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Intelligente Methoden,Prozesse und Technologien

Das Wirtschaftsmagazin für Ingenieure

Originally published in:

6/2009

PLM: A way outof the crisis

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II ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN: ECONOMIC ENGINEERING 6/2009 / page 53-55 / www.economic-engineering.de

With a global market share of ap-proximately three percent in

terms of total tonnage produced, ship-building in Germany would not appearto be a major economic force on theworld stage. But this impression is mis-leading: Measured by the number ofships and offshore platforms equipped,German suppliers in the shipbuilding in-dustry and maritime technology sectorassume a leading position worldwide,coming in just behind their Japanesecompetitors. Whether or not they willbe able to hold on to this position in thecurrent economic crisis and in the faceof growing competition from Asia andother non-EU countries will depend on

the answers they find to the technicaland organizational challenges posed bydistributed ship development. The com-petition in low-cost countries is not theonly threat to suppliers in the shipbuil-ding industry. Supply bottlenecks and ri-sing prices for high-quality materials, aswell as lack of young design and serviceengineers, are threatening the competi-tiveness of an industry which in Germa-ny comprises approximately 400 predo-minantly small and mid-sized companieswho employ a workforce of about70,000. Their small and mid-sized struc-ture allows suppliers to provide innova-tive, customer-oriented solutions fortechnically complex ships but also ma-

kes them susceptible to the financialconsequences of the crisis. The capitalcover of most companies is relativelythin, which means that the financial dif-ficulties of one or two shipyards canquickly spread to them.One possible way out of the crisis is toassume more development responsibili-ty, which is gradually leading to the for-mation of hierarchical structures in theshipbuilding supplier industry similar tothose in the automotive and aircraft in-dustries: “System providers with a highlevel of technological competence arebetter equipped to weather a crisis”,pointed out Jörg Mutschler, managingdirector of the VDMA’s Marine andOffshore Supplier Equipment Industriesworking group, at this year’s Shipbuil-ding Forum. The forum, which is organi-zed by Darmstadt-headquartered PRO-STEP AG, has become an important ve-nue for the industry to meet. As a spe-cialist for product data integration andcommunication in cross-enterprise de-velopment processes, PROSTEP helpsshipbuilders develop the technologicalcompetence required for product life-cycle management (PLM).

PLM: A way out of the crisisAfter enjoying a number of boom years, German shipbuilders are alsofeeling the impact of the worldwide economic crisis. A decline in neworders and an increase in order cancellations pose a problem for theshipbuilding industry. IT experts recommend using the crisis as anopportunity to improve competitiveness. Data integration and datacommunication in the development networks concerned with theship development process in particular still offer significant rationali-zation potential. By MICHAEL WENDENBURG

The “AidaLuna” leaves the Meyer Werft shipyard

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HIGHLIGHTMARITIM EXTRA

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Work intensive with a highlycomplex supply chain

Building ships is a work-intensive busi-ness based on a highly complex supplychainSimilar to the aerospace industry, thereare a large number of specialist sup-pliers and sub-contractors who contri-bute up to 70 or 80 percent of the va-lue added depending on the type ofship involved – the proportion is by na-ture higher in the case of a cruise linercompared with a container ship.As rule, over 100 different companiesare involved in the development andconstruction of a ship, and they all haveto carefully coordinate their work withone another to ensure that all thecomponents, such as machinery, outfit-ting and accommodation components,are available on time and fit togetherperfectly. There is little time availablefor changes since it usually takes only ayear for a vessel to evolve from initialdesign to launch. Coordinating the va-rious tasks involved in ship develop-ment is extremely time consuming. Atpresent, some employees spend up to50 percent of their working time pro-curing, preparing and documenting in-formation and performing other indi-rect tasks, as revealed by a study con-ducted by the Center of Marine Infor-mation Systems at the University ofRostock. Between the shipyard and en-gineering office alone, approximately800 communication processes takeplace over a period of a little morethan a year after a contract has beenconcluded, and 80 percent of these are

