Engineering Express is what's missing

If you don't know already, I'm a graduate of Civil Engineering from Florida Atlantic University and I currently work at a firm called Engineering Express. Seriously, I am amazed by the way this engineering firm does things. The philosophy goes like this: Starbucks revolutionized coffee because they figured out a way to do mass production and assembly-line their product. Home Depot did the same. These industries realized that there are unchanging “recipes” that can be done correctly once, then sold over and over again. That’s what Engineering Express is trying to do for structural engineering (we do hurricane resistant windows and doors, shutters, canopies, building columns and walls, etc.). So now, for every project, the theory is to never have to calculate or design the same thing twice. We log everything into our database that’s run through SQL (website all made from scratch with Coldfusion to help), track the project so the client can see how we’re progressing or when we’ll be finished, and all the design and number crunching is done almost automatically. Of course we still have to review the numbers for safety, but our calculations give us a great way to check everything once, and usually get consistent and correct results every time.

What’s even cooler is that we use a program which provides a flashy GUI interface so clients can use dials and switches to input their specific construction, and instantly receive a “Yes, approved for use” or “Not OK! Modify design!” message. The software extracts all data from a base calculation file, and we have a patent pending for use of the technology in engineering. Check out an example here: Pressure calculator. I’ve worked on a few of my own as well.

My boss had me read the book “What would Google Do?” about how Google turned the standard “get capital, get a storefront, market to the masses, sell your standard product” into a very fantastic and revolutionary idea of “do one thing best and link to the rest, market to the niches, give the people control and they will use it, make money by giving away almost everything for free to shut out your competitor, then charge small fees (through advertising) to millions of webpages”. CHA-CHING. I’m over halfway done with the book, but already I see the real power and future of blogs, merging social communities, upside-down business mindsets like why Google made it so big and Yahoo didn’t. I’d like to introduce the concept of distributed knowledge, elegant organization, and just how profound this mindset can have on our company. The book is fascinating, talking about how cable companies should have started the Vonage-type long distance service, newspapers should have started their own craigslist, and how NY Times Online took too long to figure out that if you make people pay for access, they’ll go somewhere else. In other words, all of those companies could have made much more money if they would have done what their online competitors did—which is give the people what they want at the best possible price, or for free if you can.

How does that apply to me? Well, I’m trying to take the reins and learn the SQL and Cold Fusion programming behind our website. The plan is to create a huge platform to revolutionize engineering by providing a one-size-fits-all web service which gives away these free calculators (paid by ads), makes a way to simplify the construction industry, social networking, news, blogs, forums, Wikipedia, the whole thing. Last week my boss taught me how to provide an online search of our database and SQL tables and views and return results with tabs and a nice layout. We’ve already got the Wikipedia, blogs, forums, and news; but we haven’t cracked the code on how to give so much away for free and still ensure revenue.

Anyway, I went off on a long tangent here, but I want to get a feel for these ideas. Does anyone see these changes coming as well? Like a huge shift in the way commerce and services are provided thanks to Web 2.0? To me, all these ideas are all computerizable and can for the most part be handled by formulas and rules. Who better than Engineering Express to invent them? What better time than now to put the ideas into action?