Hitachi Power Europe has selected SmartPlant® 3D for its future design and construction projects to further strengthen its excellent position in the global market through improved productivity and intelligent collaboration. The first projects to be delivered with the new solution are planned for autumn this year.

As a market and technology leader in the energy sector, Hitachi Power Europe relies on innovative and integrated software to support its projects around the globe. After a thorough benchmark period, Hitachi Power Europe chose SmartPlant 3D as its design tool for future projects, which will start with a planned implementation of the integration platform SmartPlant Foundation.

Hitachi Power Europe chose SmartPlant 3D to ensure enhanced collaboration, to increase productivity and to have a consistent impact through the whole plant life cycle. The improved collaboration with other Hitachi sites (like Babcock-Hitachi K.K.) was one of the key reasons for the company’s decision.

"After a preliminary selection process, two finalists for a pilot installation were selected and tested under identical conditions. The result of the user test, together with the evaluation of a predefined requirements matrix, showed a clear vote for SmartPlant 3D. In the long term, we expect to have a positive experience with Intergraph as a reliable partner," said Christoph Kastl, head of technical information technology at Hitachi Power Europe.

"Hitachi is another important customer in the power industry that has decided to use SmartPlant 3D. The increasing number of customers who rely on Intergraph’s design tools and information management
solutions encourage us to keep working hard on delivering integrated solutions that have a purposeful impact in the whole life cycle of the plant," says Gerhard Sallinger, Intergraph Process, Power & Marine president.

SmartPlant 3D is the world’s first and only next-generation 3D plant design solution, employing a breakthrough engineering approach that is focused on rules, relationships and automation. It is the most advanced and productive 3D plant design solution that effectively enables optimized design, increasing safety, quality, and productivity, while shortening project schedules. Companies using SmartPlant 3D typically report a 30% improvement in overall engineering design productivity.

Intergraph’s SmartPlant Enterprise, the suite comprising Intergraph’s pool of solutions, offers a powerful portfolio of industry-leading, best-in-class design and data management solutions, enabling companies in the process, power, and marine industries to capture integrated engineering knowledge at the enterprise level for the competitive advantage needed in today’s and tomorrow’s market.

SmartPlant Enterprise’s integrated suite of solutions enable proven productivity gains, improving engineering efficiency by up to 30 percent. This is why the majority of plants built worldwide are designed using Intergraph solutions.

The ARC Advisory Group, a leading industry analyst firm, ranked Intergraph as the No. 1 overall worldwide provider of engineering design solutions for industry according to its "Engineering Design Tools for Industry and Infrastructure Worldwide Outlook Market Analysis and Forecast Through 2016."