Many who have tried sailing in their youth or have just enjoyed messing about in boats will have sailed an ILCA dinghy at least once. Go to any sailing club anywhere in the world, and you will find at least one boat in use by the members. This universal appeal has made it the most popular sailing dinghy of all time with its modern good looks, simplicity and all boats are identical ethos, also known as OSEPODS. It is not an accident that nearly a quarter of a million boats have been built. In 1996, the ILCA (formerly Laser) became an Olympic Class, attracting elite athletes to compete based on skill and fitness with identical equipment.
The design of the boat itself is over 50 years old. It has been modernized to allow better fittings, composite masts, and modern sail design techniques. A few years ago, the ILCA dinghy experienced an expansion when the number of worldwide builders increased from 3 to 10. For trademark reasons, the name changed from Laser to ILCA, and to ensure all boats are of consistent quality and equal performance, there was a formation of a technical team of Engineers and Naval Architects. All of this happened in the middle of the global pandemic, and this is where the database story starts.
The Need for a Database
In the formation of the new ILCA class, in addition to getting new builders up to speed, the class started to protect its intellectual property in the design of the boat by labeling each new component with a QR Code to ensure all design royalties get paid and ensure counterfeit parts did not find their way into the ILCA class.
In many ways, the ILCA technical team had the same challenges as any small business/engineering organization with all the important information locked up in spreadsheets, reports, Word Documents, DropBox, Google Drive, WhatsApp messages, pictures, videos, etc, on multiple types of devices. These tools allowed high productivity of an individual engineer, but as the team expanded, finding up-to-date and consistent information and how to interpret it became almost impossible.
For this reason, ILCA needed a database that we could use to store engineering data and write applications for engineers, builders, and class officials to perform their roles in the office, on the shop floor, and at regattas. Like all small organizations, the idea of owning and maintaining servers and databases was not an option, so a cloud-based approach was required. All applications need to be written fast and deployed immediately using the limited skills within the team. The Oracle Autonomous Database with Apex as a development environment was chosen for ILCA’s first generation of application development.
Data Quality Challenges
The process of taking data from spreadsheets to a relational database also revealed data quality challenges. With much of the data being written by hand onto notes on the shop floor and then entered into a spreadsheet by hand, the scope for transcription errors was large. Fixing this process was largely iterative and required considerable interaction with the boat builders, but eventually, we got the error rates down from about 10% to about 0.01%. Having cleaned up the data, it was decided to give the builders an application to enter boat data directly from the shop floor into the database. Having learned where all the mistakes were made in the data entry process, all forms were built into the application designed to prevent the entry of incorrect data with reference checks, intelligent defaults, etc.
Today, all builders enter boat data daily as boats ship from the factory. This data provides the foundation for applications and reports, allowing ILCA to manage the class and identify potential future challenges to the supply and quality of boats and equipment.
To encourage the upload of engineering data to the builders, we provided them with reports and analytics so they can see how they are doing with respect to historical performance, market share and trends within the ILCA class. In many cases, we see the most active users are very often the sales teams of each boat builder, especially around the end of a quarter.
Taking the User Interface to The Olympics
In the same way that the Olympics force athletes to raise their game and perform at a higher level, the Olympics have forced ILCA to raise its game also. ILCA has worked to improve the consistency of the boats to ensure they are as identical as possible and provide data on the equipment used by each athlete in the games.
All the equipment was allocated from a larger pool of equipment, logged, and given to the athlete for the Olympic Regatta. The logging and reporting process is time-intensive and inherently error-prone. To eliminate errors and speed up the process, a new application was written that allowed scans of the QR Code of each piece of equipment as it was allocated to the athlete. All this information was then made available to Olympic officials to ensure there were no unsanctioned equipment changes and no athlete could obtain an equipment advantage. We are happy to report this process went without any problems. The races were completed, and there were no equipment issues.
The Olympics represented an important milestone in ILCA’s database development in that all equipment was tracked online without any data errors. To get to this point, however, many applications were developed that managed engineering and production data, QR Code labels, and project management with builders and equipment suppliers.
What’s Next?
Now that the database and associated applications have been running for about a year, ILCA is positioned to define more complex engineering data and render visualizations of the data valuable to the technical team and builders.
Other ideas have been brainstormed within the team, like providing access to the database so stolen equipment can be detected, lifecycle information as part of global sustainability initiatives, maintaining quality control metrics for builders and providing judges additional real-time information when scrutinizing events.
In summary, the Oracle Database and Apex have given ILCA a head start in the process of digitizing its engineering operations.