Following up on PyConZA 2012‘s great start, PyConZA 2013 is starting tomorrow, in Cape Town! See:

[sourcecode language=”python”]
from datetime import *
if date.today() + timedelta(1) == date(2013,10,3):
print("Woot!")
[/sourcecode]

PyConZA is the largest gathering in South Africa for the community using and developing the open-source programming language, Python.

St James Software is attending, sponsoring, and has the privilege of presenting in various ways – see our PyConZA 2013 page for more information, and come and say hi to us if you’re there… And if you hadn’t planned to go, consider signing up at the last minute!

PS: If you’re not from Cape Town, and you need help finding the venue, it’s almost directly 9,000km South of Budapest, 6900km east of Buenos Aires, or 10,000km west of Perth. You may not get here on time if you drive from Budapest, so consider using public transport (it’s also better for the environment). And yes, you really should visit Cape Town some time!

PyConZA is the largest gathering in South Africa for the community using and developing the open-source programming language, Python.

St James Software attended PyConZA 2013 as a gold sponsor, and some St James people also presented at the conference – a talk on A Real World Example of Caching Gone Wrong, participating in a Panel Discussion on Effective Team Practices in Software Development and an Introductory Tutorial on SQLALchemy, some lightning talks (Ask not what NinjaIDE can do for you…, and a double-speed one combining Rebugging and Downloading financial statements in Python), and a last-minute unplanned talk on exploring musical colour mappings in Python. We also had some Open Spaces discussions on using Python in Windows and hiring in smaller companies, and lots of other interesting ad-hoc chats…

Highlights of the conference (excluding our own talks for the sake of bias!) included the Astronomical Talk by Simon Ratcliffe, Michael Joseph’s pre-talk juggle, Mike Jones on efficient startuping, and the excellent Call to action from Simon de Haan which has already been producing results…

If you met us at PyCon or heard about us and are interested in more, then find out.

I’m reblogging this from my personal blog since people at the PyConZA talk have expressed interest…

At PyConZA 2013, one of the speakers couldn’t come due to a visa issue, so I volunteered to do a talk at the last minute. I was already on a panel discussion earlier, and wanted to listen to Matt’s talk on caching, so I ended with only three-quarters of an hour preparing the talk! But it ended up being a great opportunity as I decided to talk on a fun project I’ve been pottering away at in my spare time over the last few years: an experiment in music maths and colours that I’ve called HarmoniHue.

The basic idea is to try and associate colours with musical notes in such a way that there’s a correspondence between which notes sound similar to / harmonious with each other, and how similar the colours look to each other.

Having a mathematical bent, I’ve ended up investigating things about colour perception theory along the way and coming up with a simple model of harmonic relations – the project will have some updates to the colour model before I’m happy that it’s finished, but since I gave the talk on it I thought I would post my musings on the subject on the web for other people to peruse. Here’s a few images from the project:

This is then applied to musical scores as follows (excuse the misplacement of accidentals):

More information on HarmoniHue including my musings and some sample scores etc…

Early in 2014, I finally got around to turning my Raspberry Pi in to a little XMBC media centre by installing Raspbmc. Which was fun. And also easy.

Perhaps a little too easy: I’m a bit of a nerd, so it didn’t take long to get bored of just playing regular type media off the external hard drive. Part of the reason I have a Raspberry Pi, is for the fun of thinking of what relatively useless thing I might potentially do with it next, and then spending (wasting?) many hours trying to do it.

So, as I was trying to decide what to do next, I considered the fact that I fairly often like to play music on my PC while I’m working. And my sound system is now hooked up to the Raspberry Pi. So it would be most convenient if I could just deliver the sound across my network for Raspbmc to play for me. I was running Ubuntu 13.10 – Saucy Salamander – at the time.

This turned out to be a lot harder than you might imagine. Excellent. (Disclaimer: this was in 2014 – I suppose it might be easier now … if so, I apologise for the convenience).

Option 1: PulseAudio Network Streaming

Ubuntu uses PulseAudio by default for soundy things. So that is where I started my quest. If you pop open paprefs (installing it first, if it’s not there), you will notice that it claims to be able to do things over a network.

