Web Application: Engineering Process Review Document Mgmt

• Project ID:

  788966

• Project Type:

  Fixed

• Budget:

  $3000-$5000 USD
  

Project Description:

This application has two key features. It’s a user interface (UI) driven application where the user experience is primary. At the same time, the application’s underlying database must be well structured for scalability and speed of use.

The initial development will focus on a process for managing project documents and the approvals/reviews of those documents. The application will keep track of issue generation and resolution. Data will ultimately by mined from this process to give feedback on performance and areas of concern.

To support this process, the website will also need support screen for administration, and splash screen with logon capability, etc…

A spec for the application's design is attached to this posting. Please read carefully.

In selecting a person/group to handle this development, it will be vital for us to see and operate examples of past work. Individuals with strong user interface/user experience backgrounds are encouraged to bid.


The reason for developing this software is to solve is the lack of clarity around the design review process as it relates to engineering for industrial construction. If submitted designs are not reviewed and returned on a timely basis there can be serious financial consequences for an Owner. As an Owner, it is typically a contractual requirement that reviews of all submittals are conducted in less than 21 calendar days. Being late exposes the Owner to significant financial damages, or delay risk.

This set of processes is designed to allow easy and practical management of the comment process related to document review. Further, a well documented process can then be leveraged to data mine the true effectiveness of the Owner in responding to requests and the performance of the Contractor in resubmitting final approval documents after responding to the Owner comments.

Typically, large industrial projects are contracted with a mechanism called Liquidated Damages. Essentially, it’s a fair way to settle the damages associated with being late. Usually, LD’s are significant and is very much an incentive for a Contractor to defer some cost by blaming an Owner for lateness. Sometimes LD’s can even be several million $’s/day, which is a very large incentive for the Contractor to argue that the owner caused delays, and a large incentive for Owner to be certain that it didn’t and doesn’t happen.

Often an Owner hires a third party to perform the design reviews on behalf of the Owner. This role is called the Owner’s Engineer (OE). Since the OE represents the Owner, if the design reviews take longer than the contractually agreed time, the Owner becomes financially exposed. Without being intimately involved daily, it is difficult for an Owner to be fully knowledgeable regarding the OE performance. The objective of this process and website is to solve this problem.

Currently, on one project, the Contractor is making a great deal of noise about being delayed and even put forth statistics that are incorrect with the obvious self-serving objective. Given that the Contractor will possibly (probably) be late, it is even more critical that the exact record of every design review be tracked in retrospect and going forward.

The objective of creating a firm process is two-fold. To make tracking the data exchange easy and a natural part of the employees work at the OE. Further, this approach allows structured data extraction that gives clear feedback as to the track record of the design review performance so course corrections can easily be made prior to any financial exposure.

Additional Project Description:

09/08/2010 at 11:12 EDT:
The samples given so far have been primarily e-commerce. The application that we are trying to contract is a process flow application. This sort of application presents different challenges. Information flow is not as linear as in e-commerce and the presentation of info is more complicated. If you have a site centered around a project management task, I would love to see it. It is necessary for me to be able to log into the site to test drive it. A landing page won't give me a thorough impression.

Skills required:

AJAX, ASP, C# Programming, SQL

Additional Files:

Engineering+Review+Process.JMD.R3.docx