L&T Shipbuilding is involved in the manufacturing of warships, submarines and auxiliary vessels, from concept design to construction for new builds. Collaborating with Alma from 2012, L&T has continuously improved its production and nesting workflow, effectively achieving the challenges of the shipbduiling sector.
L&T Shipbuilding, renowned in the maritime industry in India
L&T Shipbuilding operates two modern shipyards in India – one at Kattupalli and the other one on the west coast at Hazira. L&T provides new construction in commercial shipbuilding, defense and as well as ship repairs, refits and conversions.
The challenge: leverage modern CAM tools integrated with CAD
L&T was using outdated tools for nesting : Nestix and Tribon Nesting tools. This was a problem as they realized they could be wasting raw material. Secondly, they had a data problem, dispatched from each other. To be more efficient, L&T decided to first, deploy a modern nesting solution and second, that Nupas Cadmatic, the 3D design solutions for ship design they were using, had to be connected to the CAM software.
The solution: Act/Cut, upgraded to the Almacam Cut
The first implementation of the Alma’s nesting solution (named Act/Cut, the Alma’s very first CAM software), has been made on the site of L&T Hazira with the aim to optimize sheet metal nesting before cutting.
After its successful deployment, L&T wanted to go a step forward and made Act/Cut interact with Nupas Cadmatic. To meet this challenge and match with L&T requirements, Alma shipyard team made very specific developments. Then, Act/Cut has successfully replaced Nestix and Tribon Nesting tools, that used to be the nesting solutions in L&T.
In 2023, well aware that a CAM software needs to be up to date to benefit from the latest innovations, L&T totally upgraded his deployment from Act/Cut to the brand new Almacam Cut software.
The results: Faster data sharing and ready-to-cut files
Years after years, L&T Shipbuilding has continuously improved and automated his production nesting flow with the following gains:
- Thanks to CAD-CAM integration with Cadmatic, L&T can now to retrieve the status of parts (with nesting location, etc.) for a block of the ship.
- Improved management of large volumes of data, very useful on construction sites.
- Better support for part revisions.
More precisely, L&T can now automatically:
- Extract and import DXF files containing multiple parts: unitary parts (DPR files) are imported after retrieving and processing the key part attributes (part name, material and thickness) from the DXF files
- Create manufacturing orders (MOs) for the imported files or manage MOs by adding imported files to them whenever it is appropriate
- Import CSV files from ERP system and export parts and offcut lists.