A couple weeks ago during the plenary session at the Petroleum User Group Conference (PUG) in Houston, the ESRI Energy Team presented an ArcLogistics solution that included mobile and AVL (automatic vehicle location) viewer components.
At the invitation of ESRI, Latitude created the AVL viewer component using ESRI’s new Silverlight API. Although our team is slammed right now, helping build the demo tied in nicely with the work we’re doing with Geocortex Essentials 2.0. I was in the audience, and I thought the ESRI team did a great job in presenting a complete workflow from start to end (we also appreciated them acknowledging our contribution on stage).
The purpose of the demonstration was to illustrate the power of ArcLogistics to optimize the processing of oil field production maintenance orders. The scenario is built using maintenance orders with the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center field data in Wyoming. Maintenance orders are taken from SAP, loaded to ArcLogistics and optimized between a small fleet of contractor vehicles. Diagnostics indicate the expected savings in time and mileage. The routes for each truck are dispatched by wireless to a simulated in-car station that informs the driver of his schedule for the day and provides an advised route generated by ArcLogistics. Through a lightweight mobile app, the contractor indicates that he has completed a job, posts it back to the dispatch desk, and then continues to his next job. Using a Geocortex tracking viewer (via ESRI’s Silverlight API), we then simulated the dispatch center’s view; real-time tracking of multiple fleet vehicles on an interactive map.
I expect that ESRI’s ArcLogistics tied in with a mobile solution has a bright future (and not just in the petroleum industry).
I attended the PUG too, and I was happy to see Geocortex showcased during day one of the conference. I’m not that stoked about ArcLogistics though. It has all the birthmarks of other “soft” products ESRI has spun off from various professional services gigs. IMHO, ESRI’s GIS Portal Toolkit, JTX, Tracking Server, PLTS, Routemap IMS, BusinessMAP, and ArcLogistics all face a bleak future. I predict that each and every one of these so-called products will slowly fade away. Here’s why: either they weren’t designed to become products in the first place, they can’t be easily integrated with core ESRI technology, they were late to market, or they’re poorly supported by ESRI and their international distributors. My $0.25 worth.
Hi Bruce,
Yeah, I think that productized projects often aren’t as solid as products engineered as products from day one because the approach and thinking that goes into project development vs. product engineering is usually quite different.
Extension products or “soft” products may not be as solidly engineered for the long-term as core products, but to me their existence is beneficial given that the alternative is to start from scratch. I think the key for any vendor is to manage expectations around productized projects and market them for what they are.
Where a product falls on the project-product continuum also depends on when the decision was made to productize it. For example, we’ve had projects morph into extension products during the scoping phase and they turned out very well. Although much of the development may happen through our services team, we’ve learned to always get the product team involved (this saves re-engineering later) to ensure the right approach and methodology is in place.
I have varying degrees of familiarity with the ESRI extension products you mention, but my hunch is that some probably show their lineage more than others. I certainly can’t speak to underlying product engineering, I think the capabilities offered by ArcLogistics have broad appeal and application. I also thought the demo for PUG sounded pretty realistic, which is why I signed off on resources to assist.
I agree that whether a product succeeds or withers on the vine has a lot to do with the sales and marketing support behind it. ESRI reps and distributors have lots of core products vying for their attention… vertical extensions are competing for that attention.
Bruce,
We’ve been changing how we build solution products over the last couple of years to address the very issue you bring up. They used to be built ‘on the side’ and you were correct in calling them soft products. Over the last few years we have moved them into main stream and integrated them into our normal processes and teams from everything from software design and architecture to documentation and support.
For us, the solution products allow us to build specific solutions using the core GIS technology, rather than the generic toolbox approach to GIS products we take in our other products. We will always have these solution products to address specific needs in our market. As we have made these into COTS products we have also changed how we build and support them. ArcLogistics is a great example of this change. In its initial version it was a custom application with little shared technology with our other products. However in its new version it is actually built on ArcGIS Engine, ArcGIS Mobile, and Network Analyst and is engineered to work with the rest of the ArcGIS system.
We are committed to our solution products and have seen a huge growth in their use over the last couple of years as we have moved them to be COTS rather than soft products.
Thanks,
Damian Spangrud
ArcGIS Product manager, ESRI
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