Case Study: New Zealand Steel updates engineering information management with Hexagon PPM SmartPlant Foundation

With production demands increasing, New Zealand Steel Ltd. updates information management system with Hexagon's SmartPlant® Foundation

New Zealand Steel Ltd., a BlueScope subsidiary and New Zealand’s only producer of flat rolled steel products, needed to move its engineering team from a traditional CAD environment to a more data-centric approach. Rising production demands and a CAD software upgrade that prevented the company from reading its own as-builts created an urgent information management challenge. Vendor Hexagon PPM, through its SmartPlant® Foundation product, was brought in to support the transition.

Hexagon PPM implemented SmartPlant® Foundation to create and manage a digital representation of the plant and its lifecycle data, with local support from Matrix Applied Computing adding a web-based front end for sitewide access to drawings. The solution gave New Zealand Steel a longer-term, scalable backbone for engineering data and improved access to documents across the site. While no hard ROI or time savings were provided, the company said the overall package was attractive despite a higher annual maintenance cost.

New Zealand Steel

Andrew Beer

Senior CAD Systems Engineer