USA: STX Signs Five Year Agreement with Intergraph to Improve Design Quality

Intergraph has signed a five-year contact with STX Europe, one of the major international players in the shipbuilding industry. STX France Solutions has purchased SmartMarine® Enterprise to improve its shipbuilding design efficiency and quality, while achieving better project stages coordination and accurate material management.

The agreement includes Intergraph SmartMarine 3D® and SmartPlant®Foundation, SmartPlant®P&ID, SmartPlant®Instrumentation, SmartPlant®Electrical Basic & Detailed, SmartPlant®Materials, SmartPlant®Foundation, SmartPlant®Review and SmartPlant®Review Publisher. The new system will help STX to reduce design man-hours and to improve its design quality with integration between disciplines and by sharing standard catalogs along the project life cycle. This will also enable STX to reduce costs.

Intergraph’s SmartMarine Enterprise suite is the world’s most advanced, integrated offshore and shipbuilding solution, driving improvements in design efficiency, production schedule, handover and overall life-cycle cost control for enhanced global competitiveness. Intergraph is a world leader in marine structure design and data management, endorsed and used by the world’s leading offshore and marine companies, including the most productive shipyard, the top offshore owner operator, the top fabrication yard and the top classification society in the world.

“We selected SmartMarineEnterprise after several months of evaluation and pilot projects because the software suite proposes a large scope of integrated functionalities, required to design complex works as cruise ships are,” said Christophe Dutrieux, CIO of STX France, said.  “It enables us to coordinate activities of hundreds of designers and subcontractors, by sharing the same model, the same catalogs, and by building a single bill of material of the ship. It provides us with the means to reduce design hours, to enhance our design quality and to improve integration and coordination between design and construction.

Management of bills of material (BOM) is a key element for STX projects, and the interface between engineering and business systems adds value to the company. Therefore, STX highly praised the integration between SmartMarine Enterprise and SAP. In addition, better consistency of data from design to construction was considered as key for STX to make the final decision. STX plans to build its next cruise ship prototype with Intergraph technology, which will be fully deployed in 2013.

Gerhard Sallinger, Intergraph Process, Power & Marine president, said, “STX’s exhaustive evaluation of competing enterprise solutions and its selection of Intergraph’s SmartMarine Enterprise signal the strength of our solutions within the marine and offshore industries.”

The ARC Advisory Group, a leading industry analyst firm, ranked Intergraph the No. 1 overall engineering design 3D software and process engineering tools (PET) provider worldwide according to its PET Worldwide Outlook Market Analysis and Forecast through 2013.

About STX France
STX Europe is an international shipbuilding group which aims to be the leading builder of cruise and offshore vessels. STX Europe AS is also the majority shareholder in STX OSV Holdings Limited listed on the Singapore Exchange (SGX). The group has a strong position in terms of developing state-of-the-art concepts, technology, processes and products for customers around the world. STX Europe AS comprises 6 shipyards in Finland, France and Norway in addition to 9 shipyards belonging to STX OSV Holdings Limited. STX Europe has approx. 16 000 employees.

About Intergraph

Intergraph is the leading global provider of engineering and geospatial software that enables customers to visualize complex data. Businesses and governments in more than 60 countries rely on Intergraph’s industry-specific software to organize vast amounts of data to make processes and infrastructure better, safer and smarter. The company’s software and services empower customers to build and operate more efficient plants and ships, create intelligent maps, and protect critical infrastructure and millions of people around the world.

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Source: Intergraph, June 8, 2011.