to work with. And DevExpress has put a lot of effort into their MVVM framework which has helped immensely.
Describe Why You Chose DevExpress
Why did I choose DevExpress? Easy: terrific technical support. When I did my first trial of DevExpress back in 2007 or 2008, I had a question about how to do something and posted a question on the support site. I wasn't expecting much of an answer since I wasn't a licensed user yet. Much to my surprise, I got a detailed answer very quickly. And that commitment to excellent technical support has never wavered over the 13+ years I've been a customer. Of course, DevExpress makes great tools that are easy to use and very powerful, which allows me to concentrate on providing new features and the best possible experience for my users. New releases of DevExpress products aren't just simple version number changes (like other software we use!)—they stay right on top of new technologies and frameworks across a variety of stacks, and are constantly introducing new controls, while also meaningfully improving their existing tools.
DevExpress Products Used
DevExpress Universal: WPF, Reporting, Business Intelligence Dashboard, Office File API, CodeRush.
Describe Your Experience with DevExpress Products
From a coding standpoint, CodeRush saves me a ton of time, and I only use a fraction of its capabilities. The refactoring tools are awesome, allowing me to easily reconsider and change my code. The UI controls are comprehensive, extensive, and constantly improved. I never have to worry about DevExpress being out of step with emerging technology. I frequently come up with new features to add just by looking through the Demo Center and finding something I hadn't considered previously.
Describe a Specific Project Challenge You Addressed with DevExpress Tools
In our industry, vendors send us a lot of documentation regarding the capabilities and design parameters of the instruments and equipment we work with. Logging this documentation, including return trips to the vendor for changes and back, is a major effort. Even more importantly, cross-referencing each document with the specific items it pertains to is challenging—especially where any given project can have several hundred vendor documents, several hundred instruments and several hundred pieces of equipment. In programming terms, these are many-to-many relationships: each document can be linked to many items and each item can be linked to many documents. But coming up with an easy-to-use user interface for this was difficult.
Originally, engineers had to work with each document one at a time, opening a view with a list of possible items to link to which they could then select. But working document by document was tedious. To solve this, I came up with a ViewModel based on Expando objects to represent the documents (rows) and items (columns) to be cross-referenced. Binding this to a DevExpress DataGrid was the easy part, and now the engineers have a simple check box grid interface to accomplish this task.
About Ben Rand, Director IT
The path to my career in programming started from an unlikely place: a degree in English. I taught one year of 6th and 7th grade and realized that my interests were somewhere outside classroom management. While working for an architect, I taught myself LISP to automate repetitive drafting processes in AutoCAD and was hooked. From there, I moved to VBA, VB6, and VB.Net and eventually to C#, which is my primary language these days. I have dabbled in several other languages including Java, Ruby, Python and am currently learning React. Along the way, I also authored or co-authored books on Microsoft Excel and several other technical topics (so my English degree wasn’t completely wasted!). I also taught professional courses on Autodesk products including Autocad, 3D Studio (3DS Max these days) and VBA for Autocad (so my teaching degree also wasn’t completely wasted!), and have presented at Autodesk University for the past several years, where I was honored to be selected twice to the Top Speaker list. I have been married for 27 years and have four children. My hobbies include reading, tennis, pickleball, volleyball and chess.
Company Name: Jōb Industrial Services, Inc.
App Name: Jōb Engineering Management System
Company Website: www.jobindustrial.com
DevExpress Products Used:
