MEA Program

Marine Engineering Assistant

The Marine Engineers Assistant (MEA) program has been created and written to standardise and modernise the Spare Gear, Work history and planned maintenance systems for one specific vessel. It has proved very succesful and has been adopted on several vessels. Written in visual basic the program is readily adaptable although source code restrictions apply mainly to protect the user than property rights The program is in use on win98, win2000 and winXP systems, no problems are expected with winME and it will run on win95. Minimum hardware requirements depend on operateing system but may be p166, 32mb ram & 15mb hard disk space although P233 & 64mb ram improves performance notably.

Interface

Navigation is via an explorer style side bar, which automatically hides out the way on smaller screens(800x600 or below) to maximise the main viewing area. For larger screens this system auto-disables.Security All areas are password protected with three access levels;

Guest-default access and allows viewing only
User- has guest rights plus some spare gear and work history rights
Manage- as user plus creation,editing and deletion rights for all areas

The default guest entry is either ready filled or requires a password determined by settings in the admin section, when the program is running the log in person may be changed at any time. This allows a user to log out to the guest entry without need to shutdown

Main View

After passing through the security check the main page is displayed. This consists of the explorer syle navigation side bar on the left- here shown in normal view mode,and the tabbed page selector-here in parts view mode.

Here its shown with the navigation bar in narrow mode ( used for smaller screen resolutions to maximise work area, auto-disables as higher resolutions) and the tabbed selector in History view. Spare gear used can be seen listed below the history record. This spare gear is entered by drag and drop-no typing required. This allows a monthly consumed list to be auto-generated. To enter an history record the user has to be logged in. That record can then only be editted or deleted by himself.

The jobs section has its own treeview which is created by a combination of user entry and by dragging groups from the main compone list.
Jobs may be time or hour based and set for either individual units or for an entire group. In the same way timers may be set, these automatically update all components placed below them. In this way a timer may be placed in a branch below anouther one.

Other features

There is comprehensive online help which is context sensitive.
Drag and drop label printing for parts.
Drag and Drop parts may be dropped into history records with auto updateing of stock levels if selected.
Unit and part details
Maker address book
History and part searches
a-z sorting of all columns
Intelligent security features

Availability

The program is freely available although a small contribution of the package & postage is required.

Current build is 2.4.10,