Huisman: For Industrial Equipment, Reliability is the Priority

Founded in 1929, Huisman provides professional and innovative technical solutions to the world's leading companies in the oil & gas, renewables, civil and leisure industries, winning the reputation of producing state-of-the-art equipment. If you ask about the secret of its success, in addition to innovation, Huisman may first and foremost answer with one word – quality.

From cranes, pipelay installations, drilling equipment, winches to vessel designs; from stand-alone components to highly-engineered integrated systems; from concept to installation and lifetime support; delivering high quality remains key throughout the process, since the products delivered by Huisman are often the critical main equipment in all kinds of operations.

Figure 1. Huisman office in the Netherlands

Now let’s get closer to Huisman with 5 of its staff in different positions of the production chain, to get some ideas of how this high quality comes about.

Ada, the Sales Engineer firstly communicates with her clients and gets to know their requirements about dimension, weight and other information of various mechanical parts easily with ZWCAD.

Then, engineering design drawings will be customized accordingly by Work Preparation Engineers, and Bob is one of them. He measures unspecified dimensions of all kinds of parts with ZWCAD, and owing to its .dwg compatibility, he uses it to modify and enrich the existing drawings as well. “I am a faithful ZWCAD user, and I have been working with ZWCAD for nearly 2 years. I can easily create or modify the drawings with it”, he said. He also demonstrated how he measures the dimensions of a component as below. This step is very significant, requiring high precision since a tiny dimension error means a serious mistake in production and operation.

Figure 2. ZWCAD is used to measure a component.

After that, Yang, Assistant of the Material Supervisor, previews, checks and plots the drawings with ZWCAD, and organizes the needed materials accordingly. Efficiency is what he values most – he needs to open and plot the drawings quickly, to save more time for the production work.

When every preparation work is done, production starts. As the Supervisor of Fitting, Lance guides the production work with the engineering drawings. The production work is sophisticated, requiring a number of sub-divided groups to cooperate seamlessly together. For example, the Production-Painting group uses ZWCAD to annotate which parts should receive particular treatments; the welders in the factory get detailed information of the drawings from ZWCAD and do the welding work accordingly; to list just a few.

Figure 3. Engineer from Huisman is using ZWCAD.

Now comes the key part. Betty, the NDT (Non Destructive Testing) Operator shoulders heavy responsibility since reliability is ensured by her and her colleagues. She opens and checks the production drawings related to NDT carefully. “I use ZWCAD all the working day. It’s simple and convenient”, said Betty. After the rigorous quality control, the final state-of-the-art products are ready.

Of course the above is just a small piece of the whole picture of the sophisticated production process. Though, we can still have a smattering of the reason why Huisman is recognized as reliable and high-quality. As the choice of Huisman, ZWCAD is also glad to help it produce great products with reliable engineering software.