Here is a link to the incomprehensible documentation about it:  NetworkSetup. At least, it was incomprehensible when I first read it. It now makes a little bit more sense – but I assume that you are at the start of your journey if you are even reading this – so it probably won’t make much sense to you. Alternatively you could have a read of this blog that claims to make network audio with PulseAudio (somewhat) easy.

However, I decided to abandon this idea:

1. Raspbmc doesn’t install with PulseAudio by default – and you would need it to be running in server mode – and at time of writing the people of the internet seemed to be having some trouble getting them to play together.
2. I wanted something that was more integrated with the XMBC user interface – rather than just something running in parallel.

Option 2: Apple AirPlay

Perhaps, like me, you noticed that paprefs has greyed-out option: “Make discoverable Apple AirTunes sound devices available locally”. That is interesting. Especially since you can set your XMBC up to be a target for Apple AirPlay sources – making it look like a set of AirPlay speakers to any iDevices on your network.  I tested it out with an iPod Touch – and it worked really nicely.

But how to get that option un-greyed-out? The internet suggested the following (might have been nice for paprefs to give me a hint):

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio-module-raop

Now you can try it out:

This will add a new audio device that you can select from your Sound Settings page, with the name of your XMBC. However, if you are like me, you may discover that it it does not work. At all. Except to produce a stream of nasty, choppy, ear-burning noise.

You might even be persistent and try out Pulseaudio-raop2. In which case, if you are like me, you will discover that it, too, does not work, and also crashes quite a lot (which is fair – since it is experimental).

Option 3: Multicast/RTP

I put this in for completeness sake. I didn’t get very far in investigating it as an option. I did a couple of experiments trying to get it to work between two Linux PCs before attempting it with the Raspberry Pi and was getting very choppy sound – so abandoned it and moved on.

Option 4: DLNA/UPnP

My final, and successful(!),  attempt involved DLNA/UPnP media streaming. On the paprefs Network Server tab was another greyed-outed option “Make local sound devices available as DLNA/UPnp Media Server”.

But how to get it un-greyed-out? The internet suggested the following (might have been nice for paprefs to give me a hint):

sudo apt-get install rygel

This too adds a new audio device that you can select:

Now go to your XBMC File Manager and look for a new UPnP device to add as a Source:

Unfortunately, you are likely to find  nothing there.

Hmm.

Turns out that you have two problems:

1. Rygel isn’t running – you need to start it manually from a shell (rygel), or set up init scripts yourself (I didn’t bother);
2. Rygel needs to be configured to actually publish PulseAudio’s stream using ‘GstLaunch‘. Obviously.

To configure Rygel, you’ll need to edit one of its configuration files. Rygel can be configured globally (/etc/rygel.conf) or per-user ($HOME/.config/rygel.conf). I just edited the global one.

Find the GstLaunch section, and add some config like this* (in my default install it was disabled):

[GstLaunch]
enabled=true
launch-items=mypulseaudiosink
mypulseaudiosink-title=Audio on @HOSTNAME@
mypulseaudiosink-mime=audio/flac
mypulseaudiosink-launch=pulsesrc device=upnp.monitor ! flacenc

^{* Courtesy of dpc’s blog.}

That setup gets Rygel to publish a new stream called ‘GstLaunch/Audio on <my pc>’. The stream will be publishing whatever sound is produced by the PulseAudio ‘upnp.monitor’ source – which is what all of those paprefs settings were actually enabling. It will also transcode that audio stream to FLAC, which is lossless, but also compressed enough to work fine over my WiFi without causing trouble – and with only a couple of seconds of buffering required on the other end.

Now you can add the GstLaunch item as a source through your XMBC File Manager:

Now you are able select your PC’s audio as a stream and connect to it:

Finally, your XBMC is playing your PC’s audio through your sound system. Hooray!

St James Software is a growing Kenilworth-based software development company that is part of the j5 International group.

We are seeking a highly motivated Junior System Administrator for our devops team with strong IT skills and the ability to think and communicate clearly, work hard and problem-solve.

The candidate should possess a good tertiary level qualification and knowledge of Linux, networking and FOSS.

