Kvaerner puts collaborative engineering in control

Kværner Oilfield Products (KOP) expects to make up to 20% savings in engineering time by installing £1 million worth of SmarTeam collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. The firm says it will be able to access and manage its multiple engineering databases across sites and departments much more effectively by creating a single global point of reference for all employees. Vice president of project and engineering support at KOP Morten Bråss says that ultimately the system will replace all of its site and project document control systems around the world, also facilitating re-use of designs and drawings for project quoting and management. KOP, which manufacture sub-sea oil production and distribution systems for oil companies throughout the world, is a £400 million company with offices in Norway, England, Scotland, Brazil, Australia and America. Bråss says that with a vast amount of product design data, supply chain information and ERP data, change control and matching designs to relevant business information had become a real challenge. “Because we are constantly revisiting and modifying our designs, the retrieval and updating of files is difficult to manage,” he says. “We need to know that we are working with the most up to date designs – and without SmarTeam this has been proving very difficult. “Also, we wanted this data to be able to work alongside our other business information. We had all these systems creating supposed knowledge, but they weren’t talking to each other. A piece of the jigsaw seemed to be missing.” KOP’s initial implementation of SmarTeam looks very much like a pilot for roll out to the rest of the Aker Kværner Group. Bråss confirms that the parent company “closely monitoring” progress of the KOP project. Chris Jones, president of European Operations at SmarTeam Europe says: “With 38 companies, this is obviously an important contract for us. This initial deployment creates a real opportunity to prove just how good SmarTeam is in a controlled and measurable way – at one of the world’s largest engineering companies.”