The Italian engineering company GP Service S.R.L. has entered into an agreement with the Spanish Sener Ingeniería y Sistemas S.A. for the license to use the FORAN CAD/CAM System in their ship design activities in Italy.
The agreement includes the implementation of the complete FORAN hull structural package, forms generation and advanced design and drafting. Designers from GP Service have received on-site training in the disciplines of the FORAN System during 2008. GP Service is currently using FORAN to develop the hull structure of yachts.
With this new license agreement SENER continues in its line of making FORAN a major player in the field of ship design and production software. The System has the backing of SENER’s in-house ship design capabilities, with the resultant quality of the personnel associated with the System, of a very high standard and very responsive in all disciplines and a complete integration of the entire range of ship design disciplines: Forms, Naval Architecture and General Arrangement, Hull Structure, Outfitting, Electrical, Build Strategy, Drafting, Virtual Reality and Design Review, Design Change and Access Control, PLM.
Giuseppe Podella, designer at GP Service S.r.l. explains the advantages of using FORAN:
“FORAN has been a great help for us for structure modelling, parts subdivision and nesting drawings. At the beginning we made all these activities manually, wasting a long time and with many possibilities of error. This means to be very careful every time you have to modify something, because in a metal ship every part leans to another and if you modify a part, maybe you will need to change another one close to it.
We appreciate a lot the FORAN associativity because we often need to modify the ship shape when we have already started modelling it, and the associative features of FORAN allow to update all the model without to rebuild the parts already created.
Moreover FORAN permits to have a complete materials and profiles database, that is useful to extract data sheet containing precious information like part name, weight and area of plates, that allows to know costs and weight balancing of the whole vessel. After that, the nesting module is a strong help to make the 3D model become real: the plates match perfectly and the bending data permits to have the sheet ready to be welded.
Thanks FORAN we can save a lot of time and we are sure that output project data are correct; the only task of designers is to plan the modelling correctly at beginning, FORAN does the rest.”