What’s happening at our Serbian office?

Activities in Serbia
Developers from Serbia had a noticeable part in building the Infrakit brand since the early beginnings of the company. We will fill this blog post with a triptych of subjects regarding our Belgrade office.

Marketing

Marketing and educational activities in Serbia took their peak in the year of 2016. The Finnish embassy was kind enough to let us make use of the residence space to gather the creme of the Serbian civil engineering community. Invitations were sent out and in our attendance we had ministers of the state, representatives of the domestic and foreign construction companies, surveyors, members of the chamber of engineers, academics. The topic was presentation of the future technologies in the Civil Engineering, which, as you know, Infrakit is a forerunner in. We wish to thank His Excellency Mr. Pertti Ikonen and his team one more time, and also Mr. Nenad Tepavac who was our sales manager in that period. Read about the event from here.

2nd International Civil Engineering Congress

One of the guest lecturers on our February event at the Embassy was our important associate, professor Dr. Gavran from the Construction faculty in Belgrade. His fame and experience in the field is topped only by GMC AutoCAD add-on that he developed, which is used in designing phase of many important construction projects in many countries. The second event took place after we were honoured by invitation from professor Gavran to present Infrakit software to the top students in a class at the University.

JavaScript Meetup

The last major event was our participation at the 2nd International Civil Engineering Congress at the Crown Plaza hotel in Belgrade. The event was opened by Serbian Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure. Our presentation, which was worth certain amount of academic points, involved case study about one of the pioneering Infrakit projects in Finland and is co-authored by our CEO Mr. Teemu Kivimäki.

PUT Plus

In other news, we had private meetings with many domestic construction, quality control and related companies (such as state railways), and published a few articles like those in the Adriatic area Civil Engineering Almanac named Put Plus. We concluded that the digital awareness in this Serbian sector is just not yet ready for such innovations, but we will be ready when that happens. DCS Finland efforts are currently focused on the more developed markets where the sales and marketing teams are doing a wonderful job in broadening our user base. However, we became a talk of the town across the industry and if any technological or scientific problem occurs in the future work of Infrakit, we will certainly have exceptional help from our friends in Serbia.

IT Scene

Serbia has been country of choice for many foreign IT companies for years. Its proven educational system in natural sciences field and affordable services make a ratio which attracts many IT companies for outsourcing, offshoring or near-shoring, you name it, kind of business model. For instance, Belgrade is one of few cities where Microsoft found home to it’s Development Center offices. The other proud example is the High School of Mathematics, which is renowned worldwide for it’s students who are seldom returning from the Mathematical Olympiad without golden medals. The truth is that many students are leaving the country, but also many are staying because of the opportunities in the IT field.

3D visualization

Let us not ignore the domestic companies which left huge impact on the IT scene. Top Eleven, the manager game that came out of Nordeus is played by million of players on a daily basis. Devana technologies, which produced the most popular WordPress managing platform, was acquired by worlds biggest Internet domain name registrar company GoDaddy a couple of months ago, thus making that company’s debut in Europe.

In the past months the government has noticed the great potential of the IT sector. The state promised a plan of benefits for the IT companies and startups, which should only lead to more favourable connection between the offices. Also, there is more than one NGO which is involved in the scene in very positive way, like hosting free or paid events and lectures.

Recruitment

That leads us to the recruitment of new software engineers. Similar to Finland, the demand for the coders has skyrocketed and the typical strategy of the IT companies is to offer internships and hunt pre- or post-graduate students. It has never been the better time to be a software engineer student in a business environment which didn’t exist ten or more years ago. Infrakit is lucky to have great coders with a degree in its Serbian office, and this small team already have had the pleasure to welcome in its rows some of the now very successful IT individuals. Aleksandra is now the producer of the Mad Head Games, Milan has his own 50+ people IT software engineering outsourcing company, and David who excelled 3D module to the current standard in his freshman year, got an internship at Microsoft.

The author of this blog post, Ognjen Popović, is also the contributing author to the oldest Serbian computer magazine, which got its fame during the time of Yugoslavia. He is often attending domestic and international IT events, like the Voxxed days which was held in the Belgrade last year, and is also a member of jury in a competition held by Computer Science Faculty in Serbia, which happens to be the place where most of our coders came from.

Lastly, let us mention the growing culture of IT meetups (entrepreneurs, developers, startups), where people from across the industry gather to promenade, share knowledge and network together. I think it is safe to conclude that we are in the right place to offer future work positions both for internships and senior coders as our company expands. Of course, everything in coordination with the band of coders come from the home offices in Finland.

The author of the article is currently mainly developing Infrakit App for iOS Devices, which might be a good topic for blog post.

Why Infrakit Apps?

What would it mean to your infra-projects if the staff, machinery and software all shared a mutual, easy-to-use map-based cloud platform? You would always have access to up-to-date situational information. You could utilize the information no matter if you’re working on your laptop or Android device. You could also easily add to the project information with geo-and design-referenced images, measurements, documents and comments.

Digitization and cloud services have arrived to all infra construction sites no matter the size of the organization, processes they use, mobile device/survey equipment/machine control system preferences and that is because of Infrakit. Infrakit is a great example of using a cloud service to utilize digital information in a very traditional industry.

Infrakit improves collaboration by facilitating on a map project’s all relevant information on your PC browser or mobile device. Our cloud manages to read and interpret all machine control system manufacturers’ designs and measurements. Infrakit App was created for worksite use. You can view design maps and models uploaded to Infrakit easily on your Android device (coming soon for iOS!), and you will get real-time as-built measurement data on your smartphone or tablet. You can also add comments or take pictures to rise to the next level in data sharing and worksite communication efficiency!

