Your project data is everywhere. Your team shouldn’t have to be.
Shipbuilding is an information-intensive business. From initial design through detailed engineering, procurement, production, and commissioning, every decision you make depends on access to the right data at the right time. Yet in most shipyards today, that information is fragmented across disconnected systems: CAD tools, PLM platforms, ERP systems, planning databases, and countless documents and drawings, each living in its own silo.
The result is frustratingly familiar. Your engineers spend hours tracking down documents. Teams duplicate effort because they lack visibility into each other’s work. Inconsistencies between systems go undetected until they show up as costly rework on the shop floor. Sound familiar?
CADMATIC eShare was built to solve exactly this problem.
Easy view for everything your team needs
eShare is a web-based digital twin platform that brings all your project data, including 3D models, drawings, documents, and data from engineering and business systems, together into a single unified environment. Everyone in your organization can access it through a standard web browser. Offline mode is also available, and you can use eShare on mobile.
Think of it as the connective tissue of your shipbuilding project. Rather than replacing your existing systems, eShare integrates with them, combining and contextualizing information from your CAD applications, ERP, PLM, planning and production systems so that any stakeholder can find what they need quickly, understand it in context, and act on it with confidence.
No CAD license required. No heavy specialist training. Just open a browser.
Does any of this sound like your shipyard?
Before looking at what eShare does, it helps to recognize the challenges it addresses. In a typical shipyard engineering and production environment, information problems tend to fall into a few recurring patterns.
- You can’t find the information you need. When data is locked in specialist tools or poorly organized document stores, your people can’t access what they need. Every process that depends on that information slows down, and costs go up.
- Your systems don’t talk to each other. Different engineering disciplines use different tools. Connecting those tools through traditional IT integration is complex and expensive, so in practice your teams extract generic documents and drawings and try to piece together a picture manually. This is time-consuming, fatiguing, and error-prone.
- Mistakes slip through the cracks. When data lives in separate systems, inconsistencies are hard to spot. A pipe tag in the 3D model may not match the tag on the P&ID. A specification in one system may conflict with data in another. Left undetected, these become rework in engineering and delays in production.
- You lack visibility into what’s really going on. Without a clear view of how information flows between your teams and systems, opportunities to improve and optimize remain out of reach.
Ouch. If you recognize yourself in any of these, eShare addresses all four in an integrated, practical way.
How eShare works
The eShare approach can be understood through four complementary capabilities.
1. See everything in one model
eShare can combine 3D models from different CAD vendors and display them together in a single federated view, accessible in a web browser, on a desktop, or on a tablet. A hull modeled in Cadmatic can sit alongside outfitting designed in Siemens NX or another system, visualized together, without requiring everyone to hold a seat in the originating application.
This alone transforms how your project team engages with the design. Engineers, production staff, supervisors, and customers can all look at the same 3D model in context, without specialist tools or training.
2. Connect your systems
The real power of eShare lies in its ability to connect data from across your IT landscape. Documents, drawings, ERP records, PLM data, planning information, and supplier documentation can all be linked to the 3D model and to each other.
When one of your engineers clicks on a valve in the 3D model, they can immediately see the associated P&ID, the material specification, the purchase order, and the installation drawing, all in one place, without switching systems or searching through document folders. This contextual integration dramatically reduces the time your team spends finding and assembling information, and gives everyone a much clearer picture of the current state of any item or system.
eShare is vendor-agnostic and designed for integration, connecting to almost any design tool, document management system, or database your shipyard may be using.
3. Catch inconsistencies before they become problems
eShare can automatically compare data fields and document content from different source systems and visually highlight where values do not match. If a tag number in your ERP system differs from the tag in the 3D model, eShare will surface that inconsistency. If a specification in one document conflicts with data from another source, it will be flagged.
This shifts the identification of information immaturity from manual review, which is slow, fatiguing, and often happens too late, to an automated ongoing process that runs as a routine part of engineering. The earlier inconsistencies are found, the cheaper they are to fix. Catching a discrepancy during detailed design is a quick correction. Catching it in production is a schedule impact and a real cost.
4. Drive progress with confidence
eShare gives you and your production managers a live view of project status, grounded in actual data from connected systems. Work packages can be created, production readiness assessed, and progress tracked visually against the 3D model. Observations and non-conformities can be captured directly in eShare and linked to the relevant component or system.
This replaces the traditional cycle of manually compiled progress reports with a continuously updated, visually navigable picture of where your project stands, enabling more decisive, better-informed management.
You can be up and running faster than you think
One of the practical advantages of eShare is how quickly it can be deployed. Because it integrates with your existing systems rather than replacing them, and because it is browser-based with no client installation required, getting started does not demand a major IT program.
Glosten, a US naval architecture firm, demonstrated this clearly. After an initial discussion with the Cadmatic team, they had a working demo environment running from their model overnight, linked drawings the following day, and were able to showcase eShare on a live project in under two days.
eShare can be deployed securely across your organization, in engineering offices, workshops, and on board vessels, and extended to subcontractors and customers where project collaboration requires it.row.
What shipyards are achieving with CADMATIC eShare
eShare is in active use at shipyards and naval architecture firms around the world. Here is what some of them have achieved.
Skipsteknisk (Norway/Turkey) combined hull models from Cadmatic with outfitting models from Siemens NX in eShare to enable collaboration across their two offices. Their General Manager reported a reduction of up to 35% in billable hours as a result of improved productivity and collaboration.
Lurssen-Kroger Yard deployed eShare into production on tablet devices to capture job completion in the yard and report project progress directly to the leadership team, starting with pipe fitting and expanding from there.
Seaspan began using eShare for design reviews, integrated ERP and PLM data, and progressed to a custom assembly planning solution linked to other systems, with reported reductions in manual planning workload of 75%.
Tsuneishi built a shipyard digital twin incorporating procurement, drawing management, and man-hour management systems, extended eShare to the production floor with RFID-based material tracking, and saw drawing creation time reduced by 80%.
Albwardy Damen combined Cadmatic design applications and ERP data in eShare to deliver digital manufacturing information directly to their production team, replacing manual progress reporting with direct access to live project data.
Take it to the shop floor with CADMATIC eGo
For production environments, eShare is complemented by CADMATIC eGo, a tablet application that makes 3D models and project documentation available on the shop floor, on the vessel, or at any location, even offline. Your workers can view the design, access relevant documents, add markups and photos, update status information, and synchronize everything back to eShare. This closes the loop between your engineering office and your production floor.
eShare works on Windows tablets and iPad.
You don’t need to transform everything at once
eShare does not require a complete overhaul of your information landscape. Most successful deployments start with a specific, high-value use case, such as visualizing the design and linking key documents, or integrating one business system to improve information flow in one part of the project, and grow from there as your team gains familiarity and confidence.
The platform is designed to be configured and extended progressively, meaning your initial investment can deliver value quickly while providing a foundation for a more comprehensive digital twin over time.
Ready to stop losing time to disconnected data?
eShare gives your shipyard a practical, vendor-agnostic platform for creating a live digital twin of your projects, connecting 3D models, drawings, documents, and data from across your existing systems into a single accessible environment.
If your teams are struggling with information silos, time lost searching for data, late discovery of inconsistencies, or limited visibility into project progress, eShare offers a concrete and proven path forward. It requires no replacement of existing tools, no specialist client software, and can be up and running in days rather than months.
Keep your project and team in sync with eShare.
