Our yard solutions offers the ship yard a way to capture and spread Best Engineering Practices throughout the organisation as well as effective collaboration with external partners.

Capturing and spreading knowledge requires an approach including both a process and the information and data related to it. Equally important is that the engineering processes must be viewed in a life cycle context. Our solutions are based on Brix Foundation, and supports scheduling and planning of engineering tasks and digital collaboration and information sharing in a project or process driven work environment.

Best Engineering Practice
By introducing Best Engineering Practice as a concept, DNV Software has realised that integration of systems and people will only be successful if you are able to monitor and control the actual processes involving both the people and the systems. By its nature, software enforces structure on design organisations. Over time, technical software investments often result in safeguarding engineering knowledge and should therefore be considered a very important part of a company's intellectual capital.
The challenge is to create frameworks that enable freedom of content while maintaining a well-defined structure. Such frameworks allow designers to focus their creativity on content – the design itself - rather than on infrastructure and technology related issues. DNV Software has developed the Brix Foundation supporting the Yard Industry’s Best Engineering Practices.

Collaboration
By introducing a collaboration mechanism as part of the framework, it is possible to define a simple process template. Deviations from the standard flow are left to be resolved through the built in collaboration mechanism in stead of explicitly modelled into the flow generating complex task sequences. The mechanism is simple but effective: by introducing a messaging scheme which is part of the framework, the engineer can request information at any time from any workflow participant. The messaging conversations are logged and kept as part of the process history for later analysis and learning. Other collaboration mechanisms like user notification in the workflow inbox, by email, or collaboration services like Microsoft Live Communication Server are also utilised where appropriate.

Document Services
It is essential that the engineers have easy access to all important information based on his/hers current context. In addition to data stored in databases, the engineer will also work with documents. The documents which are part of the process flow will appear as an integrated part of the application. This is made possible by interfacing directly with the enterprise document management system or through the Brix Document Service.

Flexibility
“Ad hoc” workflow may be introduced as part of the solution in order to increase end user flexibility. The user can chose from a set of pre-defined templates covering the majority of expected exceptions. By this way, we keep the standard flow as clean as possible, and leaving the decision to the knowledge worker of when a detailed analysis is required. It is important to realise that the ad hoc changes only applies to the instantiated process template (running process), the original template is not changed.

Learning
Changes to the workflow are saved together with the process for later evaluation and experience feedback. If one encounters many similar changes to the same process, the process owner may chose to incorporate these as part of the template process.