Using their Android tablets all survey personnel, work machine drivers and foremen utilize and create information, all of which is shown centralized on a map view and in real-time. In addition to the Infrakit web service, the App is a tool for foremen and surveyors, but it’s also a handy tool for anyone who wants to be on top of the latest project information and be able to access real-time design- and measurement data.

You can read more from here and here.

We also have great App for Truck Tracking, read more about that here.

For more information and login information, please ask Pasi Joensuu (Pasi.joensuu@infrakit.com)

Infrakit News from the Netherlands!

Dear readers,

There is a lot going on in Netherlands at the moment. First of all, we have an agreement with a company called Digital Infra Solutions who will be our reseller and service provider. This company has experienced people from different aspects in the infra market and can help you very well with all issues related to digital infra-construction.

With the great help of Digital Infra Solutions new projects will be using Infrakit and the first one is Combinatie Herepoort in Groningen. This is a 4-year project where a ring road will be transformed in a high way ring road. The existing road is a cause of traffic congestion, because there is a lot of traffic and most of it is on same level, so there is a lot of traffic controlled by traffic lights. This road is on +6m level.

The new road is going to be on -6m level and all local traffic will stay on +6m level. This way traffic just passing the city will not be disturbed anymore by the local traffic and vice versa. It is a 400 million Euro project created by 4 local construction companies (Roelofs Wegenbouw BV, Jansma Drachten BV, Koninklijke Sjouke Dijkstra BV and Oosterhof Holman Infra BV) and 2 German companies through their Dutch subsidiaries (Max Bögl Nederland BV and Züblin Nederland BV).

Fig. 1: Impression of new situation of one part of the project

This project has started already and will continue for the next 4 years! Wishing them a successful project and implementation of Infrakit Cloud Service!

The other good news is that one of the biggest companies in infra-construction in Netherlands has become a customer! After using Infrakit at a pilot project and seeing the great results using Infrakit they have decided that they will use Infrakit for all relevant projects! We welcome company Heijmans N.V. as a customer. Heijmans is a stock listed company and has very nice projects coming up and going on. One of the new project that will start this month is the so called 3Angle project, which will be done in combination with 3i Infrastructure and Fluor. This is a project where 2 highways will be widened from 2×3 to 2×4 lanes and from 2×2 to 2×3 lanes. Have a look at this.

Fig. 2: Impression of a new connection of local roads with the expanded highway.

Of course, nature will get a lot of attention as well. Look at this eco tunnel!

Fig. 3: Impression of the Eco tunnel

We wish Heijmans and the combination partners a successful project and a successful implementation of our Infrakit Cloud Service!

One of the great advantages of using Infrakit in these kind of projects is that there is always a mixed fleet of machine control brands on the project. Infrakit can handle them all!

Do you want to know more? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we will demonstrate you how!

Kind Regards,

Jan van den Brandt
Infrakit B.V.
T: +31 655735500

Verlengde Maanderweg 100
6713 LL Ede
Netherlands

Release Notes – Version 3.2.2-4 & Version 3.2.2-5

Release Notes – Version 3.2.2-5
Bug
[IN-388] – Admin Organizations page list headers are in wrong order
[IN-389] – mobile.infrakit.com sometimes uses Infrakit Office active project
[IN-391] – Separate files can have same versionGroup if multiple people upload files at same time

Release Notes – Version 3.2.2-4
Bug
[IN-354] – DWG to DXF converter might get stuck
[IN-356] – Fix the case where vehicle vendor id might be 0
[IN-359] – Show vehicle station when vehicle is outside the main alignment
[IN-367] – Inframodel pipe height is wrong if pipe elevType=”crown level”
[IN-371] – Point source filename is not always shown
[IN-373] – Sitelink integration – Fix file sync when only some of the vehicles in a project have new models

Task
[IN-246] – Draw long-section page
[IN-351] – Show logpoint pointname in logpoints page
[IN-357] – Change ConX integration url to conx.leica-geosystems.com
[IN-358] – Calculate file size and md5 when receiving the file from user
[IN-361] – Clicking a notification pans and zooms to the area on map where the notification happened
[IN-368] – Translate Infrakit to Estonian
[IN-369] – Add Swedish geoid swen08 rh70
[IN-370] – Also create directories without any files when uploading zip file
[IN-374] – Vehicles page – Add link to admin edit vehicle if user is admin

Release Notes: Infrakit Version 3.2.1

Infrakit Office cross section pan & zoom is now live. Also bugs fixed.

Bug

[IN-276] – New maps page – Free cross section tool should always be available
[IN-292] – Integration logins sometimes not visible in the admin edit project page
[IN-298] – Free cross section draw view is limited by the station location in y-direction sometimes resulting in an empty cross section canvas.
[IN-300] – Cross section screen models, logpoints and pipes check boxes are not saved properly
[IN-301] – Web cross section logpoint checkboxes are horizontally miss aligned with mouse click
[IN-318] – When opening cross section graph, pan graphs in y-direction so that alignment/station is always visible.
[IN-320] – Approval edit does not work
[IN-321] – Project code list not initialized on map initialize
[IN-322] – Fix Icon Telematics logpoint reference model matching
Task

[IN-242] – Web cross section pan & zoom
[IN-256] – Cross section show/hide pipes
[IN-284] – Remove alignment id requirement from free cross section
[IN-312] – Change cross section graphs canvas size to scale with the window size.
[IN-313] – Add model’s file name to graphs, pipes and logpoints hower tool tips in cross section view

Previous release notes: Version 3.2.0 & new map page