For more information please send a motivational letter and CV to jobs@sjsoft.com – see Working Here for more information on other positions

Implementing Virtual Time in Python

Delorean Time Controls

For testing in our product (which does operations management including features like providing shift handovers on industrial plants), we quite often need to simulate a different time, or to move through a period of time fairly rapidly to see what happens when different schedules run etc. It’s possible to do that by altering the system clock, but that has several issues:

• It can have side-effects on the rest of the operating system (so you generally need to do it in a virtual machine)
• It’s hard to make it move through time quickly without confusion resulting

So we created a library called virtualtime (pypi, github) which wraps all the methods in the Python time and datetime libraries to return a simulated time. It works by keeping an offset to the current time, and allows:

• Enabling and disabling virtual time
• Setting the time offset directly
• Setting the current time (by adjusting the offset) – using a time.time()-style constant, a local datetime, or a UTC datetime
• Fast-forwarding through time in small increments, allowing schedulers to indicate when processes that were launched at that time are completed before proceeding
• There’s an API for being notified of changes and for requiring a callback for the fast-forward mentioned above

In order to accomplish this, it needs to patch the time and datetime modules; patching datetime is slightly awkward because you can’t override methods on CPython objects. The library therefore replaces this datetime class with a patchable one, and then has separate methods to enable or disable its adjusted methods. It should therefore be imported as soon as possible when an application starts up (so that other libraries don’t use the unpatched datetime).

We’ve found this useful for manual testing as well as for automated tests that can be kicked off at a virtual time.

python-datetime-tz

We also use a library called python-datetime-tz (github) that enhances Python’s timezone support for datetime objects. The virtualtime library patches this library as well, and we have a fork of the library that supports this alongside some other changes we’ve made

tl;dr: We’ve maintained a fairly awkward version control setup for a long time, but are finally escaping; I’ve been working on a tool to combine our two parallel git repositories together, merging their history. This is also allowing us to clean up some of our source code structure and release some useful open source code, without losing important information (like the source code history).

Current repository setup

Two parallel worlds

When our product was originally produced, we wanted to make a portion of it available as open source. So we created two repositories (at that stage in svn), and the open source one functioned as a framework that our closed source product used. In reality they were really one project, so we generally branched them at the same time. Also, initially we had different branch names, but in practice most of the branches were branched exactly at the same time and so just relabeling branch names can give us corresponding branches.

Because our open source code was a large collection that was really just the bottom half of our product, i t wasn’t in a form anyone else could use or contribute to. So we have decided to rather choose portions of the code that would function effectively as stand-alone libraries, and publish them as open source projects.

svn has remained master

These repositories have subsequently been moved to git, although we retain an svn repository as the master copy because our build scripts still depend on it. We use an ungainly setup where a single central git repository performs commits through git-svn and then fetches the results (since git svn does not produce consistent hashes when doing a fetch). The conversion also loses any real git merge history, so we are missing many of the benefits of git. This was initially envisaged as a temporary measure … four and a half years ago. Lesson: Infrastructure can last longer than you think – don’t get stuck!

Fixing everything

Having grown sick and tired of the above setup, we took the following steps:

1. publish usable parts of our software as viable open source libraries – see for example this blog entry on our virtualtime library; we plan to do more of this over time
2. combine our two repositories into one – see the separate blog entry on splicing git repositories together
3. abandon svn forever – not much more to say about that – the step above also achieves it!

I’ve developed a tool called splice-repos to combine our two parallel git repositories together (I’ve separately described the background of our awkward repository setup). There are a few existing ways to do this (with some interesting discussions on Stack Overflow):

• Just start afresh with a new repository, and commit a fresh copy of the source code for each branch. I hate losing history, so that’s a no-go.
• A single merge point per branch (as used in subtree-merge) – join the two git repositories into a single one (with a standard git process, or something like git-stitch-repo), and then do a merge commit for each branch that joins the two branches together. This gives a single point to work on from into the future, but doesn’t allow you to easily see what the state of the two repositories was at a particular date.

Since we’ve been developing on these two projects in parallel, and building from the current point in time of each project on a branch, they really are one project and should have been in one repository, so I wanted to recreate the git history in such a way that it looked like they were.

