
Ask HN: How is your industry stuck in the past (no digital, all on paper etc.)? - akudha
Suppose you want to build a product for your industry, to automate some task (or part of a task) or digitize some task etc. What industry you are in and how is it stuck in the past, and why?<p>Think of it as an idea generation exercise for software products
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airbreather
You would be surprised, but electrical and control systems engineering is
still struggling into the digital age. Many very large projects are still
effectively designed the same way they were when it was ink on velum, just now
it is inkjet dots on a page.

Data based engineering is the way of the future, and packages exit that allow
substantially less manpower and greater accuracy (and I mean real packages,
not Intools), but there is so much vested interest in the EPCM type model and
the traditional way of doing things.

Change is coming slowly, but not because of lack of software tools and
methodologies, just lack of boldness and vision by those that don't want to be
accountable for a stuff-up on a multi-billion dollar job.

I work for consultants that specialise in trying to do as much data based type
engineering as possible, but still for about half the clients we end up
translating the end results from a database into .dwg files, at significant
extra cost.

One client is forward thinking, we don't deliver drawings, or any paper, they
get a database as the final deliverable. One specialist engineer produces the
entire electrical design for a major mining hub on their own, replacing up to
20 traditional designers and drafts people.

Just a brief story to highlight how change isn't always about the means,
sometimes it is as much about the will.

