CAMBRIDGE, England, January 13 /PRNewswire/ -- AVEVA announces the release of AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface, a powerful solution to the problem of transferring 3D models between incompatible design systems.

Until now, solutions for transferring design between different 3D CAD systems have proved to be inadequate in various ways and have not achieved the necessary high levels of usability or industry support. Recently, however, a neutral format has been adopted - STEP AP203 - which does offer an effective means of 3D design transfer and is now achieving widespread industry acceptance. AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface has been developed to employ the AP203 protocol and provides a plant or ship designer with a robust and efficient tool for importing into AVEVA PDMS or AVEVA Outfitting accurate 3D models of suppliers' equipment items.

Commenting on this important new release, Bruce Douglas, AVEVA Vice President Product and Marketing Strategy, said:

'The inability to easily share data between computer systems has long been a barrier to exploiting the full value of engineering information and to effective collaboration on complex projects. AVEVA is committed to the removal of such barriers and plays a leading role in the development, promotion and use of open standards for data interoperability.'

'AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface is further confirmation of this continuing commitment and our equal commitment to providing customers with ever-increasing value from their use of AVEVA solutions. This new product will make the practicing designer's work a lot easier and provide measurable business benefits in project cost, timescale and quality.'

A number of customers in the marine, power and mining industries worked closely with AVEVA during the development of this new product and have already reported up to 60% reduction in man-hours compared with their previous practice of re-creating equipment models from scratch in AVEVA PDMS.

AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface is available for immediate deployment in an AVEVA Plant or AVEVA Marine environment, and is appropriate for the Power, Marine, Mining, Mineral Processing, Pulp and Paper, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing sectors.

About AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface

Equipment suppliers can export 3D models from the principal MCAD systems in STEP AP203 format. Using AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface, a designer can import these fully-detailed models into AVEVA PDMS or AVEVA Outfitting, where they can be manipulated like any native PDMS or Outfitting objects. This avoids the need for laborious and error-prone workarounds, such as manually re-creating an equipment model in PDMS/Outfitting. Now the full design value already created by the equipment supplier can be exploited by the PDMS/Outfitting designer to create better-quality plant or vessel designs more quickly.

AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface provides facilities for simplifying the display of an imported model for more efficient working while creating the overall design, and for exporting selected parts of a PDMS or Outfitting model to third-party 3D design applications which support AP203 import.

More information about AVEVA Mechanical Equipment Interface and other AVEVA solutions can be found at http://www.aveva.com/plant or http://www.aveva.com/marine.

About AVEVA

AVEVA is a leading supplier of engineering and design software to the plant and marine industries. For more information about AVEVA, please visit http://www.aveva.com/ednotes.

For further information, please contact: Alison Patey Marketing Communications Manager AVEVA Corporate Tel: +44-1223-556653 alison.patey@aveva.com

SOURCE: Aveva Group Plc

CONTACT: For further information, please contact: Alison Patey, MarketingCommunications Manager, AVEVA Corporate, Tel: +44-1223-556653,alison.patey@aveva.com