HC Andersen is not the only world success that took its beginning on the
Danish island of Funen. TERMIS was created 25 years ago when Fjernvarme Fyn
(District Heating on Funen) was faced with a billion kroner renovation of its
district heating network. TERMIS worked perfectly and has since been developed
into a complete project engineering and operation tool, used across the
world.
”They knew about programming and we knew about district heating,” managing
director of Fjernvarme Fyn, Per Rimmen summarizes the close working relationship
with 7-Technologies; a relationship that resulted in the first version of TERMIS
in the mid-eighties.
”I actually invented the name TERMIS in the late nineties,” Per Rimmen
suddenly remembers. ”In the beginning we called the program OKF CAD (Odense
Kommunale Fjernvarme Computer Aided Design), not the best of names if you wanted
to sell the product to others,” Per Rimmen says. And that was exactly the idea
because TERMIS turned out to be a giant success, and today TERMIS controls the
water supply in over 100 million homes across the world.
The Great Cooperation
The cooperation between Fjernvarme
Fyn and 7-Technologies – in those days called LICconsult – started in 1985 when
Fjernvarme Fyn earmarked a billion kroner investment to renovate the
district heating network.
”We needed a tool to optimize the dimensioning of our network. After a visit
to all the large IT and engineering companies in the country, we decided to go
for the people from LICconsult. We knew them from an earlier project and we
trusted them.
It turned out to be a brilliant choice. Today, we look back at close to 25
years of excellent cooperation and at a product that has refined and streamlined
the operation of district heating on a global scale.”
The Power of Math
”Both companies have invested substantial amounts of
money and resources into the development of TERMIS. The application has been
subject to a tremendous development since the beginning, when it was running on
a PC with 80-86 processors.
TERMIS started as a project tool that turned into a sophisticated operations
tool. Today, this tool can generate most accurate prognoses and operation
analyses for the future.
Over the course of time TERMIS has optimized our operation significantly and
at the same time given us a nifty income in royalties. This income has been
placed in a development fund and is used for the continued development of
TERMIS,” says Per Rimmen.