So if you look at the shipbuilding industry, this
industry are earlier adopters of both CAD and ERP for
past many years.
At least 40 years for CAD.
But PLM or product lifecycle management is relatively
new in shipbuilding.
What a PLM system does is support the collaborative creation or authoring
With authoring
in this case you're talking about a CAD system for ship
design, then management, which is managing the data
dissemination, disseminating the data within the
shipyard and organizations outside the shipyard and
use of the product definition information or in our case
the ship design and manufacturing information across
the extended enterprise.
The extended enterprise would include the customer
class, the marine supply chain, or the specific marine
suppliers, which could be even design providers for the project
PLM systems not only manage data during the design
phase, but they managed data for the entire life cycle
of a product or ship. Starting from inquiry from a
customer to design, production or construction in
service support and maintenance, then upgrades and
refits, which is particularly important for naval
shipbuilding and right up to ship disposal.
What a PLM system does, it provides a framework
which effectively enables capture or representation,
retrieval and reuse of product and process data or knowledge.
In this case the process knowledge would be the
knowledge for ship manufacturing or construction and
allows collaboration across distributed and
multidisciplinary design teams in a shipbuilding project.
Since shipbuilding is a project based industry with
heavy environmental subcontractors and suppliers who
are actually spread around the globe for most projects,
effective collaboration is key for success of a project
and this is what a PLM system has facilitated.
One key requirement for effective change management
is knowledge capture and retrieval for the current
project and the forgone projects, which, again, PLM
system can handle very effectively.
So a PLM systematically provides a digital thread for
change management. Which facilitates or allows a
collaborative work flow that links forces across the
shipbuilding organization. The organization for a typical
shipbuilding project or a shipyard will include design,
engineering, planning, production, and inventory,
suppliers, et cetera.
With sister ships, there are different changes affecting a specific configuration of
the ship and its roll on effects the effectivity of a
change, which means which particular configuration
and what time should have their change affected
the required information or knowledge about the
product and its current state.
To evaluate an engineering change is actually resident
in different systems in a shipyard and multiple systems.
And this is what PLM system can help manage.
We're talking about different configurations of ships of
the class and how change propagates and reference
different ship configurations.
Legacy examples. We talked about Starting from
design to manufacturing and that can exchange to
ships in service and then you will have different
IT systems used in different places in the extended
enterprise and also importantly in different phases of
the ship life cycle.
If you look at this particular slide, you see a major
portion of the data related to ship design
Or the product design is actually managed by the PLM
system which includes different configurations, different
document revisions, effectivity.
These are all managed by the PLM system and the
manufacturing data is actually managed by the ERP
and MRP systems.
So the PLM system manages the design driven
information or the product related information and hands
over or exchanges the data and information with the ERP
And the MRP systems for production.
So the PLM system enables the change to propagate
for the life cycle of a product or a ship, making its real
impact visible and measurable not only within the
design organization but also across manufacturing and
other stakeholders across the extended enterprise.