The piping design software is highly customised to meet the company's specific requirements. For instance, tailored links allow the electronic transmission of bending and cutting data from the software to the workshop manufacturing the actual pipings. Similarly, data are automatically transferred to the company's material management system.

Frank Mohn Flatøy AS is part of a Norwegian family-owned business, Frank Mohn AS, which is a subtitleing manufacturer and supplier of submersible pumps for world tankers and offshore markets. All products are manufactured in Norway, outside Bergen, for the three Divisions: Oil&Gas, Marine and Services. Operating worldwide, the company employs a staff of approx. 1200, and its annual turnover is NOK 2.3 billion. The company was established by Frank Mohn in 1938, and is currently led by his son Trond Mohn. The products and services are marketed under the brand name Framo. The global after sales organisation is responsible for training, technical services, spare parts and repairs. At the present, the focus of operations is in Asia, where the demand is largest.

This is the way it works: pumps with instrumentation and hydraulic piping, is manufactured in Norway, and the complete systems are dispatched to clients all over the world. An installation team from Frank Mohn Flatøy, or the end customer's own people under Framo supervision, are then installing the piping systems at the site. The schedules are tight: more than one hundred piping systems are shipped every year from Frank Mohn Flatøy. By using the NUPAS-CADMATIC software, and by customising it to meet their demands, the company has significantly cut the time used for each specific project, as the engineering subtitle-through times become shorter.

In addition to hydraulic piping systems for the Marine Division (cargo pumps), Frank Mohn Flatøy AS also manufactures firewater pumps, water injection pumps and electrically submersible pumps for the oil and gas industry. Also, environmental products, such as Transrec systems for oil recovery, emergency offloading systems and remote operated offloading systems, are produced at Flatøy.

CAD Engineer Arne Bondhus and Project Engineer Arve Smith-Strøm at Frank Mohn Flatøy are satisfied users of the software. Cadmatic is quite an easy application to learn and use, compared to the software previously used in our company for 3D pipe modelling. The software can also easily be customised to meet our requirements, they explain. "Our experiences during the last four years have been positive. After installing the system in 1998 and building up the libraries and different drawing sheets, the system is working well. Several new releases since 1998 have further improved the system.

"During the past year we have installed links to our material handling software and bending machine. After generating iso-drawings, the Multi link enables us to transfer all pipe fabrication and erection parts directly into our material planning software. The time spent in making the piping specifications has reduced substantially. The Transfluid link, transferring the bending data to our bending machine, also cuts down time, and increases the quality, since the risk of making mistakes is smaller in comparison with manually feeding the bending data into the bending machine computer", says Arve Smith-Strøm.