Software, services, and expertise for the business of shipbuilding.

        • Achieve a Quick ROI
        • Sliced implementations and our expertise means a benefit from day one, without a lengthy setup.

        • Integrate, Collaborate, Re-use
        • SSI’s Open Shipbuilding Platform gives you a future-proof source of truth for your shipbuilding projects.

        • Change Management
        • Get visibility into changes, understand the impacts, and have the right information at the right time to execute the change.

        • Adapt and Innovate
        • Create a local or virtualized shipbuilding environment for your global distributed workforce.

        • Changing from Another Solution
        • SSI makes it easy to switch from other platforms and keep your existing data.

        • Design
        • The most significant opportunities to impact the cost of building and operating a ship are found in the design and engineering phase.

          Initial Design  |  Basic Design  |  Detailed Design

        • Build
        • Even a smaller shipbuilding project is immense in scope and scale. Manage the challenges that are unique to ship construction.

          Prepare  |  Fabricate  |  Assemble

        • Maintain
        • With the majority of a ship’s life taking place after it’s been built, it’s crucial to ensure that the organization has a clear picture of the vessel at all times.

          Digital Twin  |  Repair / Refit  |  Operations

        • Nexus
        • SSI Nexus is a community for users, creators, & implementers of SSI software.

        • SSI Certified Training
        • SSI Certified Training allows SSI users to access detailed training exercises, materials, courses, and certifications.

        • SSI Blogs
        • The SSI blogs are your place to get insights from our CEO into the intersection of shipbuilding and technology, see how shipbuilding is moving forward, and keep up with SSI news.

          Lighthouse Waveform  |  Shipbuilding Solutions

        • ShipConstructor
        • A complete line of solutions for the design, engineering, and construction of ships and offshore projects.

        • EnterprisePlatform
        • Tools to connect and share data across every system in the shipyard and make information available.

        • ShipbuildingPLM
        • The only truly shipbuilding-specific product lifecycle management (PLM) platform.

        • Company
        • Learn more about SSI and our leadership.

        • Locations & Contact
        • You need a partner with a global presence.

        • News
        • The latest on SSI and shipbuilding.

        • Events
        • Join us at our next event, conference, or trade show.

March 26, 2014
Behind the Curtain

SSI_Autodesk

This will be my first “Behind the Curtain” type of post. Every now and then I will share something about SSI or ShipConstructor that is obvious from the inside, but perhaps is not as clearly seen from without. Better aligning these two viewpoints benefits us all.

Two weeks ago Denis Morais, Pat David and I returned from Autodesk One Team Conference in Las Vegas. This is the annual sales summit for all Autodesk sales partners. SSI attends because we are one of the most significant Autodesk developers and because we are an Autodesk reseller in the Americas in our own right.

Spending that much time with Autodesk employees and other Autodesk resellers, you begin to get an idea of how many of them think of ShipConstructor. Especially with such a heavy focus on Autodesk’s own products, it becomes clear that a majority Autodesk thinks of ShipConstructor as a plugin to AutoCAD. Any overall implementation including other Autodesk products is thought of as an Autodesk solution. (I should take a minute to be fair to those of our champions within Autodesk and say that not everyone in Autodesk thinks that way. There are an increasing number of people who have indeed drunk the SSI Kool-Aid)

SCPlugin

And frankly, the longer a client has been with SSI, the more likely it is that they think of ShipConstructor this way too. In the case of our clients it is mostly because earlier versions of ShipConstructor were plugins to AutoCAD.

Newer clients, who were never exposed to older versions of ShipConstructor, tend to think of ShipConstructor in more or less the same way as we do ourselves. With our Marine Information Modeling approach to shipbuilding software, and with AutoCAD being mainly a viewport into our product model database, we think of ShipConstructor as a range of products built on an AutoCAD foundation. Essentially ShipConstructor becomes the Autodesk solution for shipbuilding.

AutodeskPlatform

Why does this matter? It matters because the workflows users implement inside an engineering department are ShipConstructor workflows, not AutoCAD workflows. Once you realize this, you just as quickly realize that the rest of the Autodesk products that form a complete ShipConstructor solution can be (and need to be) implemented in the context of the ShipConstructor workflows.

This was perhaps less important when clients were only using Autodesk Navisworks for engineering review and perhaps Autodesk Inventor for some 3D equipment modeling. However, in just the last few years Autodesk has significantly extended their range of reality capture, simulation, visualization, collaboration, and engineering tools. It is critical that client’s think of all of these capabilities in a ShipConstructor context, as they are in many cases both the best answer to each particular challenge, and the one SSI looks at as our answer.

If you don’t already think of SSI and ShipConstructor this way, I would challenge everyone to ask yourself if it’s time you did…

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Post Comments

  1. Tommy Holder says:

    I agree. This is a very good article.

  2. Jeroen Walhof says:

    Great to see how it all fits together. Impressive growth too.

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