Enji Blog: Engineering Calculations. Then, Now, and the Future.

With every SME and multinational construction corporation focused on going fully digital, technical professionals are encouraged to look for new ways to optimise their operations and work smarter. And while the professions centred around coding can quickly adopt productivity tools created by companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the engineers in construction are left out. Mechanical, Electrical, Public Health, Civil, Structural, and other engineers are stuck using software created decades ago, with limited opportunities to perform basic optimisation tasks.

Yes, most of the engineering could be done with the help of programming languages. However, it is crucial to understand that engineers in construction are not software developers. Some can build simple algorithms and data structures, but it is rather uncommon to have the knowledge and skills to develop and maintain large libraries. And while AI might improve this by a small margin, ask yourself - do you want engineers to use automatically generated code to build the infrastructure surrounding you? The code, that they are not in absolute control of due to the lack of fundamental computer science knowledge. Will you feel safe?

Later blogs will explain why AI/ML is not among the top three technologies that will radically transform construction. But for now, let's focus on calculations.

Those who are fans of tech products, just as much as the Enjicalc team, could easily guess that there is a need for some low-code solution to cover engineer's needs. That is so obvious that in a far 1986 Mathsoft team released their WYSIWYG software for interactive programming called Mathcad, which supported mathematical notation.

If you ask professionals who have spent 20+ years in the construction, Mathcad has been considered an industry standard for quite some time. However, our comprehensive surveys and experience show that in 2024, the software is so outdated that teams on ongoing projects would prefer any other solution but Mathcad. Furthermore, when you talk to graduates and junior engineers, it forms an impression that Mathcad almost does not exist. While this is certainly a strong statement, there is evidence that those who acquired Mathcad for 63 million US dollars also have a sense of disconnect from this software.

After the 2006 acquisition, PTC financial reports included at least one paragraph citing Mathcad and its leading position as a tool for engineering calculations. However, starting in 2019, this software and its market performance were not mentioned — not one word.

Microsoft Excel the Saviour

Despite Mathcad's declining popularity, engineers did not stop working countless hours with calculations. Today, they rely on coded calculations within their FEA software and often create in-house calculations to address gaps in pre-built design and analysis tools. And most importantly, engineers rewrite calculations to gain confidence in the output of coded design algorithms, which act as black boxes because they are not exposed to the end users.

Engineers in construction, and in fact, engineers in any industry, bear legal and contractual responsibility for their design and must exercise reasonable skill and care. This means that they cannot blindly trust a “black box”. It is their duty to check the outputs of any software to ensure they align with their intuition and/or other analytical models. This underscores the need for the inner workings of the tools to be transparent and as easily verifiable as possible.

But if Mathcad is not an option for writing new calculations, what are the alternatives? There are various commercial software, such as Maple Flow, Wolfram Mathematica, and Matlab. There are also attempts to replicate the Mathcad user experience in a browser, like Blockpad, and open-source alternatives like Calcpad, SageMath, Scilab, EngineeringPaper.xyz and SMath Studio. However, engineers needed something low-cost, with a very low entry barrier and something that could be distributed among other engineers without significant friction. With these requirements, there is only one offer - Microsoft Excel. And, from our research and surveys, it absolutely dominates this niche.

However, as a team with extensive experience working in academia and the construction industry, we believe that Microsoft Excel is far from being the right tool. While Excel is excellent at providing features to work with small to medium-sized data tables, it is inadequate to store hundreds of formulas and constants. The Excel formulas are not represented by text-based variables, not even mentioning mathematical notation-based variables. Excel formulas are represented by cell location (A303, CH3, AB12), making reviewing jobs unnecessarily time-consuming. Furthermore, one cannot develop modular libraries with the help of Excel, and it is impossible to use Excel spreadsheets outside of Excel itself, which makes interoperability equal to zero.

Interoperability is a must-have as it opens up opportunities to build optimisation pipelines and execute design/analysis a hundredfold quicker.

Enjicalc - Interactive Programming Language for the web

After dozens of prototypes and experiments, we came up with a unique software architecture that allowed us to develop the first web-based interactive programming language powered by mathematical notation. Our goal is to get Enjicalc as close as possible to a definition of a programming language while keeping it user-friendly. Together with Netflix-like pricing, we will solve the problems of construction professionals and close the questions of software choice for construction businesses.

Enjicalc draws inspiration from leading productivity tools for software developers, aiming to bring a fresh and collaborative experience to construction engineers. Our platform enables engineers to work together in a GitHub-like manner, with features like branching, pull requests and reviews. It also empowers engineers to create calculations that can be abstracted into global modules, fostering reusability within our platform or by external software developers via the REST API. This is interoperability at its best.

One aspect of Enjicalc that we are particularly proud of is its peak readability. Readability not only streamlines workflows and increases the profit margin of executing a contract but also makes the processes straightforward and less mentally taxing. Our solution automatically substitutes a user-defined formula with values, enabling engineers to review calculations from top to bottom, left to right, like an open book. Formula duplicates and flexibility of mathematical variable names create a literal pinnacle of formula review speed. There is nothing else that can be done to improve it.

To summarise, we envision Enjicalc as a beacon of innovation, aiming to address the pain points left by outdated software. Our target market is 100% engineers worldwide, and we are committed to attracting them through our free tier and the high value proposition of paid subscriptions. We also firmly believe that the construction productivity tools market must be radically re-segmented. With Enjicalc, we set a start for a more reactive approach to producing and updating deliverables to improve the efficiency of materials and logistics.

There will be no productivity breakthrough until we store drawings and other deliverables in PDFs and communicate them via email or a project management platform.