PRESS RELEASE May 30, 2007  

 

 

AREVA NP, INC. Nuclear power toolmaker energized by ENOVIA SmarTeam Utilities worldwide are engaged in a complex struggle to meet the world’s escalating demand for electricity without increasing its emissions of greenhouse gases. The challenge has re-focused attention on nuclear power, enjoying a resurgence as today’s only commercially viable, carbon dioxide-free technology.

AREVA NP, a world leader in nuclear power services and the only company to cover all industrial activities in the nuclear field, is at the forefront of efforts to construct the next generation of U.S. nuclear power plants. AREVA NP also plays a critical role in maintaining the nation’s 103 operating nuclear reactors, each of which is unique. Even “twin” reactors located side by side at the same site can have design differences.

To keep the nation’s existing nuclear plants in prime condition, many operators are conducting first-of-a-kind maintenance procedures. These services often require new tools and equipment custom designed for specific operations – the specialty of AREVA NP’s Component Repair Technologies, a group within AREVA NP Nuclear Services.

Whether AREVA NP is designing replacement equipment or the tools to service existing plants, documentation in this highly regulated industry is critical. Knowing which tools have been designed before also is important to meet unanticipated service requests that must be performed during a scheduled plant shutdown and so require quick turnaround.

“One big piece of our data management puzzle was to have a system flexible enough to allow us to do a design for a job like that as quickly as possible,” said Gary Poling, Design Engineer for AREVA NP Component Repair Technologies. “The key to speed is being able to find your design data quickly.”

Existing data accelerates short lead-time orders

“Before ENOVIA SmarTeam, we saved all of our files on our network drives,” Poling said. “With ENOVIA SmarTeam, we saw the opportunity to improve our search capabilities, making it easier and faster to locate the data we needed and ensuring that data is preserved. ENOVIA SmarTeam also provides revision management, which allows us to see all of the versions, who made changes, when they made them and why, which is valuable for the regulatory review process.”

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Revision management creates regulatory history

“Especially for components that will be installed at the nuclear plant and left behind, what we call ‘safety-related’ materials, the documentation is critical,” Poling said. “Every component that gets left at the plant requires an official document that lists all of the other documents necessary to fabricate the component. It’s more than a bill of material. It’s fabrication, assembly, operating and maintenance instructions, and the design data we manage in ENOVIA SmarTeam is crucial to assembling those documents as well.”

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Data re-use vision permeates AREVA NP

“Our goal is to get to the point where we enter data once and reuse it in many systems,” Poling said. “We’ve done it with Records Management. As soon as we get our new ERP system up and running, we want to do it there, too. ENOVIA SmarTeam is well engineered to support that goal. I’ve looked at other PLM packages, and the robustness of ENOVIA SmarTeam lets you do so much more than the competitors. It gives you all the tools. You still have to pick out the right tool and use it the right way, but the tools to do what you want to do are there with ENOVIA SmarTeam.”

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