Bruce Gilham Jr.

All work · Industrial & manufacturing

Cimnet Systems — Engenix

A Delphi rules engine, a dot-notation tree walk generating manufacturing travellers dynamically, prototyped in three days and in a working product in six months, still sold and maintained twenty-five years on.

Years
1999–2000
Sector
Manufacturing execution software (printed circuit boards)
Role
Software architect — rules engine and data architecture
Outcome
Still sold today

What was wrong

Cimnet had been trying to get a manufacturing execution product off the ground for over five years, with almost $2 million invested and nothing to show for it.

What I built

The rules engine and the data structure were mine: a dot-notation tree walk that generated manufacturing travellers dynamically, prototyped in three days. Took it on with a team of two others.

What happened

The working prototype was ready to implement in six months. Engenix became the company's flagship product and is still a commercially sold, actively maintained system more than twenty-five years later. In 2026 I was brought back to work on it.

Stack

Delphi Rules engine design Relational data architecture
Maintaining something like this? What I do about Delphi

Inherited a system like this one?

Tell me what it does, what it is written in, and what breaks when it goes down. I will say plainly whether I can help.

Tell me what it runs on