DNV Software has served the yard industry for years with well-known products such as Nauticus Hull and Nauticus Machinery. With the introduction of Nauticus Early Design and Brix Foundation, the yard offering has reached a new level.

By adding web services such as Environmental Performance System (EPS) and TenderSuite to the well-known product range, the total solution will be new to many DNV Software yard customers. Here is a description of some of the main features of DNV Software’s Yard Package.

Innovative approach
DNV Software has invested heavily in new technologies, enabling more agile software development. Both Nauticus Hull and Nauticus Machinery were redesigned with multi-users and digital collaboration in focus. By implementing information workflow as an important technology, DNV Software helps existing and new customers find the right balance between emerging technologies and new ways of engineering.

Information workers spend up to 30 per cent of their workday just looking for the data they need to complete a task, and 15–25 per cent of their time on non-productive, information-related activities. Both figures are untenable positions for any organisation. (‘Document Collaboration’, Butler Group 01.12.2006)

Brix Project Manager provides a powerful mechanism for knowledge management through a common project space for all ship design project members. It enables project management (planning and follow-up) and supports project members with a working environment to execute their part of the work by providing detailed business process support through application integration, work description and a common document archive. With Brix Project Manager, ‘how you work’ is the main focus.

All information related to the different activities is easily accessible directly from the task at hand, covering produced results as well as guidelines and work descriptions. In addition to project planning and scheduling, the solution also includes seamless integration of all project documents (letters, faxes, emails, reports etc.). Notification and work progress reporting is also part of the delivered solution. The solution also provides the management with the progress and status of the complete project portfolio with information aggregated across projects.

Process templates and project templates are cornerstones in Brix Project Manager. A process template defines a set of activities very similar to the existing packaging of Nauticus Hull, showing best practice of the steps needed to perform a specific analysis in order to complete a design task. For each activity a template defines which applications to use, dataflow, conditions and dependencies, as well as estimated duration and man-hours.

By using Brix Project Manager, DNV Software and its customer base have new capabilities that merge the best from Nauticus Hull and Nauticus Early Design. Although Nauticus Hull and Nauticus Early Design are separate industry-specific templates, the project itself stays consistent, thanks to the revision management capabilities found in Brix Project Manager.

The capabilities of Nauticus Hull as a service to Nauticus Early Design’s ship-specific product model are a prerequisite in fulfilling DNV Software’s long-term strength assessment goal. The principal objective of the requirements defined by computational ship analysis is to provide a framework for the evaluation of the hull
structure against defined acceptance criteria based on an extended calculation procedure covering load and structural response analyses. Nauticus Early Design’s open modelling environment accommodates integration of third-party model structures. The imported data are instantly available for further work within the GeniE application environment.

Nauticus Early Design’s export facility allows users to extract conceptual data for further use within its own workflow by efficient tools for each separate task in the strength assessment process. One of the key steps in a ship analysis is the idealisation process. Thus an idealisation from a design model to an engineering model that has been embedded with transformation knowledge in order to comply with all the intentions, constraints and rules that have been set forth. The idealisation may be viewed as a sequence of transformations where we record each step in order to provide a ‘way back’ from the calculation model to the design model.

Managers do acknowledge that knowledge sharing is important – however, they often fail to implement the means to enable organisational learning. By working from a template hierarchy, including activity, process and project templates, Brix enables an organisation to easily benchmark business performance. By capturing and supporting work methods, and by measuring the performance, these results can be used to improve an organisation’s best practice. DNV Software’s approach enables a project-oriented organisation to introduce knowledge sharing at the team level, where sharing between team members and cross team sharing keep the project consistent during the design phase.