Status tracking in ship information modelling

Status tracking in ship information modelling is the foundation of successful project management. Whether it is ship construction, engineering, or equipment delivery, reliable feedback from the process is a must. Naval Architect enables data-driven status tracking from the project start.

How do we do it wrong?

Among the many sins of shipbuilding project members, one most often leads to cost and schedule overruns. That is unreliable status tracking. Given the tight deadlines of engineering and production, status tracking becomes another time-consuming activity. As a result, it is often mistreat leading to distorted or delayed feedback for project management. Excel-based status reports provided by various disciplines and manually assembled into an overall picture by project managers quickly become too complex and slow to reliably manage a shipbuilding project. Status tracking without proper visualisation and connection to actual project data becomes a problem and requires a lot of additional time for meetings and communication.

Ship data model enables simple and reliable status tracking

In Naval Architect, the easy-to-create 3D model with data layer is used for various purposes in the design and production process, such as weight calculation or other estimations. Therefore the model is created in parallel and requires no additional effort from the design team.

Whatever you build and whatever you want to track during the process, Naval Architect is always the system that suits your needs, thanks to its fully customisable data layer. The same object in the model can contain multiple, user-defined properties and calculations, and can be assigned to different classification systems. The same data, once entered into the system, can be used for tracking different features of the project and different visualisations.

Examples of status tracking in Naval Architect

Our demo ship is divided into 6 mega-blocks, each consisting of several blocks. Style sheets allow the block subdivision to be visualised in any view, including 3D. The views can be downloaded as AutoCAD files with all styling applied. Learn more about the integration with AutoCAD in this video.

Thanks to the customisable data layer, you can track the status of various project-related metrics. In our example, we track the maturity of various hull outfitting activities, such as the installation of foundations, equipment, or corrosion protection, based on the block subdivision. The status is visualised both in the view and in the form of a custom breakdown table.

The engineering planning is also tracked using the same block subdivision and custom date properties.

In our demo configuration, platform users can define tasks and assign them to other members of the project, such as equipment suppliers. The task contains properties such as the description of the work, the time needed and the person responsible. The project manager can track the execution of the tasks by the supplier, by the location or system in question.

Status tracking tool made to measure

The above examples cover only a small number of possible real-life situation. Naval Architect is a customisable system that allows you to create your own data structure based on 3D geometry. Status tracking tools are finally made to measure thanks to ship information modelling.

We are cloud based ship information modelling system

Naval Architect is a cloud-based system accessible through a web browser. All functionalities are accessible through a small powerbook or a tablet. This allows real-time status reports directly from the production site.

Our user interface is simple and can be operated by non-technical people. Naval Architect allows read-only access for easy status monitoring by project stakeholders or higher management.

Naval Architect integrates with other systems such as MS Excel and allows for automatic export of data from the data model. We write more about this here!