During the recent shipbuilding boom, most shipbuilders have been struggling with delivery capacity. The financial crisis has proved a new era for most shipbuilders; efficient planning, lean production and 'right' projects will be cruical for healthy business margins.
DNV Software has developed Brix Project Manager enabling yards to improve quality, reduce overhead cost and increase engineering productivity by utilising the power of sharing Best Engineering Practices in an efficient way throughout the organisation.
Process templates and project templates are the cornerstones of the solution. A process template defines a business process with respect to activities, conditions, application integration and input/output. Process templates contain information about estimated man-hours and duration for each activity, which is useful for initial planning. Process templates can be added at any time to the system and made available to its users.
A project template defines a plan for a given project type by defining the process templates such a project should handle. Different project types can be supported by providing several project templates. After a plan is created, changes can be made to suit the specific project.
The developed solution covers the following main functions:
- Basic functionality for project planning
- Execution of activities in work processes
- Monitor progress of activities such as deviation reports
- Managing drawings, comments and correspondence.
A new building project cannot be covered by a single plan. Brix Project Manager enables a set of plans to interact within the main project, such as main schedule, production plan, inspection plan and test plan.
Within a plan the system provides several perspectives, enabling the user to view the plan according to for instance SFI structure, Discipline, Work package or Unit. Different users work with different perspectives; a single task can be displayed in one or several perspectives.
Plans can be created by using project templates and process templates.
