Did you know that the Naha Airport in Okinawa has the 6th largest number of domestic flyers in Japan? Since Okinawa cannot depend on ground transport, it is an important airport facility for supporting Okinawan lives and industries. It is shared 24 hours by civilians and the Self Defense Force and is therefore a high-demand airport that has ran on its one runway since opening. However, the increase in LCC flights in recent years has led to the need to add a runway. With this, the large scale runway expansion began in March 20 with a total cost of 181.6 billion yen and is scheduled to be completed in 2019.
How Drupal was Introduced
The construction of Naha Airport was an extremely large scale national project that costed 180 billion yen. Many major construction firms, contractors, and government officials needed to share the progress of daily constructions and the usage of budgets.
At the actual construction site, Excel is usually used to manage progress and daily reports. It became necessary to consolidate these information on one site efficiently.
In response to such a request, ANNAI proposed a solution that would make use of Drupal’s content management function.
Desired Functions
Importing construction information from Excel into Drupal with one button
Construction supervisors manage things such as on-site pictures, process sheets, and construction progress on Excel. However, many on the field are not used to computers and are not capable of figuring out what mechanism can convert the collected data into a format that can be easy to read. The site created this time was the solution to that.
One of site’s the notable features is the need to allow each person in charge to be able to upload data from Excel onto the site by clicking only buttons in Excel without having to access the website.
The function to visually display construction information on aerial photographs
The construction to expand the runway is a very extensive construction and thus there is a need to have a simple way to visually confirm the progress. For that reason, we decided to map the progress onto the airport’s aerial photos and Drupal-fied the photos.
Specifically, we needed a function that would enable Drupal to read and display the data from Excel which contained construction information placed on the aerial photos. Since on-site managers would need to confirm these information on their tablets, the image data must be in svg format and the information must show each layer of the aerial photos. They can then tap on these and view the relevant information within the site.
Project Goal
The goal of this project was to allow the on-site construction data managed by Excel to be imported into Drupal with just one button and enable information sharing between the on-site and off-site parties. ANNAI carried out the design of the overall architecture and the development of Drupal to receive contents.
To work towards completing the new runway in 2019, the site continues to consolidate construction progress information every day.
Drupal, ideal for both mangaging progress of large scale contruction projects and intranets.
With a large scale project such as the the runway construction at the Naha Airport, just managing all the daily progress reported from on-site is difficult. Also when staff are off-site, sharing information can be even more challenging at times. Drupal is best fit for sites used to manage these kinds of projects.
Drupal has the the image of being used by large-scale sites that are open to the general public such as the White House and the Australian Government. It is also suitable for cases such as the Naha Airport with flexible permission settings, content management functions, project management, and information sharing system for intranets. As a matter of fact, there are already many large domestic companies that use Drupal for their intranet systems.
