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60 Maritime Professional 4Q 2011result while working with the rest of the AVEVA Marine suite. Another new product, AVEVA Engineering, adds further data integra- tion. This application enables a wide variety of schematic and tabular data to be created in, or imported into, a com-mon database from where it can berobustly controlled and shared across a project. Historically, every engineering company has created data in a variety of spreadsheets, databases and schematicCAD systems, none of which were inte-grated. Data was therefore frequently duplicated, with the inevitable inconsis- tencies, and impossible to control orshare effectively. Now such fragmented but valuable information can be proper- ly integrated, have any inconsistencies highlighted for correction, and beshared across the various disciplines that require it.Perhaps the most eagerly awaited new product is AVEVA Design Reuse. This is much more than just a ?Save As? func- tion; it enables all or parts of previous projects to be replicated for use on sub-sequent ones by also copying the ?intel- ligence? in the originals. The potential savings in design effort can be as high as 70%, whether for sister ship designs,or for creating new ships from modular design elements. Importantly, Design Reuse does more than simply replicatehull structure; it can replicate outfitting, equipment and drawing information. The retained intelligence between thevarious design elements enables the new version to be resized or re-propor- tioned as necessary. Different cata- logues and standards may also beapplied to the new design to meet spe- cific client requirements. DESIGN INTELLIGENCEOn the subject of design intelligence,the new AVEVA Space Management application makes extensive use of the ability to associate different types of information. Every hull structure is a form of ?egg box? of different volumes forming the various rooms, compart- ments, holds and so on. Manually creat-ing these subdivisions, adding their var- ious attributes (such as SOLAS classifi- cation, insulation specification, paint requirements and so on) and then updat-ing everything as the design evolves can be laborious and error-prone. AVEVA Space Management overcomes this by automatically creating an initial subdi-vision of a hull into volumes and then allowing these divisions to be interac- tively resized, merged, split or redefined as necessary. The software automatically updates the dependent attributes so that, for example, the total Bill of Materials for insulation or carpeting remains in stepwith the design.The advantages gained from integrat- ing marine and plant design solutionsare plain enough. Another new product will shortly be added to AVEVA Marine that brings further productivity to outfit- ting designers: AVEVA Pipe Supports ? Marine. The precursor of this, AVEVA Multi-Discipline Supports, has formany years been considered the prover- bial ?killer application? in the plant design world, dramatically reducing the labor required to design and specify thehuge numbers of different supports and hangers required. But this product isoverkill for marine outfitting so, rather than create a separate marine ?lite? ver- sion however, AVEVA has effectively implemented the ?lite? version as a par- ticular view of the full product. This offers the outfitting designer easy access to the more limited range of sup-ports typically used in shipbuilding, but retains access to the full functionality ifnecessary. So, a marine outfitting designer and a plant piping designerwill actually use the same product, but configured optimally to their individual needs.ECONOMY: TIME SAVED = COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE The kind of business benefits that arise through the combination of moreproduct capability and more extensive information sharing are considerable.Customers regularly report saving hun- dreds of man-hours per ship purelythrough the use of new or upgraded applications. Add to this the more gen- eral efficiency improvements that arise through better use and sharing of data,and the ability to tender for more com-plex, collaborative projects, and it is clear that integrating engineering with SOFTWARE (Photo: Aveva)The new AVEVA Surface Manager application can import data from third-party surface design programs. MP #4 (50-64):MP Layouts 11/8/2011 2:33 PM Page 60