Electronic Data Interchange for the European Maritime Industry
ESPRIT 4: 22624 (01/97 - 12/98)

General Information:

The shipbuilding industry is characterised by the complexity of its products, concurrent processes and a large number of external companies taking part in the manufacturing process. Enabling these companies toward more efficient cooperation is one of the major challenges for the European shipbuilding industry, by reducing costs to gain a competitive edge against the low wage countries. One possibility of overcoming the cost barrier is the outsourcing of parts of the product development and production tasks. This in turn increases communication and organisational costs. IT and newly designed business processes are the enabling means to overcome this approach of outsourcing.

Shipyards to date are experiencing difficulties in developing and introducing special branch standards and constraining suppliers to use such standards because of the heterogeneous supplier structure. The standardisation problem can however be solved by means of an internationally accepted standard. This is the EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport, ISO 9735) for commercial data.

This standard defines a significant number of messages for different applications (e.g. order, delivery, inquiry etc.) which reduces the communication overhead for the information exchange between companies. EDIMAR will focus on the commercial and design-refinement business chains of the shipbuilding process.

In shipbuilding, even major supply products are not standard off-the-shelf products. Therefore many products 'made-to-order' require a highly intensive data-exchange between shipyard and supplier. The international standard to support the exchange of product data for manufacturing, STEP, (Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data) will be extended by EDIMAR for exchange of engineering data, specially for ship mechanical systems (AP226. EDIMAR aims to integrate product, process and business data for relevant business chains in shipbuilding. The development of electronic data interchange (EDI), standard interfaces and inter-organisational work flow methods will lead to a complete electronic working environment with the following business objectives:

• reduction of cost of ship construction
• reduction of time to market and lead time for European shipbuilding
• enhanced inter-organisational cooperation in ship production
• development of work flow methods which include data management throughout the interorganisational information exchange process
• improved quality of data exchanged between industries

More info:
http://www.biba.uni-bremen.de/projects/edimar
Project page on Cordis

Contact:

DR. REINHARD AHLERS BALance TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING GmbH Contrescarpe 33, D-28203 Bremen, Germany Tel: +49-421-3351744 Fax: +49-421-3351711 Email: reinhard.ahlers@balance-bremen.de

Partner: