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After enjoying a number of boom years, German shipbuilders are also feeling the impact of the worldwide economic crisis. A decline in new orders and an increase in order cancellations pose a problem for the shipbuilding industry. IT experts recommend using the crisis as an opportunity to improve competitiveness. Data integration and data communication in the development networks concerned with the ship development process in particular still offer significant rationalization potential.

Compared with the automotive or aerospace industry, the shipbuilding industry is characterized by extremely short development and production cycles. It takes only a little more than a year for a vessel to evolve from initial design to launch. Up to 200 suppliers may be involved in its development. Insufficient communication between the shipyards and their partners is becoming an ever more significant obstacle in the development process. Fortunately, solutions for process automation in product data communication provide anelegant way of avoiding such problems.