If a designer wants to look at a model, he wants to look at it immediately. He doesn't want to wait half an hour to get the download. So Jacobs is turning to streaming media to deliver the data over its intranet to internal project collaborators, and to clients via a dedicated connection to extranet servers that are updated every evening. The technology has obvious speed advantages over snail mail and over FTP, which requires that a multimegabyte, multimedia file be sent and downloaded in a single, large chunk before it can be viewed. Jacobs now stores 100-MB models on centralized servers.
Users can view the file as the data is sent across the network.
Jacobs has deployed the technology in about 10 offices and is making it more widely available. Such improvements can fall to the bottom line. For instance, by speeding the delivery of engineering models for collaboration, Jacobs gets reviews and feedback faster, and eliminates a lot of costly reengineering. Streaming media could reduce cycle times by 20 percent to 30 percent, Olmstead says. If we can get a plant up and operational three months ahead of schedule, that will have a major impact on profitability.