China's Wuchang Shipyard Gets Some New Software

According to this,

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), the Product Development Company(TM), jointly announced today with Wuchang Shipyard the implementation of PTC's Shipbuilding Solution comprising Windchill PDMLink(TM), Windchill ProjectLink(TM) and CADDS(R) 5i, which will be used as a production design management platform in Wuchang Shipyard. Wuchang Shipyard is now using the solution in production, making the shipyard one of the most technologically advanced companies in China's highly competitive shipbuilding industry.

Wuchang Shipyard, founded in 1934, is a subsidiary of the China Shipbuilding Industrial Corporation. It is one of China's largest and most modernized shipyards with capabilities to design, build, and repair various types of ships for civil, military and tourism use, and which are used in China and exported to other countries. Wuchang Shipyard has had almost a decade of a working relationship with PTC.

The completion of the PTC Shipbuilding Solution implementation is expected to bring about revolutionary changes in Wuchang Shipyard's business processes, particularly in the way product data is managed. The shipyard uses Windchill ProjectLink as a collaborative tool for the R&D, manufacturing and production departments, thereby enabling concurrent engineering, shortening product design lead-time and accelerating time-to-market. Windchill PDMLink consolidates what used to be scattered islands of information, controlling the typically chaotic product change management processes, thus increasing productivity and preventing costly design errors. The broad functional application set of CADDS 5i is used for ship design and 3-D modeling, enabling the users' ability to reference each others' evolving designs and facilitating concurrent engineering. The PTC Shipbuilding Solution allows project managers to better control and resolve problems earlier in the development cycle.

According to this:

The Wuchang shipyard in Wuhan is responsible for conventional submarine construction. Products include military ships such as Cruise-missile submarines, Medium sized conventionally powered submarines, New type and mordernized submarines, Heavy landing ships, Minesweepers and Sea salvage ship. Wuchagn Shipyard, founded in 1934, was subordinated to the China State Shipbuilding Corporation prior to the 1999 formation of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.

Wuchang Shipyard is the biggest modern and comprehensive shipbuilding enterprise in inland China. The shipyard covers an area of 820,000 square meters with the total employees of more than 8,000, among them 200 are technical management staff, including 200 senior engineers, 15 experts enjoying state special subsidy.

With the capability to design, build and repair various type of civil ships below 8000DWT and military ships of 3000t, it has constructed and exported multipurpose cargo ships of 3830/6130 DWT, anchor handling / tug supply vessels of 4800KW, submarines and mine sweepers to Germany, Norway, Hongkong, Egypt, Bangladesh and etc, and all those ships have got approval by the International Classification Societies like CCS, GL, DNV and etc. Nowdays, all the ships are being constructed by a completed, advanced shipbuilding prodution line.

Am I concerned? Well, I've been reading again, this time The Pentagon's New Map, and I'm trying to embrace the idea that a fully functional China as part of the "core" is a good and wonderous thing. As Dr. Barnett notes, however, it's not the way I was brought up in the Navy, so it's a tough paradigm shift... (more on the book in a later post)