STX Finland Turku Shipyard saves time and critical resources with ROOM-LINK


Sep 10, 2013

After just two months of introducing ROOM-LINK, STX Finland Turku Shipyard is already cashing in on a number of benefits.

“In many of our projects we prepare a rather detailed General Arrangement drawing. The life cycle of a serious ship project includes lots of design variations, testing, and modifications. For many of the variants, we want to carry out a large number of analyses with NAPA. We gain in many ways from the much shorter time we now need to spend on NAPA geometry modelling.” explains Olli Jantunen, Head of Naval Architecture at STX Finland Turku Shipyard.

A high throughput of projects is characteristic of the Turku shipyard project design department, which makes the design team all too familiar with the challenges that this brings along: the engineers responsible for the overall feasibility and for providing accurate data for estimating profitability are often fully occupied. Consequently, they sometimes run out of hands when making the NAPA models needed in many of the naval architectural analyses.

ROOM-LINK eases these kinds of peak load situations by enabling the overloaded naval architects and theory engineers to share the tasks of modelling and updating models with colleagues who have less or no NAPA experience. Thus no one needs any longer to copy points and curve shapes between different systems. The work that many consider both monotonous and prone to errors can now be put aside.

Furthermore, modelling with ROOM-LINK takes significantly less time compared to the previously applied method. This makes it possible for the specialised resources to focus more of their time to analysing the available information. Mr Jantunen notes that he is astonished by how the project design team's performance has increased thanks to ROOM-LINK.


Mr Juha Kujanpää enjoys the easy transfer of the complicated geometric shapes and attribute information from AutoCAD

Reflecting on the department's user experiences, Project Engineer Juha Kujanpää is very satisfied with ROOM-LINK and its new feature of controlling information with attributes in AutoCAD. The link moves attributes, along with generating the geometry, into arrangement tables. Mr Kujanpää is also pleased with being able to do tedious scantling work and input information by using AutoCAD only, as this considerably cuts down the time needed for modelling.

Lastly, Mr Jantunen highlights that with ROOM-LINK the shipyard has been able to narrow the gap between their key design system and their key naval architectural analysis system. In addition to making NAPA modelling easy for practically anyone, ROOM-LINK has increased motivation for modelling work and is saving the company time by speeding up the design cycle. “Most importantly, by implementing the ROOM-LINK system we can now prepare our offers quicker than before,” concludes the delighted department head.





STX FINLAND Turku Shipyard is the experienced builder of cruise ships and other technically demanding specialised ships and offshore units. The shipyard, specialised in building post-Panama class cruise vessels, is among the largest and most modern shipyards in Europe, with a land area of 144 ha and a newbuilding dock measuring 365 x 80 metres.

ROOM-LINK is a joint venture product between Ship Solutions FI Ltd Oy and Nerom Software Ltd. Ship Solutions FI is an independent, privately-owned consulting and engineering company offering a range of NAPA services. Nerom Software provides the solution for the AutoCAD integration.