New production concept at MacGregor

 

MacGregor Offshore have implemented a new production management concept for their crane production in Kristiansand, Norway.

 

Hydramarine, a Norwegian based subsidiary of the MacGregor group, is market leading in design and production of advanced cranes, capable of handling objects up to 400 ton and at depths down to 4.000 meters. The cranes they produce is capable of compensating for a ships movement in rough seas, thus allowing a supply vessel to safely place a laser on an oilrig, even when the ship is moving.

 

Besides the big and advanced cranes, Hydramarine is also producing a number of smaller cranes, down to the comparably small davits, used for launching rescue vessels from the side of a ship. A part of the crane production is based in another MacGregor subsidiary based in Singapore.

 

MacGregor have been facing increasing challenges in supplying enough cranes to a rapidly expanding market. The order book is filled for the next 3 years, but the company needed to trim the projects to fit the capacity and eliminate bottlenecks in the production process. For instance all cranes need to undergo rigorous testing to achieve the certificates required for offshore operations. A part of the testing process takes place on massive test foundations, of which there is only a limited number on the production site. The same problem arise when mounting the cranes on ships, it requires a rather large dock area, which also becomes a bottleneck.

 

The challenge Hydramarine faced was to create an overview of all the projects in the order book and then create a budget of the necessary resource.

 

The company has been using Dynamics AX for some time, to manage the financial aspect of the projects but wasn’t satisfied with the project module. Hydramarine required a project management tool that would be able to cooperate with Dynamics AX and could provide overview of projects and the usage of resources.

 

Though Columbus IT, who manages the Dynamics AX part, Hydramarine was put in contact with the Danish company Hans Tørsleff Management Systems. Hans Tørsleff Management Systems is the only company supplying a thoroughly tested integration solution between Dynamics AX and Microsoft Project Server.

 

The project was initiated, all the existing “stand-alone” project plans at Hydramarine were worked out and 6 project templates were created. These templates reflect the method for managing all future projects in the company. The process defining the “best-practice” was hard work, as every department had to define their interfaces and deliveries. Only then would it be possible to create master plans reflecting the projects from contract formation, through engineering and procurement to assembly.

 

 

The basic idea behind the Project Management Process

Hydramarine has established a Project Management Process that store all project information on one data source, so no matter who is getting access to projects all will look at the same data. Further plans for different departments are linked together, so delays in one department will affect other department. The backbone system is a Project Server, which stores all data on a SQL-Server. The client in the solution is Microsoft Project Professional.

 

The Project data are linked to Hydramarine’s ERP system, Dynamics AX, so project forecasts and hour budgets will be shown in Dynamics AX. Further, actual hours registered In Dynamics AX either through the Shop Floor Control module or the Time Sheet module will transfer to the Project Server, so project managers can see progress on their tasks how many hours that have been spend and update remaining man hours.

 

 

    Diagram 1: link between the different modules

 

Project Management model

The Hydramarine planning model consists of a main project plan for the overall project for e.g. a big crane. The main plan links all the subprojects for the different departments to one master plan and shows the overall timeline for the project and the total man hour budget.

 

Hydramarine have built a model that consists of a Master Project and Subprojects for Procurement, Engineering, Assembly, and Test. Some of departments only support an Excel spread sheet as a task list that is stored on the main schedule.

 

 

 

Diagram 2: the relationship between master plan- and sub-plans 

 

Project Server architecture

This section describes how Project Server is related to the different component the solution for Hydramarine include.

 

Project Server runs on an SQL-Server – a relational database – and SQL-Server is installed on a Windows Server. You can access Project Server in tow different ways through Microsoft Project Professional (the tool for all project managers) or you can have access to Project Server data through Project Web Access. Project Web Access is like project portal where you can see project information trough a number of view. The diagram below gives an overview over the architecture and how the different components interact. The interface between Project Server and Dynamics AX goes through SQL-Server trough the data connector.

 

 

 

 

 

The interface between Project Server and Dynamics AX is shown on the diagram below, Project Server and Dynamics AX interact trough an Dynamics AX add in and PDS (Project Data Service) and a web service called HTMS BizTalkConnector.

 

 

 

 

Caption: (from left): Olli Isotalo, President of the MacGREGOR Group, Ambassador of Finland to PRC, H.E. Mr. Antti Kuosmanen, Tianjin City Political Commerce Vice Chairman, Mr. Liu Chang Xi and Henrik Vildenfeldt, General Manager of MacGREGOR’s Offshore division at the opening ceremony