I found a Python library called git_fast_filter from the jbosstools-gitmigration project which allows fairly intuitive processing of the formats produced by git-fast-export and git-fast-import. They even had an example script for splicing two repositories together – but using a predetermined order of four commits. So I’ve adapted it to do what I wanted:

• Each branch contains a sequence of commits from both repositories, interleaved in the order they were originally committed
• The process is repeatable, and generates the same hashes for commits when run again
• The process can be done incrementally (so that we can start working on the new repository for some branches, while older branches are still maintained in the old repos)

Since we also need to rename branches etc, I do this in two passes – one to export the repositories, filter them and rename/exclude branches, files etc to prevent conflicts (using a renamer tool that I wrote with git_fast_filter), and then the splice_repos program which interweaves the history of branches together into the new target repository. Handling an incremental import was interesting as it needs to be able to refer to previously spliced commits that come from the original repositories – this is currently handled through a large JSON file which records the state of the merge for reuse. We need incremental import as there’s lots of infrastructure to switch, so we plan to do that gradually (switching one branch at a time to be managed through the new repository, and allowing commits from the other to keep on being imported…)

This is currently all living in the St James Software fork of the jbosstools-gitmigration repository; there’s a pull request to get it merged but I suspect it’s diverging from the maintainer’s purpose and may become a separate tool in its own right…

company_name.replace("sjsoft", "j5int"); print("news")

We are very excited to announce that we have changed our name from St James Software to j5 International! Have a look at our December newsletter to see what else we’ve been up to (new regions, new conferences, new product release coming up…) Happy New Year everyone!

A presentation at our users conference in Japan

The Problem: I mostly use PyCharm for development, and it has great debugging capabilities (including in version 4 the ability to attach to an existing process). However running under the debugger is slower, and I would sometimes find myself resorting to pdb with a import pdb ; pdb.set_trace() invocation, particularly when debugging processes that take a long time to run, with the problems occurring in a later phase of the program.

An alternative is to invoke the graphical debugger, but only at the trace point desired. In PyCharm it seems the easiest way to do this is to run the program normally, but have the remote debugger waiting (on the local machine), and connect to that at the trace point. Any breakpoints set in PyCharm will be honoured, but only after the debugger has connected at the first trace point.

In order to give myself the greatest flexibility, I wrote a little utility called dbghelper (GitHub) that allows you to set a trace point in the code as with pdb, but determine with environment variables which debugger you actually want invoked. I can then debug the same problem in pdb, winpdb, or PyCharm – in standard debug mode or with the remote trick I described above – without having to go and edit the various trace points I’ve created. There’s some brief documentation (easiest to read on GitHub) on the options available; in PyCharm you can set up configurations to easily manage different approaches.

Let me know if anyone else finds this useful or has alternative tricks… and if you use this, whether environment variables work conveniently as the debugger selection mechanism; switching debuggers is not currently supported as I’m trying to minimize imports.

dbghelper running in various modes from PyCharm – pdb, winpdb, remote PyCharm debugging

When receiving spurious arguments to a function call, when the caller knows they should do better, it seems appropriate to log an insult. However, a search on Google reveals that this loglevel is missing from the Python function:

15.7. logging — Logging facility for Python — Python 2.7.10 …
https://docs.python.org/2/library/logging.html
levelname, %(levelname)s, Text logging level for the message (‘DEBUG’, ‘INFO’, ‘WARNING’, ‘ERROR’, ‘CRITICAL’). levelno, %(levelno)s, Numeric logging  …
Missing: insult

Adding insult to injury…

j5 International are delighted to announce our new partnership with Ludan Engineering SRL.  This partnership extends the presence of the j5 brand in Europe, specifically Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

The post Ludan Engineering SRL Become j5 Delivery Partner appeared first on j5 International.

As part of the j5 International Sales and Marketing Conference 2017, a gathering was hosted at the j5 Software South Africa office in Cape Town on Wednesday the 8th of February.  It gave j5 representatives from the Isle of Man, North America, Australia, Middle East, Japan, Singapore and of course South Africa the rare chance to meet face-to-face.

The post Cape Town Office Gathering 2017 appeared first on j5 International.

j5 International, a leading provider of Operations Management Software, have written a Case Study with the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) company – Singapore LNG Corporation (SLNG) – who are using the j5 Management of Change, j5 Permit to Work, j5 Incident Management and j5 Compliance Management applications at their site in Singapore.

The requirements for the SLNG terminal were substantial and diverse.  In a context of demanding deadlines for the launch of the terminal, strict safety regulations and budget constraints, SLNG needed a system to meet operations, process safety and compliance requirements.

