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Under the contract, valued in the millions of euros, 200 IBM workstations running CATIA Version 5 Release 7 (V5R7) and ENOVIA 3D design software, developed by IBM’s shipbuilding solutions partner, France’s Dassault Systemes, will be installed. The new system will be fully in place by 2003. The first vessel that will be built with the IBM Shipbuilding Solutions is a 65 m Type 214 submarine, set for delivery to Greece in 2005. “The reason we are starting with submarines,” says Rohweder, “is because the need was most urgent there. These are extremely complex vessels.” The time between when a contract is signed and when a ship is delivered continues to be compressed. This means that design, engineering and purchasing tasks must be performed concurrently, not sequentially. To do this, it is essential to have a system capable of handling the complex flow of information between everyone involved. Software systems allow the storage and development of the complete design in one large concurrent multi-user access database called a 3D project model. Through the use of software systems, shipyards have been able to trim man-hours in design and production by 30% and slice the time from the signing of a contract to delivery in half. Using these systems, shipyards have devised build strategies that focus on earlier production start, minimum building dock time, extensive pre-outfitting, accurate work content estimates and specific production information for each stage of production. IBM Shipbuilding Solutions stores individual ship parts, process templates and manufacturing resources as intelligent and interconnected components that know about themselves and their relationship to one another by attaching information about their real-work industrial characteristics and behavior. The system actually uses the design context to pick the most appropriate part from the project catalog. |
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