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Challenge: Maximising the value of the company’s engineering knowledge, avoiding the cost of needless redesign, and eliminating the risk of disastrous errors.

Strategy: Deploy Mathcad Enterprise, enabling engineers to create, capture, protect, share, track and manage calculations.

Results: Rambøll is saving time and money and raising productivity to deliver better services more promptly to happier customers.

The Rambøll Group, headquartered in Copenhagen, is the Nordic region’s leading engineering company, offering full-service consultancy services in infrastructure, telecommunications, building, health, industry, oil/gas, energy, environment, IT and management. Rambøll nearly doubled in size last year to 4,200 employees by acquiring Scandiaconsult, another leading Nordic consulting firm, resulting in a combined company with 70 offices covering the Nordic region and much of the globe. The Rambøll Group has a turnover/revenue of more than 380 million Euros annually and maintains a strong commitment to sustainable development in more than 100 countries. Recent projects include a natural gas pipeline connecting Algeria to Spain and towers for Sweden’s new 3G network.

Although engineering drives many companies’ success, it is Rambøll’s core business. As such, preserving and sharing intellectual capital – including the engineering calculations at the core of every project – are pillars of the company’s success. The company is trying to minimise the practice of managing calculations the traditional way: by hand, on calculators, in spreadsheets, in word processing programs or on standalone mathematical software. Avoiding the traditional approach spares Rambøll from having to manage calculations that end up scattered on desks, personal hard drives, document management systems and in file cabinets. Enterprises that do their engineering that way risk needless redesign and disastrous errors while squandering intellectual capital.

Instead, Rambøll has deployed Mathcad Enterprise, an intranet-based solution for calculation management. Calculation management is the process of applying principles and technologies of information management, combined with old-fashioned housekeeping, to engineering in order to reduce risk, minimise rework, preserve knowledge and assemble reliable audit trials. Mathcad Enterprise, available to 1,000 employees in Rambøll’s 20 Danish offices, lets engineers create, capture, protect, share, track and manage calculations to streamline engineering processes, minimise risk and ultimately accelerate better services to clients. Mathcad Enterprise records calculations as engineers create them, then stores approved calculations in a central repository.

Mathcad Enterprise presents calculations precisely as if they were written down on paper. The software is based on a patented “live document interface” where symbols have meaning when users type their formulas into Mathcad Enterprise’s flexible worksheets. The software automatically calculates and displays results directly in the document. Engineers can include as much text as needed to explain the methods and assumptions that went into the calculations.

“Without Mathcad, calculations would be concealed in unreadable Pascal programming code or hidden behind cells in spreadsheets,” said Bent Feddersen, Rambøll’s chief of expertise development. “That approach wastes time for engineers who could simply reuse a calculation rather than recreating a new one from scratch. It presents problems for quality assurance managers who need to see how calculations are derived, not just the results. Without Mathcad, engineers would also need to recreate calculations and context after the fact to report to building authorities who sometimes double-check our engineering. So Mathcad delivers quality, safety, productivity and savings of time and money.”

Sharing standard calculations simply

Mathcad Enterprise lets Rambøll provide its engineers with standard calculations for their most important engineering functions. These standard calculations are accessible through the Mathcad Repository and Mathcad Application Server. An engineer who needs to calculate the reinforcement requirements for a concrete beam, for example, simply visits the “concrete” home page on the company intranet and accesses the reinforcement calculation. Since the calculation is locked – i.e., protected from unauthorised changes – the engineer can be confident the formula and data outputs are reliable. By using the standard calculation on the Web page, the engineer saves time and contributes to the quick completion of Rambøll projects. Using the standard calculation also eliminates any worry that it needs to be verified and makes quality assurance a breeze. Rather than gathering scattered files, redevising calculations and assembling reports for building authorities, Rambøll can simply print out the calculation, which provides all the information and context regulators need to ensure the integrity of the Rambøll project.

“We save time and money and raise productivity,” said Bent Feddersen,. “Our customers are happy because their projects get done more quickly than they otherwise might. The benefits are clear: when you need a standard formula, it’s there – there for the engineer, there for the quality assurance manager, and there for the regulator to verify.”

Engineers, eager to contribute and showcase their work across the company, enthusiastically offer up new calculations to management as proposed standards. “When an engineer devises a valuable calculation, it’s simple to make it a standard,” said Feddersen. “It’s very clear how data goes into the equation and how the results come out.” The value of the standardised calculation increases with each employee’s engineering experience.

Rambøll is simplifying its use of Mathcad Enterprise by using Mathsoft’s FLEXlm electronic licensing technology to control, monitor and maintain software licence use and distribution from a centralised location, simplifying network administrative tasks.

When a new version is available, Jens-Erik Nielsen, a Rambøll civil engineer, simply notifies colleagues by a Mathcad News group, and they download the new version from the intranet.”The FLEXlm option saves us time installing the program at the user end because installation is controlled from the server,” said Nielsen. “All offices in our company throughout Denmark can access the Mathcad server. All Mathcad updates are installed centrally from our Mathcad server. And we can maximise use of our licenses because they are floating licenses.”

So why did Rambøll select Mathcad in the first place over other mathematics software? One reason is no other product matches its capabilities. Another is that Mathcad has been helping Rambøll engineers work efficiently for nearly two decades. It was 1986 that Nielsen loaded Mathcad 1.5 into his computer drive for the first time. Since then he’s introduced it around the company and taught two levels of courses to help engineers harness the power of Mathcad.

“Within the next year,” Feddersen said, “we’ll extend our implementation to cover all of our countries and geographies and make Mathcad Enterprise the Rambøll standard for more than 2,000 engineers.”

Mathcad is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific plc, Amor Way, Letchworth, Herts. SG6 1ZA; telephone (01462) 480055, fax (01462) 480213, email mathcad@adeptscience.co.uk; or see Adept’s World Wide Web site http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.