SLNG required that these modules would interact seamlessly with each other, and with other systems in order to eliminate human error and the double capture of information.

j5 International in partnership with Accenture Singapore delivered process safety applications to address the strict regulatory and safety requirements of the site

j5 International also delivered custom applications tailored to the expressed needs of SLNG:

• The j5 Ship Unloading System, which manages all the steps in the process of unloading from the time the ship arrives to its departure
• The j5 Send Out Management application, for managing outward deliveries of LNG, including the validation of planned vs. actual quantities shipped

These j5 applications operate seamlessly off a unified, web-based user-interface powered from a single, central server.  The suite can be accessed from any browser that is connected to the site’s LAN.  The j5 system integrates seamlessly with 3rd party software where required, such as IBM Maximo, EC and Babelfish.  The j5 system was delivered in time for the first shipment of LNG to be received, and within budget.

As a delivery partner, j5 International has demonstrated a high level of excellence and commitment to the success of a key LNG client in Singapore.  I would definitely recommend j5 to my next client.

Saqib Khan, Senior Manager, Accenture Singapore

The post SLNG Utilize j5 Process Safety Applications to Address Strict Regulatory and Safety Requirements appeared first on j5 International.

j5 Operations Management Software is the core business and speciality of j5 International.  The j5 framework is a tried and tested, sustainable, flexible, integrated, comprehensive and growing suite of applications, being used globally in a variety of industries.  Here are 10 Reasons Why j5 Is Regarded by Many as the Leading Operations Management Software for Industry:

1. Designed to be Sustainable: Contemporary businesses are looking for sustainable software solutions which evolve with their changing requirements.  For many years, the j5 suite has consistently improved and extended, and customers are able to enjoy smooth transitions to the latest product version.  The j5 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) / IndustraForm®  allows the system to be easily and reliably extended and customized.  The unique built-in revision control enables site changes to be automatically merged with system changes.
2. Tried and Tested: j5 is a mature product which has been developed by engineers with over 30 years of Operations Management Software experience.  The applications are used by over 30,000 users across 6 continents in many languages.  For example, the largest refinery group in Japan relies on j5 for safe, efficient, secure and stable operations.
3. Comprehensive and Web Browser-based: j5 is not a narrow, add-on application.  Rather, it is a comprehensive, integrated Operations Management Software suite that integrates the key areas of Operations, Process Safety, Compliance, Maintenance and Mobility on a single platform.  The interface is simple, intuitive and in a familiar web browser-based environment (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari etc.).  j5 Clients can reduce their reliance on standalone applications and spreadsheets.
4. Tight, Bidirectional and Native Interfaces: Industrial sites deploy diverse systems such as DCS, Data Historians, CMMS, LIMS, ERP and so on; therefore, integration can be a challenge for companies seeking a single, streamlined Operations Management System.  j5 has a growing set of productized connectors and web service APIs, and the j5 team has extensive integration experience.
5. Proven Scalability: j5’s simple client-server architecture is innately scalable to multiple sites.  Single j5 installations can have over 10,000 named j5 users with over 300 persons able to access the j5 database at any one time.  Integrated revision control allows changes in configuration to be rolled out seamlessly, and easily reversed if necessary.
6. Integrated Mobile Extensions: With the high volume of information required to manage industrial plants and the pressures on personnel to perform quickly and efficiently, traditional desk-based systems are fast becoming untenable.  More and more companies are using native Android and iOS j5 Mobile solutions to deliver important information directly to operations staff – using explosion-proof smart devices – without having to return to their desks.  Field operators can collect information during Inspection Rounds and have a remote Operations Logbook.
7. Advanced Views, Dashboards and Reports: With the quantity of information now available on industrial sites, operations personnel rely on instant Displays, Dashboards and Reports to get a functional overview of their work environment.  The j5 system has a variety of visualization tools such as Gantt Time-Line, Calendar and Plot Plan displays.  j5 brings information from all corners of a plant (Control Room, Field, Management, DCS, CMMS etc.) and allows users to have a central reporting system which captures information from these data sources.
8. Flexible Configuration and Workflow: In the ever-changing industrial world, organizations need to adapt their workflows accordingly.  j5 workflow configuration is carried out using the j5 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) / IndustraForm®  so there is no need for programming.  Customers and partners can develop and configure their own workflows within the j5 system without the need to contact the supplier.
9. Intelligent Asset and User Management: In an OMS, it is extremely important to organize assets and personnel properly.  j5 allows organizations to synchronize their areas, assets, equipment and systems easily.  j5 also allows users to be allocated individual or role based read / write / view permissions.  j5 can be integrated with CMMS systems to retrieve equipment and functional location data in order to populate j5’s asset register.  j5 supports HR system integration, LDAP integration, and Single Sign On.
10. Operations Management Software Experts: j5 Operations Management Software is not an add-on, it’s j5 International’s core business and specialty.  30 years’ of industrial software experience underlines j5 International’s desire to excel in Operations and Process Safety management software.  The system stands out because it is tried and tested, sustainable, flexible, integrated, comprehensive and growing.  The j5 Development Team is passionate to ensure that j5 is the global standard in Operations Management software.

