David Thomos from AVEVA talks about life cycle management as a new business field for shipyards and which role the digital handover plays here. Since intellectual property rights are critical, the software company is working on equivalent solutions
Mr Thomson, how do shipyards care about life cycle management and could they generate additional business by doing[ds_preview] so?
David Thomson: Yes, to both questions. Shipyards are taking an increased interest in the whole topic of life cycle services, especially European shipyards. With their deeper engineering knowledge, they rely on such services to compete against low-cost competitors in Asia, which is difficult because shipbuilding is primarily a labour-intensive business. There are many good examples, such as the Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft which has established a good relationship with many shipowners.
For example when the ship is delivered, it is often accompanied by an extensive digital handover pack containing such information as lists of equipment and spare parts with which to populate the onboard planned maintenance system. Some yards continue to provide a value-adding through-life service on special vessel types such as dredgers, for which the shipyard itself normally makes the equipment. And there is increasing use of »black box« data recorders that capture data for the analysis and improvement of reliability and maintenance.
Their reward comes partly through recurring revenues from the services themselves, but mostly from the repeat business that such high-quality customer service generates.
What role do 3D models play for life cycle services?
Thomson: The use of 3D models for purposes such as condition monitoring is still in the early stages. The problem is that no shipyard yet hands over 3D models to the owner. We are starting to see the handover of DVDs and PDF documents, though, but paper drawings are still most common.
Ideally, the shipyard or design office would prepare a 3D model that reflects the as-delivered condition and the owner or operator would continue to maintain this model in the as-operated condition, reflecting changes to the machinery, the structure and so on. This is common in the plant industries, but currently almost unknown in the marine industry. Sometimes during the design and construction phase shipyards may provide full access to 3D models but they don’t hand over the information afterwards.
»We are investing heavily in appropriate solutions to protect our customer’s intellectual property«
Why are they so reluctant to do so?
Thomson: Shipyards are understandably reluctant to hand over 3D models because of copyright issues; a ship design represents considerable intellectual property. If you have developed a highly fuel-efficient hull form with optimized structural design, you really don’t want a copy of it coming out of a low-cost shipyard that hasn’t had to put in the same level of investment and know-how. For 3D to play its full potential in the vessel’s life cycle, we need to find a way to export those models in a secure way.
How far have you come yet in the field of IPR protection?
Thomson: We are investing heavily in appropriate solutions to protect our customers’ intellectual property. Already AVEVA Marine software enables users to encrypt databases and simplify models, which is a first level of protection. We are also looking at Digital Rights Management (DRM) companies on ways of applying DRM to our products.
Generally, being at COMPIT what main trends do you see that are important for AVEVA and your work?
Thomson: The discussion about developing the mathematics to the next step beyond NURBS is certainly relevant for helping us to advance our hull design software. Another important topic – as discussed before – are Product Data Models (PDM). There are several initiatives looking into interoperability and more specifically the use of frameworks for data model exchange. AVEVA is already looking at such a framework with the oil and gas industry.
In the past, CAD – and IT generally – was typically about applications to solve specific business problems. So there was a lot of focus on business process optimization in individual engineering or manufacturing areas. Now we need to get these different, highly optimized processes and applications to work together to improve overall project and business performance. Therefore, we need more open standards.
Being a market leader, aren’t you afraid to open up too much?
Thomson: Absolutely not. With the advent of social media and the opening up of business in general the major CAD vendors are much more open with each other these days. This might make it harder to stay ahead, but being open to other systems and able to work together with your competitors is where the IT industry has got to be. In the end, it’s the right way to benefit the customer.
Nikos Späth