in response to communication errors.The supplied information is either un-suitable for the task in question, unin-terpretable, incomplete or incorrect. Inaddition, the parties involved often failto understand who needs the informa-tion in the process and when. Hetero-geneous IT systems, a lack of appropri-ate interfaces and manual processesmean that data communication in de-velopment projects is a time-consu-ming task that is prone to errors. Shi-pyards, shipping companies and sup-pliers are therefore looking for solu-tions that will allow them to reducethe time and effort involved in commu-nication and use their sparse manpo-wer more efficiently. According toPROSTEP, there are three main startingpoints for accelerating data communi-cation in the shipbuilding industry:■ improving the quality and compatibi-

lity of the original data■ consolidating all the data relevant to

development with the correspon-ding product structure informationin a central data management plat-form

■ harmonizing and automating the ac-tual data exchange processes.

How and in what order the individualmeasures are implemented ultimatelydepends on the priorities that thecompany in question has specifiedwhen formulating its PLM strategy.With the help of a standardized refe-rence model approaches for the proce-dures involved in PLM projects like theone developed by PROSTEP, the mostimportant areas of activity for projectsof this type can be defined relativelyquickly.

Data quality: a work in progress

Many of the problems with communi-cation in distributed ship developmentprojects originate from an inadequatelevel of data quality. When the data isgenerated, the quality of the data willdetermine how smoothly collaborationlater in the development process willfunction. If the data is inconsistent andexhibits a low level of quality, it will beimpossible to convert and transfer it.Therefore, on the one hand, companiesin the shipbuilding industry need helpimplementing methods that guaranteethe creation of models that are well su-ited to data exchange and, on the otherhand, they need efficient interfaces bet-ween the various CAD systems used

for ship development. In addition, servi-ces such as OpenDESC®.com, whichprovides them with support for quali-ty-assured data conversion, thus allo-wing them to avoid having to maintainall the various CAD systems, are a gre-at help. The CAD landscape in the ship-building industry is relatively heteroge-neous since no one system can satisfyall the requirements, and the shipyardscannot always tell their suppliers whichtools they ought to use. Alongside thespecial systems for hull form designand analysis or the vessel's steel struc-ture, the machinery, piping, equipmentand outfitting components are oftendesigned using leading 3D CAD sy-stems such as Catia or NX, which areonly loosely incorporated in the exi-sting system landscape and establishedprocesses. One of the main require-ments to be satisfied by the interfacethat PROSTEP developed togetherwith Blohm + Voss Nordseewerke inEmden, a shipbuilding company belon-ging to ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems(TKMS), was therefore the ability totransfer the NX-based outfitting designdata to the Tribon M3 Hull steel con-struction package, where it can be usedfor the subsequent CNC-based manu-facturing processes.In principle, it can be assumed that thevariety of systems and thus the needfor conversion will continue to grow inorder to meet the growing require-ments in ship development. Shipbuil-ders are therefore now thinking abouthow they can put virtual reality (VR)technologies to good use, for example,to examine the ergonomics of the in-terior fittings or the wheelchair-acces-sible layout of escape routes. Wide-spread use of VR is currently beinghampered by the high overhead invol-ved in converting and preparing theCAD data.

Integration platform for theshipbuilding industry

The most important prerequisite forefficient data communication in theshipbuilding industry is the consistentmanagement and versioning of all thedata relevant to development in a uni-form data management environmentso that the most current informationcan be made available to everyone in-volved in the process at any time. Tothe extent to which suppliers becomesystem suppliers who assume respon-

Jörg Mutschler from the VDMA at this yea-r’s Shipbuilding Forum, which is organizedby PROSTEP

