General Dynamics

General Dynamics Electric Boat Shipyard, located in Groton Connecticut, is the nations only facility for building nuclear powered Trident and 688 attack submarines. With the ending of the cold war, companies like GD will enter into maintenance programs with its' larger scale military contracts. As part of their efforts to improve maintenance, GD had 500,000,000 drawings scanned to a raster format and placed in optical CD ROM format for placement onboard ships. Raster was chosen as the format for distribution and maintenance because of the compression advantages over vector systems. The Autodesk opportunity within GD is to compliment and/or replace the 750+ Catia seats with a hybrid raster/vector solution from AutoCAD and GTX. The key business driver is to maintain the 500,000,000 raster scanned assets. With Intergraph having been awarded the NAVSEA contract, GD has had the Intergraph based raster tool, I/RAS, under evaluation. In addition, a pilot AutoCAD system has been in place and evaluated with the CAD Overlay ESP product from Softdesk Imaging, however, such a product offered little advantages over the Intergraph offering.

The Teamwork

In November of 1994, Autodesk major accounts team invited Open Archive Systems, Inc. to present the market leading AutoCAD/GTX solution, to an audience of 25 users from various departments. In conclusion, the group had never seen raster handled as effortlessly as the AutoCAD/GTX solution provided. A week later, Open Archive Systems, Inc. was invited to present the same technology to the head of Navy commercial procurements, the funding source for the project.

The Solution

An initial order of 25 AutoCAD and 8 GTX Raster CAD Plus was placed in early 1995 with the potential for 100-200. As of the first half of 1999, an additional 84 seats of GTX software have been purchased with 167 seats of Myriad. Open Archive Systems, Inc. has also been providing ongoing consulting and training services to meet the broader Document Management and Control needs within General Dynamics.