Tekla enables delivery of heavy engineering steel structure in 50% less time

JFE Engineering India Pvt. Ltd., is a wholly owned subsidiary of JFE Engineering Corporation, Japan, which is globally renowned & is the largest EPC solution provider within Japan. JFE believes and strives to move forward with the goal of becoming a world-leading “comprehensive engineering company”, by delivering products and services which form the foundations of societies and industries.

JFE Engineering plays a vital role in improving the efficiency of cargo loading and unloading at ports and harbours by providing quay-side container cranes and other critical products. JFE Engineering is contributing to society through the installation of port and harbour infrastructure.
 

Developing new methods to deliver port crane structure:

Port crane structure is a type of movable heavy engineering steel structure, utilized for loading & unloading of cargo-containers from ships to ground or ground vehicles at ports. Port-Crane height varies from minimum 50m to 60m and weight around 300 to 400 tonnes.

The executing team focused its efforts to develop paper free manufacturing workshops and new automated methods for creation of production design data using Tekla Structures. Another objective was to develop the output for different departments like material group, logistic group, planning group, production group, etc. thus enabling them to meet their requirements easily.
 

“We lead in innovative methods for preparation of production design data for various JFE heavy engineering products, the port crane structure is one such product. In developing and delivering it, Trimble products namely - Tekla Structures and Trimble Connect - worked like a wonder drug for us. Tekla helped us to tackle the structure’s complexities, develop customized systems, reduce process time & maintain accuracy of 3D/2D with the help of custom components & open API features. Whereas Trimble Connect supported us with in-house and external collaboration. The project’s exceptional success has encouraged our team to exercise the same process in bridge structures, heavy engineering structures and other industrial machinery structures.”

- Mr. Gaurav Kasar, Sr. Steel Structure Engineer, JFE Engineering India Pvt. Ltd. 

Achieving the inversely proportional targets of reduced time and increased quality

Some of the major challenges for the executing team was the preparation of complex 3D model, reduction of the overall time taken and elimination of errors in developing newer methods using automation processes without compromising on the manufacturing standards set by JFE Engineering. Further, meeting the requirements of the different divisions like logistics, material, production, etc. was another vital task that the project team considered.

The complexity of the port crane structure, understanding the structure and internal complex geometry of every girder was no less than a challenge for the delivery team. In addition, there were three different drawing standards the team had to follow for GA and fabrication design data in different formats and to match the output was also an overwhelming task for them.

Leveraging Tekla’s Constructible models for intelligent data

“Port crane structure is a very complex dynamic structure. Conventionally, we were fully dependent on 2D CAD, which tends to consume time in understanding the structure, preparation of fabrication design data & coordination. We were in search of a solution that could give us smart intelligent data from one single 3D model. Trimble’s Tekla software gave us that efficiency. And Trimble Connect was best tool we found for managing the complete lifecycle of the whole project.” Mr. Gaurav Kasar, Sr. Steel Structure Engineer, JFE Engineering India Pvt. Ltd.

The level & flexibility of customization achieved through the advanced features of Tekla Structures enabled the team to deliver the dynamic and complex steel structure most efficiently saving 50% of time. The other benefits achieved through leveraging Tekla Structures & Trimble Connect were as follows,

Advanced programming feature: One of major challenges faced by the project team was numbering of the same part in two different ways as per the design and production standards of JFE Engineering. Tekla Structures’ advanced API features enabled the team to control the numbering for the same parts and assign numbers in two different styles.

Customized custom components: Preparation of the customised custom component library, as per the team’s requirement, helped them to reduce the process time by 50% while maintaining the highest levels of accuracy in the project. This ultimately resulted in the reduction of the overall cost of the project.

Project management and collaboration through Trimble Connect: Managing the entire project lifecycle and ensuring seamless coordination amongst stakeholders were made easy with Trimble Connect, especially during the remote working period imposed by the COVID19 pandemic. Features like web sharing, complete/partial model sharing to different users through emails turned out to be critical solutions to maintain the confidentiality of any partial portion of the structure.