The post 10 Reasons Why j5 Is Regarded by Many as the Leading Operations Management Software for Industry appeared first on j5 International.

On any industrial site, there are many Operations processes that need to be managed efficiently.  It is beneficial to manage these procedures consistently on a single IT platform, which can also be extended and customized to the future needs of an organisation.  Here are 10 Common Operations Processes that j5 Excels In:

1. Manual Logging of Operations Events: On any industrial site, there is a continuous stream of operations, maintenance and safety events occurring at all levels and areas that must be recorded as to satisfy internal or external regulatory business processes.  Once logged, this information should be made available across the site from Operations, to Technical, to HSE and so on.  To find this information quickly and efficiently, each entry should be categorized against an area or piece of equipment.
2. Shift to Shift Communication: Many incidents on an industrial site occur after the poor transfer of information from one shift crew to another.  Operations personnel must know the specific state of the process at the point of Shift Handover.  They need information from many data sources, such as real-time data readings, equipment status, safety events, laboratory information, planned maintenance and notes from the past shift.  Management needs to know that business processes implemented for this type of communication have been executed as per the designated procedures, to help reduce the potential of incident or added operational expense.
3. Operations Orders: Often referred to as “Standing Orders“, “Nightly Orders” or “Weekend Orders” these are typically communications with groups of users within a facility or plant where management needs to track and confirm acknowledgement of these instructions. Often these tasks are managed through Whiteboards, Emails, Spreadsheets and therefore do not allow effective workflows to be put in place to manage the distribution and acknowledgement of these important orders.
4. Operations Task Management: Operational tasks, whether regularly scheduled or ad-hoc are typically not related to any specific piece of equipment and therefore are not appropriate for the site maintenance management system. Often these tasks are scheduled and communicated using Email Client Tasks, Emails, Whiteboards or Spreadsheets.  Operations personnel need a tool that will track Work Instructions to ensure that the associated tasks are carried out on time and to the required standard.
5. Follow-up or Corrective Actions: Business processes are seldom 100% defined within an organization.  Therefore, follow-up and corrective actions across a variety of departments and business processes must be managed so that users have a clear view of the actions either assigned to them or ones that they should be interested in. Often these actions can’t be linked back to the business processes which spawned them without unnecessary replication of entry.  The j5 Action Management application allows users to Assign, Define, Manage and Track actions which are related to events within a site.
6. Responding and Reporting on Events Captured by Other Plant Real-time Systems: Industrial systems such as the Process Historian continually gather tens of thousands of data points from plant operations.  When there are individual or groups of process values that constitute a potentially dangerous or expensive problem in the plant, these events should be recorded and followed-up on through conclusion, reporting or both. It is important not to let these events slip through the cracks.  The j5 Event Manager application allows personnel to handle abnormal situations in an efficient and structured way.
7. Operator Rounds: Even with today’s push towards automation, there is still a very high proportion of information – typically greater than 40% – that does not get automatically collected and recorded via the DCS / PLC and Data Historian.  Such information is collected by field operators who make regular Inspection Rounds with clipboards or preferably with mobile devices.  Standardization of plant and equipment inspections can result in decreased safety incidents and increased plant reliability.
8. Incident and Near Miss Management: Operations Managers and staff are empowered to improve safety constantly by vigilantly tracking near misses and incidents. Every near miss or incident should be thoroughly investigated to improve the overall safety on the site. The management and tracking of incidents and near misses through the many departments in an organization is often carried out with a diverse range of spreadsheets, word documents, web applications and so on. Often there is a “home grown solution” in each department which leads to inconsistencies, maintenance issues, missed deadlines, lack of co-ordination, and widespread frustration.
9. Documented Management of Change: The accurate and efficient management and tracking of technical, personnel and procedural changes are vital to ensure a safe, efficient, and productive site. Most sites use a combination of in-house built solutions, spreadsheets, word documents and web applications leading to irregularities, lack of co-ordination and inefficiencies. The lack of an efficient Management of Change system can create a safety hazard for personnel and a state of confusion where change requests are not administered correctly. This results in a lot of unnecessary work (and re-work) within the plant to ensure the changes are understood and carried out correctly.
10. Work Permitting System: The efficient and consistent management of Work Permits in an industrial site is crucial for the smooth running of the operations.  Typically, there are many such permits in operation in the different areas of the site and in various stages of completion. There are also typically different classes of Work Permit, which require different means of managing and certification.  It is essential that all these factors are considered for the safe operation of the site.  Therefore, a centralized Permit to Work system is essential.

