It’s been six years since a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch in New Zealand and the city is still recovering.
The skyline is dotted with cranes and construction sites have spread to across the city.
The earthquake damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings and the city will take years to rebuild completely.
As a result, the engineering community is looking for any tools that help them work faster.
Many parts of Christchurch are still construction sites. Source: SBS
Maxim Millen is the founder and managing director of a software business called Pensolve, which is designed to fast-track engineering projects.
“It's software for engineers and it's probably best described as Google translate for engineering spreadsheets.”
Complicated data spreadsheets are collated and simplified to fast-track construction projects and most importantly, to eliminate errors.
Mr Millen points out that during the process of constructing a building, there are endless instances where things can go wrong.
Even an error in a single bolt, can compromise an entire building.
“There are thousands of [bolts], and so they [engineers] need to pretty much review every single one,” Mr Millen said.
“The whole lot is designed by an engineer so that'll all go through a spreadsheet, all come out through these calculations.”
One mistake in those calculations can lead to significant financial losses for companies.
“There would be huge costs, especially once the building is finished, you've got a real problem,” Mr Millen said.
Consistency of data, calculations, and spreadsheets throughout a project is a major concern for engineering companies and that’s where Pensolve comes in.
“By making that communication easier, then you can be more efficient so you can have faster reviews internally for engineering firms but you also get faster building consents, so you can go through that whole design process quicker,” he said.
Maxim Millen saw a gap in the market for simplifying engineering projects. Source: SBS
“The whole engineering community is looking at Christchurch and all the techniques they're using to rebuild the city,” he said.
Mr Millen saw a gap in the market for this sort of product and jumped at the opportunity.
After 18 months of development and beta tests, the 28-year old engineer created Pensolve.
“The biggest thing is is there a market need and can you get to that market? Can you actually sell this software?”
Today he has customers throughout New Zealand and Australia, but has also expanded to places like South Africa.
He says one of the most important things is getting feedback from his customers to improve his product.
“I try to maintain as much contact with customers and people that are using to find out what's not working and we'll refine those things and update it every week.”
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