Next-generation Cruise Ships to be Designed with Intergraph® SmartMarine® Enterprise

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 and 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 SmartMarine Enterprise 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. “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 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.