Digital Shipbuilding for the Future, In Sight
The Challenges of Modern Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding leaders around the world are facing an increasingly competitive global market where an emphasis must be placed on improving efficiency, reducing design and build times, and fully utilizing modern lean manufacturing techniques. Companies that design and produce marine vessels need to be able to better control their component supply chains, ensure product traceability and reduce waste in order to minimize time-to-market, facilitate change management, grow profitability and comply with government regulations. If that sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. Engineering Industries eXcellence division also has extensive expertise in driving digital transformation for the shipbuilding sector. Our digital solutions for shipbuilding span across the lifecycle of a ship, from design to production and assembly, all the way to maintenance, repair and decommissioning.
The Digital Lifecycle for Today’s Modern Ship
1. Design The Ship: Product Design Automation
Our design automation practice is dedicated to helping shipbuilding companies implement digitalized product design and engineering solutions that automate these processes, optimize designs and eliminate manufacturing issues. Product design automation significantly improves cycle times, quality and overall costs by eliminating manual and error-prone engineering work. Product simulation automation helps find the optimal design quickly by running thousands of design iterations in minutes. Our automated test correlation solutions reduce physical product testing efforts by using a digital copy of a physical model instead.
2. Design the Ship: Product Lifecycle Management
Managing large amounts of data is a huge task in the manufacturing industry, and nowhere is this truer than in shipbuilding, where products are complex and require high levels of precision and documentation. Furthermore, keeping this data updated as well as making sure that data is controlled and accessible between different departments (between engineering and manufacturing, for example) across the enterprise is a big challenge. Our global team delivers holistic Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions to create a single digital source of truth across the product and process lifecycles. Our solutions enable teams and individuals to create, organize, manage and consolidate information effectively for secure and efficient product development.
3. Produce & Assemble The Ship: Digital Manufacturing
When it comes to technology, shipbuilding leaders responsible for producing complex vessels in a cost-efficient way are looking to improve how quickly they can design and manufacture their products. Our expertise in the entire spectrum of technologies for digital manufacturing enables us to deliver these industry-specific solutions and system integration services that help them achieve these goals and meet strict regulatory requirements at the same time. Our team drives digital transformation from the manufacturing side. We also deliver and integrate systems that manage the data and the execution of products being fabricated and assembled, including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
4. Operate & Maintain The Ship: Asset Management
Ship performance monitoring is the process of collecting and analyzing data related to the operation of a ship or vessel in the real world. The data collected typically includes information on fuel consumption, engine performance, navigation and other factors that affect the vessel’s efficiency and environmental impact. Our fleet and asset management solutions for this industry enable real-time monitoring and analysis of a vessel’s performance via the implementation of solutions including sensors, software and remotely-accessible user interfaces for analytics and reporting. Asset management solutions for ships lead to improved performance benchmarking and better data-driven decision-making for marine vessel efficiency.
5. Simulating the Shipyard: Simulation & Decision Science
Simulation modeling in a virtual environment enables shipbuilders to study, verify and optimize the behavior of their manufacturing, assembly operations and supply chain processes together before they are deployed in the shipyard. Our Digital Twin solutions can help shipbuilders streamline shipbuilding processes and improve resource performance, especially when facing high complexity, high variability, heavy volumes of data and an endless number of moving parts (very common in shipyards). Our simulation models help shipbuilders study their current assembly process in order to identify bottlenecks and/or areas for optimization. Our shipyard models can run extensive "what if" scenarios to identify and evaluate the best changes which shipbuilders could then implement in their shipyard in order to improve processes and meet production deadlines. Most importantly, a simulation model for a shipyard is a flexible, living and risk-free digital tool that the shipbuilder can augment, modify and leverage in the years to come to continuously improve their operations.
Building The Future of Shipbuilding Together
Most shipbuilders do not have the internal knowledge, technical expertise and resources necessary to navigate and understand all the complexities of digital transformation alone. They must look towards a strategic partnership with an expert that can help them assess their current systems and processes, identify gaps and priorities, source and implement the right solutions, and support the digitalization process from start to finish. With over 20 years of experience implementing Industry 4.0 solutions for enterprises, Engineering Industries eXcellence has established a depth of expertise and understanding of industry-specific challenges, standards and solutions that shipbuilding companies could not find at any other company in the world.
To learn more about industry challenges, solutions and our capabilities, read our Shipbuilding Brief.