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sibility for an increasingly large propor-tion of the development activities, theyhave to communicate increasingly lar-ger and more complex amounts ofdata with the shipyards. The exchangeof the CAD data is no longer enough.If this data is to be efficiently proces-sed, the recipient needs structure in-formation, attributes and other meta-data normally stored in a product datamanagement (PDM) system. It may bethe case that this metadata also needsto be made available to partners whothemselves are not yet using a PDM sy-stem. Unlike other industries, cross-sy-stem PDM systems are only slowlyestablishing themselves in the shipbuil-ding industry. The metadata is oftenstored in a number of databases thatfirst of all have to be consolidated. Theintroduction of a central data backbo-ne not only requires a competent im-plementation partner who is familiarwith the industry’s requirements andcan map its processes in the softwarebut also an open integration platformwith connectors to shipbuilding-speci-fic CAD applications, legacy databasesand other business applications such asERP systems.Over the past few years, PROSTEP hascontinued to develop its OpenPDM®integration platform with a view to sa-tisfying the requirements of the shipbu-ilding industry so that, for example,CAD data, product structures andmetadata from Tribon M3 can be syn-chronized with other CAD and PDMsystems – no easy task due to the spe-cial system architecture. In conjunctionwith PROSTEP’s PDM Editor, the neu-tral data model allows structured de-velopment data to be exchanged withpartners who either have no PDM sy-stem or who use a different PDM sy-stem and the automated re-import ofsupplier data in a structured form intothe backend systems used by the re-spective shipyards. It is a good idea toconvert the development data to thestandard, open PDF/A format in orderto safeguard it over the long term. So-lution components for long-term archi-ving can also be incorporated into theOpenPDM® Shipbuilding Edition.Consistent PDM is an important stepon the way to more efficient data com-munication, but it alone is not enough.To minimize the organizational effortinvolved in preparing the data, the engi-neers at the shipyards, shipping compa-nies and suppliers need tools that al-

low them to automatically extract datafrom different source systems, convertthe data if necessary, and make the dataavailable to other parties involved inthe process. At the same time, the in-formation must be protected againstmisuse, especially in collaboration sce-narios in global development networkswhere you no longer know each ex-change partner personally. The protec-tion of intellectual property is also be-coming increasingly important in theshipbuilding industry.

Secure and automateddata exchange

One approach is a portal-based solu-tion for the secure and automated ex-change of mass data via the Internetsuch as the OpenDXM® GlobalXShipbuilding developed by PROSTEP.When the data is uploaded to the dataexchange platform, it is encrypted insuch a way that it can only be openedby authorized users. With the help ofdigital rights management (DRM) func-tions, usage can also be made subjectto time constraints. Publish and sub-scribe mechanisms permit version con-trol of the published documents, thusfulfilling an important requirement inthe shipbuilding industry. Change ma-nagement is one of the most importantchallenges in the shipbuilding processsince designs change frequently evenonce the ship is already under con-struction. As a result, there is a con-stant need to create and exchange newdocuments. Intelligent PDF forms,which are automatically filled with cer-tain information from database systemsand can include both 2D data and 3D

models, provide new possibilities forspeeding up the cross-enterprise har-monization of intended changes. Expe-rience in other industries indicates thatthis allows the lead times for changesto be reduced by 40 percent. The ser-ver-based solutions are based on thePDF technology from Adobe Systems,with whom PROTEP maintains a stra-tegic partnership. They represent a use-ful addition to the data exchange por-tal for all cases in which document-ba-sed information from heterogeneoussource systems needs to be communi-cated quickly and securely.More efficient data communication inthe development networks involved inthe ship development process reducesthe multitude of errors that are re-sponsible for the majority of the com-munication processes in shipbuildingand thus improves collaboration bet-ween all the parties involved. Thanks tothe automatic mechanisms, engineerscan once again concentrate on theiractual work, and they no longer have toinvest so much time in data prepara-tion. These benefits ultimately allowsuppliers in the shipbuilding industryand maritime technology sector to respond more quickly and more preci-sely to the demands of their custo-mers, thus making an important contri-bution to improving their competitive-ness.

INFOCORNERYou will find more information ondata communication solutions for theshipbuilding industry atwww.prostep.com

Luxury yachts made in Germany are in great demand. Our photograph shows the yacht“Eclipse” built by Blohm + Voss in Hamburg for Roman Abramovic.

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN: ECONOMIC ENGINEERING 6/2009 / page 53-55 / www.economic-engineering.de IV

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