The post 10 Common Operations Processes that j5 Excels In appeared first on j5 International.

j5 International, a leading provider of Operations Management Software, have written a Case Study with the Downstream Oil and Gas / Refining company – Wakayama Petroleum Refining – who are using the j5 Operations Logbook, j5 Shift Handover, j5 Work Instructions, j5 Standing Orders, j5 Inspection Rounds and j5 Incident Management applications at their sites in Japan.

The management of Wakayama Petroleum Refining‘s operations involves close collaboration between many teams on the plant including Safety, Maintenance, Management, Planning, Real-Time Control, and Personnel.

Wakayama Petroleum Refining needed a comprehensive Operations Management System for information sharing, automating routine tasks and reports, and ensuring procedures were consistently followed.

The j5 suite operates off a unified user-interface powered from a single, central server. It can be accessed from any browser that is connected to plant’s network.  Users can select between Japanese and English.

j5 makes important shift, inspection round, personnel, safety, maintenance and process information visible to users across the whole refinery.  This fosters greater understanding, coordination, knowledge transfer and communication between teams, and improved decisions.

j5 delivered a professional consulting service that gave us a clear understanding of our current situation and goals.  We selected j5 as the de facto global standard for achieving competitiveness in operations management.  We rely on j5 for logbook,handover, work instructions,standing orders, near misses and mobile inspection rounds.  We would like to extend our use of j5 to other applications in the future.

Nobuyuki Takahashi, Executive Director, Kainan Plant Manager, Wakayama Petroleum Refinery

The post Wakayama Petroleum Refining Rely on j5 for Operations, Safety and Mobile Inspection Rounds Applications appeared first on j5 International.

Idemitsu Kosan Co.,Ltd. – a Downstream Oil and Gas / Refining company in Japan – have implemented j5 Mobile Inspection Rounds at their Aichi Refinery.  The company – headquartered in Tokyo – employs around 10,000 people and is the latest Japanese oil and gas company to use the j5 Operations Management Software platform.

The post Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd. Implement j5 Mobile Inspection Rounds at Aichi Refinery appeared first on j5 International.

The SAP Human Resources (HR) Interface allows j5 Operations Management Software to access information relating to the personnel and organizational hierarchy structure of a business.  This information is related to the users in j5 and can therefore sync and add value.  The j5 SAP HR Integration allows the SAP HR Master Data to also be imported into j5.

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Cosmo Oil Co., Ltd. – a Downstream Oil and Gas / Refining company in Japan – have selected the j5 Operations Logbook, j5 Shift Handover, j5 Work Instructions, j5 Standing Orders and j5 Event Manager applications along with the j5 Aspen InfoPlus.21 (IP.21) Interface for their Chiba, Sakai and Yokkaichi Refineries.  The company – headquartered in Tokyo – imports and exports, refines, stores, and sells crude oil and petroleum products and is the latest Japanese oil and gas company to use the j5 Operations Management Software platform.

The post Cosmo Oil Co., Ltd. Select j5 Operations Management Software for Their Chiba, Sakai and Yokkaichi Refineries appeared first on j5 International.