ATLAS ELEKTRONIK GmbH, Bremen, is a worldwide leader in maritime electronics both above and below the water surface - with over 100 years of experience. The product portfolio goes from the most advanced sonar systems via deep-sea surveying to minesweeping. More than 1,700 staff members are employed in Germany, Denmark, Australia and Malaysia.
For projecting its submarine electronics, after thorough comparison ATLAS has opted for Engineering Base (EB), the new software platform from AUCOTEC that offers new solutions for plant design in a project-oriented and data-base-driven manner.
Safe
Up to now the graphic system and the database were separate entities, the adjustment was done manually, and redundancy in lists and drawings was unavoidable. The equivalence of both views in Engineering Base means a tremendous saving of labor and ensured data integrity. Because any change, no matter at which point of the diagram, automatically entails data consistency in all other views – including the Explorer view.
Several users can simultaneously access the diagram and be sure that their version is the current one. Moreover even objects that are not yet graphically represented can be edited.
As Usual
The previously used Office tools including the Access database were meanwhile overtaxed by the further development of ATLAS‘ highly sensitive high-tech products. Familiar working practices must not be dispensed with, however, for Engineering Base uses Office tools: Microsoft Visio for graphic representations, the SQL server as reliable database and VBA, the familiar programming language.
Optimized
From the user interface for the input to the finished documentation, EB offers the Bremen company a „completely carefree package“. Moreover the method of operation of Engineering Base resulted in a new definition of the work-flow and thus improved the internal ATLAS procedures quasi as a by-product. Thus the people at ATLAS think that the special EB solution for the submarine segment can easily be extended to other areas.