Synchronized Shipbuilding
How EnterprisePlatform can help your Business
When engineering information smoothly drives all the other departments, tools, and processes, it leaves you truly in control of the information available to you. For your organization, that also means the freedom to make business decisions without putting current or future projects at risk.
What is EnterprisePlatform?
Every department in a shipyard requires timely and accurate information from engineering. To be efficient, engineering data needs to feed your entire organization, either directly or through PLM and ERP/MRP applications. However, if departments have difficulty accessing and utilizing that information, or if there are errors or inconsistencies, there can be significant delays, errors, and cost overruns. As the number of discrete processes involved in the design, construction, and maintenance of a vessel increase, the number of ways information must be represented grow in lock-step.
When the digital thread between every process is clear, every piece of information within your organization is delivered in the right format at the right time, and the best shipbuilding specific tools are in place, your organization can continue innovating without jeopardizing the projects at hand. That’s what we call synchronized shipbuilding.
What can you do with ShipConstructor?
EnterprisePlatform
EnterprisePlatform
DigitalHub
DigitalHub
Who’s successful with EnterprisePlatform?
Huntington Ingalls Industries
Royal Huisman
Austal Australia
Drydocks World
Seaspan ULC (Canada)
EnterprisePlatform
Shipbuilding projects are at a massive scale, and that means an equally large amount of information is generated. Connecting and synchronizing that information throughout every piece of an organization, and every platform that’s already in place, is what allows for informed decisions to be made.
Single pieces of data need to be able to flow freely to anywhere they’re needed. Often, that means being limited in the platforms you can choose and the capabilities of those platforms. Passing data through to wherever it is most needed, without being locked in to inferior products, allows a shipbuilder to trust that they can leverage the information they already have.
Effectively Sharing Information
EnterprisePlatform enables the enormous wealth of engineering information present in every shipbuilding project to be available across an organization. This information can be efficiently shared with, and easily accessed by multiple individuals, software applications, and production equipment utilized in the shipbuilding process. This includes people, programs and processes outside of the Engineering department. EnterprisePlatform generates information in the correct format and representation needed for varying use cases and brings a product-focused approach to enterprise-wide availability of engineering data that is cost-effective, scalable, configurable, consistent, and transparent.
Publisher LT
PublisherLT was the first EnterprisePlatform product released and was made available in 2014, quickly becoming popular with clients. PublisherLT streamlines and automates the generation of engineering information from the Marine Information Model in a wide variety of formats. Engineers and designers automate the generation of information for other stakeholders and focus on their core design/modelling tasks.
Publisher
Publisher extends the information sharing capacity to all departments, processes and tools without the need of local ShipConstructor installations or knowledge. Any department can pull data from the Marine Information Model in the format they need and information can be pushed to PLM, ERP and MRP systems as well as production machines.
InformationHub
The InformationHub is the centerpiece of the EnterprisePlatform and keeps all systems connected. It orchestrates the processing of multiple information requests, oversees all communication, manages a directory of users, and provides a console for viewing and configuring its currently registered connectors, users, and publish modes.
ProjectViewer
ProjectViewer enables your team to quickly access the latest output published with SSI EnterprisePlatform. It enables a large group of people to tap into a common bank of published project documentation updated on a continual basis.
WorkerNode
A node is a physical or virtual workstation that can parallel process multiple information requests and repackage them in the format required. Unlimited nodes can be connected to the InformationHub to increase the processing capacity of the system, allowing for a scalable implementation.
JobServer
The JobServer provides the ability to schedule automated requests for information and configure the delivery of results.
ProjectCache
The ProjectCache is the latest connector joining the EnterprisePlatform Servers suite and adds caching capabilities to the EnterprisePlatform system. The ProjectCache analyzes the output of work packages, copies the latest revision of documents pertaining to an item or a group of items, and discards older revisions – allowing for already generated information to be quickly served up.
DigitalHub
Shipbuilding requires careful coordination among many departments, but far too often the information for decisions is siloed in numerous legacy software systems and spreadsheets. A system, designed specifically for Shipbuilding, that offers a practical and organized set of information for your Engineering, Planning, Production, and Project Management groups allows an organization to leverage the massive amount of data and information generated as a result of shipbuilding.
For critical activities like change management workflows, design reviews, and progress reports, it is essential to track design changes throughout the duration of the project. Maintaining snapshots of your data through time, controlling when documentation becomes officially released, and ensuring that the production teams are working with the most up-to-date information are all ways to ensure that you are in control of your data and information.
A successful shipbuilder’s information management solution will:
- Have pre-configured data with item types including Parts, Assemblies, Drawings, Spools, Systems, and Nests.
- Be ready out of the box to show engineering, planning, and production teams the information that matters most to them.
- Have web-based access so that applications don’t need to be installed on users’ desktop computers.
- Support information browsing on a tablet computer from anywhere in a shipyard.
- Allow for all data to stay local, mitigating risks and allowing for more control over where the data is accessible.
- Extend to work with powerful shipyard management workflows.
Opening up the silos of legacy software, spreadsheets, employee knowledge, and engineering software is what allows every department to access the information they need. Organizing that information in a way that maintains coordination across departments, is designed for the requirements of shipbuilding, and is practical for the needs of Engineering, Planning, Production, and Product Management is crucial.
No matter how messy the current shipyard system architecture is, as a foundational platform, DigitalHub provides immediate return from a small initial investment and can be further customized to satisfy the specific needs of any shipyard.
Seamless Integration with ShipConstructor
To make informed decisions going forward, it’s important to know a project’s current and past status. DigitalHub works by capturing the evolution of your ShipConstructor projects through time. Simply by using a standard web browser to view ShipConstructor items and their relationships, accurate data becomes easily accessible to users across all shipyard departments.
DigitalHub can be used immediately because it is pre-configured with ShipConstructor item types including:
- Parts
- Assemblies
- Drawings
- Spools
- Nests
ShipConstructor data is gathered into DigitalHub through EnterprisePlatform and is recorded as a data snapshot at a point in time. As your ShipConstructor project data changes, these can be periodically imported into DigitalHub to create the most current view of the data, as well as provide historical snapshots and change lists through time.
Secured Locally, Accessible from Anywhere
Especially for global organizations, being able to access the same information from anywhere is key to removing silos. Access to DigitalHub is web-based, so it does not require any applications to be installed on users’ desktop computers. DigitalHub is powered by the Aras Innovator PLM that uses standard Microsoft SQL Server and IIS technologies, meaning that your data stays local and accessible.