MH Pro! Description

MH Pro! is a semi-custom software program for assisting with the takeoff, design and production of drainage structures, usually referred to as manholes, catch basins or curb inlets. Because you have unique business processes for sales, design, manufacturing, shipping and accounting, MH Pro! must be customized for your organization.

This description has two parts. It will first describe the technical process that is used to get a customized version of MH Pro! in place at your company. Second, it will describe how MH Pro! users can quickly generate the needed drawings and Bill-of material reports.

Setting up MH Pro!
There are two different paths that are followed to get MH Pro! implemented for a precast producer: business and technical. See Implementation Steps for the business related activity needed to secure MH Pro! for you company. This description will present the technical and training activities that are needed to get MH Pro! ready to produce for you. Once the decision to participate in an MH Pro! Trial Project is made by a precast company, the following activities occur:

- Initial Data Capture
- Creation of the Trial Project version of MH Pro!
- Training for MH Pro!
- Additional Data Gathering, Modification and Use
- Production Version Acceptance

Initial Data Capture
In the informal discussions that lead to a decision to request an MH Pro! Trial Project FBE gains a small amount of data about how a precaster operates. After the decision is made, a detailed extraction of data is made by using phone interviews and a comprehensive spreadsheet developed for that purpose. Usually the data is about 48” Storm and Sanitary structures (and their individual pieces) and any special features needed for these structures to satisfy the requirements of at least two different jurisdictions the precast company serves. Two standard drawing types are also presented to the precast company for modification suggestions.

Creation of the Trial Project version of MH Pro!
FBE takes the current version of MH Pro! that is being shipped to regular customers and inserts a database made specifically for the precaster that is participating in the Trial Project. This database contains precast pieces, jurisdictional and manufacturing rules and drawings formatted for your precast company.

Once the first version for the Trial Project is delivered, the Initial and Second Training sessions are completed. Usually modifications and additions are requested and these are scheduled for another Trial Project version or for a production version of MH Pro!, depending on the business arrangement that is agreed to by the precaster and FBE.

Training for MH Pro!
Usually the person first trained on the use of MH Pro! is the person who has been providing much of the precast and jurisdictional data that is put into MH Pro! The training has three distinct phases, which are:

Initial Training. Input Screens and Navigation – An initial training session provides the user with enough information to create simple structures, navigate and use about 60% of the screens and create reports. The student user creates 2 to 4 structures in the training session and has about a dozen “home work” structures to work on in preparation for the second training.
Second Training. Technical Details – In this session any questions from the homework structures are answered before the user is lead through a discussion and hands-on training activities to understand how their company’s precast pieces and organizing reference structures provide reasonable candidate stacks for the production structures needed. The main discussion is on the following three topics:
 

- Build Height
- Reference Structures
- Stack Editor

 When the second training is complete the user can create any of the structure types that are in the version of MH Pro! that is installed at their site. The user should be able to do production work at this time on most simple or average structures.

Consultative – A customer application engineer is assigned to a company when the Trial Project is begun. This customer application engineer will help a user with any questions about the training or with any questions related to how to create stacks for unusual or difficult stacking situation. General questions can be answered by most FBE staff but questions about the complete details for a company’s products are usually best answered by the customer application engineer who is familiar with that individual company’s database.

 Additional Data Gathering, Modification and Use
Once the Trial Project version is in place a regular relationship with FBE is established that has the following pattern:

Users request modifications and additions
FBE requests additional information
FBE provides selected modifications and/or additions
Users review and request additional modifications and additions
When the decision is made to move to the production version then the comprehensive spreadsheet is filled out for all of the structure types that the precaster makes and all the known miscellaneous information needed is identified. Each precaster will have a different set of priorities for which information it collects first and for which functionality it wants first in the production build. As additional information is inserted in the database, new versions of MH Pro! are sent to the user and modifications are made from interactions with the new version of MH Pro!

Production Version Acceptance
Once a Production version of MH Pro! is delivered to the precaster; the users test the deliverables that are described in the business agreement. When they agree that MH Pro! is working to their satisfaction they notify FBE and Regular Lease Payments begin.

Sometimes there will be additional deliverables that appear after the business agreement is signed. Most of the time they are added without cost, but some are so large that the precast customer and FBE determine the additional cost to implement them.

Using MH Pro!
MH Pro! must be customized for your business as described in the section above.
As this customization work is being done for the Trial Project, one or more future users of MH Pro! are trained in the basics of MH Pro! utilization.

The following activities describe how MH Pro! is used to quickly get accurate drawings and Bill-of material reports completed.
 

- Job Setup
- Structure Input
- Automatic Stacking
- Report Generation
- Additional Screens

Job Setup
Data entered in the Job and Job Data screen provide the information that is required to appear on the drawings and other reports. Pipe and Fabricated Steel screens help users set-up/select data required for these items at the beginning of work on a job.

Structure Data Input
The data that define the manhole and pipe positions for the structure are entered into the system in this step. This includes structure type and size, pipe type and size, structure location, TOC information, IE information, etc. This activity will be repeated for each structure in the job.

Automatic Stacking
MH Pro! uses intelligent search algorithms to quickly create a list of potential stackings for each structure. Each structure is individually stacked using the customer provided precast library and customer rules that have been added into MH Pro! as part of the customization of the system.

MH Pro! will stack manholes automatically, avoiding pipe-in-joint conditions where possible, based on the company rules for stacking. You may choose to stack a manhole manually or to modify a generated potential stack to meet a specific need for a customer.

Report Generation
MH Pro! generates printed reports. The most common reports are shop drawings and bills of material.

MH Pro! also generates plan and elevation views of the candidate stack on screen in the Plan screen and Elevation screen so that you may review the pieces in a stack before you generate a submittal or shop drawing.

The submittal drawing contains all the information that an over-sight agency or the contractor might want about the structure. Our customers sometimes use the submittal drawings as installation drawings.

The shop drawings are mainly intended for use in the manufacturing area and contain information to create the precast concrete sections that make up the structures. They typically show the plan and elevation views of the structure and contain some bill of material information as well. Shop drawings can be created several different ways. They can contain all the components of a structure or only one component of a structure. They might contain all available plan, elevation, and BOM information or only partial information on selected components and may be presented with one structure per page or with multiple structures per page. BOM reports can be the basis for Quotation, Invoicing and Shipping documents.

Additional Screens
MH Pro! provides several additional screens that are used to help keep you on track as you input, stack and display the structures and their drawings. These screens are described in the Screens Section.