I keep a palm oil mill running in Malaysia. I build the software we needed and nobody was selling. This is where I write about both.
I am a palm oil mill engineer. Hundreds of machines, twenty people, something always about to fail.
I'm not a developer. I started building because I am lazy. Yes — lazy. My definition of it is refusing to do a thing twice when it could be done once. So I built things that make the work easier and faster, and that only need doing once.
Two things I built and use every day. Notes on building them.
Everything on this site is used by people who never asked for an app. The first is Ullage Bunker, which works out the volume in a bunker in seconds. The second is a lite CMMS called MaintenX.
MaintenX is the most complicated thing I have built, and it was difficult. I have no background in building apps. I insisted on building one anyway. I built it because nobody could tell me what broke last time. The logbook was unreadable. The WhatsApp thread was buried. And the last nail in the coffin — the one person who remembered had transferred out, quit, or retired.
Maintenance and repair history for palm oil mills. Every machine keeps its own chart — what went wrong, how often, who fixed it.
Three sounding dips into net palm kernel tonnage. On a phone, offline. Replaces a printed chart and a calculator on top of a bunker.
Why I stopped building a work log and started building a medical record for machines.
5S taught us to do that for tools and spares. Nobody had done it for what we know about the machines.
A year on Ghost, a subscription I could not justify, and what I found when I went to move.
Run a mill or a plant? If this sounds like your problem, tell me about it — akmalkharolanuar@gmail.com