How to achieve seamless Information Flows in Shipbuilding

Shipyards typically use shipbuilding-specific CAD systems from AVEVA, CADMATIC, SIEMENS (incl. FORAN), HEXAGON, NAPA, or SSI to design the vessels’ steel structure. Unlike traditional mechanical CAD applications, these systems are highly feature-based and render the 3D geometry model based on the design intent. This spares designers from defining repetitive details like stiffener end cuts or cutouts manually. Additionally, these CAD models contain a wealth of manufacturing-relevant information, such as weld parameters or shrinkage compensation, which are needed for the NC programming of cutting and welding robots and for controlling the panel lines. The challenge is to extract this information and prepare it in such a way that it can be processed by the machine manufacturers' NC programming systems.

One of the world’s leading manufacturers of solutions for welding and production automation is the family-owned Finnish company PEMAMEK. The company’s headquarter is in Loimaa, Finland, with additional subsidiaries in six European countries and the United States. They have delivered over 15,000 welding automation solutions to customers. PEMA solutions are used not only in the marine and offshore industries, but also in metal fabrication, wind turbine manufacturing, power generation, the process industry, and heavy engineering.

PEMAConnect ensures a robust transfer of digital model information, including part topology, plate geometry, profile endcuts etc. We use our internal Ship XML format as neutral container. It allows the system-independent representation of part geometry and attributes, including parametricity, topology and assembly information.

The main challenge when transferring data to the PEMA software is understanding the complex and highly parameterized information structures of the respective CAD systems and mapping them to the target system. This expert knowledge is one of the unique selling points of PROSTEP's shipbuilding experts, who have been advising and supporting companies in the marine and offshore industries on the digitalization of their business processes for more than 25 years. 

Originally developed for one of Europe's largest shipyards that builds complex cruise ships - MEYER Turku Shipyard - PEMAConnect is now in productive use at several f major shipyards in the North Americas, Australia, and the UK, and discussions are currently underway to add more. The shipyards can use OpenPDM SHIP to significantly improve the consistency of their digital information flows. The automatic transfer of design data to NC machinery not only saves time but also reduces the risk of errors associated with the manual redesign for manufacturing purposes.

From the machine manufacturer's point of view, a key advantage of OpenPDM SHIP is that they can offer their customers integration with all leading CAD, PLM and ERP systems without having to develop and maintain countless interfaces. 
PROSTEP maintains partnerships with all major system providers in the shipbuilding industry, giving them access to the vendors’ native data models and ensuring that the connectors are continuously updated whenever the systems are updated. For this reason, PROSTEP also entered into a technology partnership with PEMAMEK. This enables the Finnish company to sell PEMAConnect as part of turnkey solutions for their NC machinery installations.

This article was first published in VDMA Special | Schiff&Hafen | Ship&Offshore | 2025/26