The History of Cleopatra Enterprise

A cost engineering tool as versatile as Cleopatra takes time to develop. 

Cleopatra Enterprise’s history goes back over 22 years. When the first computers rolled into the offices of the oil giants of the world, one of the founding members of Cost Engineering turned his mind to seeing how this could improve the way in which estimates were made. At that time estimates were calculated by hand, which made it very time consuming and prone to errors.

Thoughts turned to a first release of a counter estimating program which already held two estimating levels. Developed in house by Dutch oil company NAM it was launched in 1986 and immediately spread within the NAM and Shell organizations. Stimulated by the results of the new program, a decision was made to continue development to include two more levels of estimating. Launched as a DOS version in 1995 by heavy users NAM and Shell, it was soon decided to privatize the software. As a result Cleopatra was first commercially released as a DOS program in 1996.

"Cleopatra Enterprise: Inspired by the past,
built for your future"

In 1996 the new founded company started to work on converting Cleopatra from its DOS roots to a new version to suit the possibilities of Microsoft Windows. Completely rewritten Cleopatra proved to be an instant hit with the oil and gas industry in the Netherlands. The improved user interface and its four levels of estimating made estimating a lot easier, quicker and more accurate for many multi-national companies. The main focus for Cleopatra at the time was the tendering process.

In 2005 Cost Engineering management made a hard decision. To enable Cleopatra Enterprise to be able to cater to the market more, it was decided to start with a clean slate and completely rewrite Cleopatra. The main goals for a completely new build were the opportunity to offer a more versatile program to the globalizing economy. New technologies enabling the use of remote servers, and the new possibilities for web interfaces make Cleopatra Enterprise much more suitable for the multi-national corporate environments of today and tomorrow.
The redesign was not only used to implement new technology. It was also used to redesign Cleopatra Enterprise’s features, enhancing its strong points and removing the limits of the old versions. This has made Cleopatra Enterprise even more versatile which allows its users to use Cleopatra Enterprise in the complete lifecycle of projects as well as tendering, creating bids, estimate validation and initial investment decisions.