Success story

Company background

Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding is a long-established multidiscipled engineering company with global interests in ship and ocean activities, environmental recycling, plant engineering, social infrastructure construction and advanced machinery systems.

MES also operates one of the world’s most experienced shipyards, building LNG carriers, double hull tankers and other cargo ships, destroyers, transport ships, patrol ships and research vessels.

The challenge

Detailed photography plays a crucial role in the MES factory setting, particularly when it comes to documenting quality and safety. It’s common for employees to take a large number of digital photographs and paste them into their documents and presentations, which can easily reach sizes of more than 100MB.

Files such as these can take a few minutes just to start up, assuming the PC is even capable of opening them. When they are attached to emails, employee inboxes can be filled up in no time. When this happens, it becomes impossible for employees to send or receive messages. On one occasion, an employee sent an email with a 50MB attachment to everybody on MES’s global mailing list - a grandiose waste of productivity and network resources.

The strategy

An initiative to persuade employees to manually optimise the photographs within their documents and presentations (using an image editing application) failed because most factory floor employees have limited PC access. Employees lacked both the time and the technical proficiency to go through such a long-winded procedure, which was generally regarded as ‘tedious’.

It was clear that a solution was required on an organisational level, rather than at an individual level. MES therefore decided to deploy NXPowerLite Desktop Edition with Microsoft Outlook integration enabled. This ensured that everybody’s email attachments were always optimised before sending. Because the optimisation process happened quickly and automatically, there was no loss of productivity and employees did not require any additional training.

The result

Employees love NXPowerLite because it’s so easy. The software is now routinely used to optimise files prior to transmission and has been found to drastically reduce their sizes. One 300MB PowerPoint presentation was reduced to just 1MB with no visible loss of quality. Although this is an extreme example, files ranging between 30MB and 50MB in size are a daily occurance in the shipbuilding industry and NXPowerLite routinely reduces them by a significant amount.

The problems caused by large email attachments have been instantly solved. Additionally, MES has significantly reduced the burden on server capacity, meaning costly hardware upgrades have been avoided. Bandwidth costs have also been reduced, as smaller files are less expensive to transmit.

Conclusions

MES initially purchased 50 NXPowerLite licenses for use at the Chiba Shipyard. Because the software has been proven to meet the operational needs of manufacturing industries so well, MES now plans to adopt NXPowerLite across the entire organisation.

Company-wide deployment of NXPowerLite will drastically lighten the overall load on the corporate network and offer additional savings on hardware upgrades at all locations. Coupled with the productivity savings that can be expected from a company-wide deployment, this will result in a significant return on investment.