Data Mining for Flight Safety Gets Notoriety

The Washington Post published an article about how data mining has been improving airline safety titled "Avoiding Plane Crashes By Crunching Numbers, Data Mining Helps Identify Subtle Flaws". Staff writer Del Wilber's piece points out that data mining is part of the new era in the airlines industry, which has been without a major U.S. commercial aircraft crash since August 2006.

For ten years ProWorks has been helping major airlines to improve flight safety through secure safety reporting systems, performance monitoring systems and FAA approved flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) systems mentioned in the article.

These intensive large scale projects are generally unnoticed by the general public outside of the airlines industry. It is understandable, considering the nature of an effective safety system is to avoid abnormal and potentially hazardous events.

Currently, ProWorks is working on the Distributed National FOQA Archive (DNFA). The FAA managed DNFA system is designed to analyze data to identify trends from a single aggregated source of flight data and safety reports. Flight safety analysts are able to access the data while the integrity, security, and confidentiality of the original data sources is maintained.

Thank you to Del Wilber and The Washington Post for noticing how data mining is contributing to the absence airlines flight safety in the news media.

Reduced Product Prices for 2008

ProWorks has significantly reduced the cost of all product licenses for 2008. This includes our popular line of graphing tools, the Flipper Graph Control and Flipper Graph ASP, our .NET line of charting tools, Chart for Windows and Chart for ASP.NET and the unique Flipper CAD Control drawing tool.

New Product License Prices:

Flipper Graph Control $249
Flipper Graph ASP $449

Flipper CAD Control $349

Chart for Windows $299
Chart for ASP.NET $499

Visit our product pages for more detail about each product. Fully functional trial versions of each product are available for free download. Please be our guest and give one of our developer tools a spin.

ProWorks Recieves 2007 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer from the Federal Laboratory Consortium

ProWorks President Gary Prothero recieved a letter of congratulations from Samuel W. Bodman, the Secretary of Energy and head of the United States Department of Energy for being named a recipient of the 2007 Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. The award presented by the Federal Laboratory Consortium recognizes the outstanding accomplishment of transferring the ProWorks co-developed software named the The Morning Report to the commercial marketplace.

The Morning Report is an R&D 100 Award winning airline safety tool. The application analyzes hundreds of commercial aircraft in-flight data variables, such as speed, wing angle, equipment status, and engine temperature from thousands of flights a day. The result is a daily report that allows the rapid identification of anomalies, and the prevention of possible accidents. Delivering aviation experts with the reports generated by The Morning Report will greatly improve the safety of flight operations.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in collaboration with Battelle, NASA-Ames, ProWorks, Flight Safety Consultants and Safe Flight, developed the technology and licensed it to SAGEM Avionics, Inc. for commercial use. The technology is also being adapted to identify typical patterns and atypical events in other areas. Gary Prothero and ProWorks continues to provide the IT services behind the development of technologies related to The Morning Report.

ProWorks Exhibits at Convergence

Last week Jason and I attended Microsoft's annual Convergence conference and exposition showcasing the Microsoft Dynamics line of business solutions. This was my second year to the event and I was pleased that San Diego was the location. The weather was great and the city fondly reminded me of Honolulu. Reportedly over 8000 people were in attendance, evidence that the Microsoft Dynamics community is continuing to grow. Again this year I was impressed that the event planners were able to manage that many people and make there time productive. The exposition hours seemed to be extended this year. At times there is quite a bit of traffic which was great for us. Jason and I got a chance to speak with a number of CRM partners and customers. I noticed a distinct increase in the awareness around CRM analytics and predictive analysis. We have to thank Microsoft for at least some of that. They ran a CRM analysis demo in the expo hall and had a couple of educational sessions devoted specifically to CRM analytics. As partners and customers begin to complete their inital implementations of CRM they seem to be looking for ways to take advantage of their growing CRM data.

One of our biggest challenges has been to clearly present the potential benefits of CRM analytics. Good analysis has been limited to data experts and executives for so long I think everyone else naturally asks "so how does this help me?" I am really looking for forward to Microsoft contributing to the general credibility of CRM analytics and predictive analysis and helping ProWorks to focus on meeting specific analysis needs for CRM users.

I would not have complained if the exposition hours were reduced a bit. Some of times overlap with the learning sessions and the number of visitors can be pretty minimal.

The structured networking could also have been much better. I completely agree with Mike Snyder's assessment of the networking system on the Sonoma Partners Blog. Last years system was not the greatest solution. This years new solution was terrible by comparison. I hope the event coordinators notice a reduction in scheduled meetings through the networking system and give it some serious attention for next year.

It was great trip. Thank you to Microsoft for hosting a fun and productive event. The entertainment was great. Where do you find an old Asteroids arcade game? I particularly enjoyed the sushi table and the baked brie. And thank you to all the Dynamics partners and customers that visited our booth and spoke with us.

ProWorks Celebrates its 20th Anniverary

ProWorks Corporation proudly celebrates our 20th Anniversary this year. Thank you to all of our past and present customers and partners. For two decades it has been our pleasure to contribute to your information technology needs. We look forward to continuing to provide you with the highest quality software and IT services for years to come.

Looking Back:
In 1986 Susan Prothero founded ProWorks based on the sales of Flipper Graphics Library written by Gary Prothero for Clipper. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for innovation Susan and Gary together formed ProWorks LLC in 1988. Staying abreast of the latest technology at the time ProWorks LLC created data visualization tools for Visual Studio.
These tools attracted the attention of a NASA airlines safety project managed by Battelle. Soon after, Gary Prothero was named the technical lead on the project in 1999. Steady growth allowed ProWorks to move to our present offices in Corvallis, Oregon in 2002.

ProWorks continued to partner with Battelle to develop cutting edge software applications based on data analysis. In 2005 ProWorks consulting team was recognized with a R&D 100 Award for 'The Morning Report' software. Today, ProWorks continues to deliver quality IT services to Battelle and NASA and maintains a line of available COM and .NET data visualization tools.

Looking Forward:
Building on our successes delivering actionable data mining insights to airlines and hospital safety experts, ProWorks is developing CRM analysis tools that improve the daily operations of sales, marketing and customer service users. New CRM solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 are making customer relationship management systems affordable for small and mid-sized businesses and usable by non-expert employees. ProWorks CRM analysis software is designed make the same analysis benefits previously accessible only to large enterprises, available to a broader spectrum of business users.

Although ProWorks has grown in size over the past two decades, we have remained committed to the tradition of service and innovation that we started with and has steadily steered us through recessions, changes in government spending and the dot-com bubble burst. And of course we are thankful to all of our customers and partners that have supported us all these years. Happy Birthday to ProWorks and a Happy Holliday to you