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Philosophy

Simple & User Friendly
  • Our philosophy remains to develop applications that can quickly and easily be adopted by engineers that don't necessarily have much experience in subjects such as SQL query language or Microsoft Windows

  • Today, we have a new generation of specialists managing the pipelines. These experts are using our programs with ease and pleasure - we have new user friendly interfaces providing a compelling variety of options to analyze data in different ways, allowing users to build their own algorithms of risk assessments, and generate complex reports
    • The Importance of the User
  • ATP applications are developed and designed to be intuitive for end-users

  • No one can better define the user requirements for managing pipelines than the user him/herself

  • While developing and implementing a new system, we carefully integrate expert/customer requirements and include the best ideas into PIMSlider

    • ILI Independence
    One of the key selling points for ATP is that we do not have any contractual obligations to any one particular pipeline inspection company.

    A vital feature of PiMSlider is to be able to store, analyse and correlate data from a variety of pipeline inspections carried out over a number of years. Such analysis often generates the question about the quality of previous inspection data. One contractor may provide similar potential measures data of the Cathodic Protection (CP) system for many years, whilst a new contractor may well show a different set of data to that measured by the original contractor.

    Comparing pig-run data is another example of such a task capable within PiMSlider. Not long ago, it would have been quite difficult (and often impossible) to manually compare two sets of ILI (in-line inspection) pig-run data for the same stretch of pipeline, especially when contractors results can contain thousands of defects, sometimes millions.

    But now, using Rehabilitation Expert, this task takes just a matter of seconds. The vast difference between two sets of contractor data does raise the question on the quality of tools (such as smart pigs) as well as raw data analysis for both suppliers.

    As we know, the pipeline inspection industry is well established, with much competition between contractors. The PiMSlider suite of applications help to analyse results objectively and enable any pipeline operator to select the most effective and cost-efficient contractor.

     
    PiMS PHILOSOPHY

    ATP specialists have implemented over fifty corporate Pipeline Integrity Management Systems (PIMS). During these successful years of developing software for the pipeline substance transportation industry, ATP has gained extremely valuable experience and is proud to state the following philosophies and principles adopted in our approach to software development


    KEEPING PiMS AUTONOMOUS

    Our customers often ask us which GIS system PiMS is built/based on. It is commonly thought that GIS is an ideal platform to develop PiMS applications on, however, ATP are of the opinion that the software developer is limited from the very beginning if one specific GIS is chosen. And our reasons?

  • PIMS will use a variety of data from different sources

  • There are so many GIS systems available on the market place. In this industry, the Customer cannot manage his infrastructure without GIS systems, and therefore (more than likely) has at least one GIS system implemented

  • even if the same GIS system is implemented within PiMS as well as the Customer, there is the additional complication of ensuring both parties have the same release version in both implementations


    Provided that the major corporate systems (including PiMSlider) remain stable with a well-documented database, it is easy for us to develop interfaces between these applications for data exchange. Using this principle and the experience we have acquired, ATP can develop connections and interfaces into any kind of GIS (and other third party) system quickly, efficiently, and most importantly, cost-effectively. The result of this approach means we have a reliable, mobile and effective PIMS solution, where all corporate data and software systems communicate without any problems

    • USE ONLY NECESSARY DATA

    Another one of our principles is that we only actually store data we need to work with in the PIMS database - it is not filled with unnecessary junk.

    We are often asked the question of what do we actually store in the database. Customers want to see all data related to a pipeline; however, for the current series of mathematical algorithm embedded in PiMS, and for risk assessment, such data is not always needed.

    Let's take an example - valve data. PiMS needs the exact valve location in order to link ILI data. The Customer may well want to see all information, including the fence colour, the date and content of the last repair. It is quite possible that this extra data will be useful in the future for some business objectives, but there is currently no such algorithm suitable for this data.

    Instead of storing such data we set up a connection with the original system responsible for this data - ERP, in this particular case.

    		  



















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