CATIA for boat design

Most companies have many different cad programs.
You need to know what actually do with them before you claim "your" program is a "standard" in any field.

Autodesk said a few days ago that 100% of the "Fortune 100" companies in USA were heir customers, an 98% of the Fortune 500...
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=348215

 

Yacht design is a big subject encompassing hull design, hydrostatics, stability, resistance, performance prediction, seakeeping analysis, structural analysis, and finally structural detailing for production. Of these, which bits are covered by CATIA? And I don't mean claims like "we can specify a cutting plane and calculate volumetric properties" I mean functions that are actually being used by the companies you mention. I think you will find that most of the companies you mention do the naval architecture part of the design process in other applications.

The production builders you listed such as Beneteau also often get external designs done externally by well known yacht designers such as Farr, so the actual yacht design work is done in other packages.

Others such as Humphreys Yacht Design use a variety of software. Rob Humphreys was one of the first designers to buy Maxsurf 25 years ago, and he has been a user of the software for all of that time. Maybe you should give him a call and check how much of the yacht design process he does in CATIA. My guess it is drafting, production models and visualisation stuff.

This is not to understate the magnitude of the production design and detailing task for such companies, however it is important to recognise that it is just one step in the whole yacht design process.

 

Just a side note in the Catia vs others commercial war

One thing ultra important not to forget is the localisation and availability of formed technicians.

Catia is made by Daussault Systemes. A french company. French translation is about correct, including all technical terms. Up to the point that French state schooling system has choosen Solidworks and Catia as cad systems for engineering courses (and also the NIH syndrom for Autocad or alike). It is even in priority list for training unemployed people. (Ie if you have been fired for economic reasons (french people and french companies), and you worked in the mechanics field, you could get a Catia training paid by the unemployement state service( at least this was true 2 years ago)).

This means that french companies can get drawing/ conception technicians, trained into Catia and working in their native language for not very expensive.

That's probably why french companies like beneteau, jeanneau, CMN, Rivoyre ingenierie, Berret Racoupeau, Vaton design choosed Catia. In fact more than 3/4 of the nautical companies listed in previous posts.

Another thing for Catia is the maintenance price. The licence price is one thing. the maintenance fees are another story.

 

I suppose you look at the other thread also
I would really like to know the maintenance cost.
In Norway both SolidWorks and Inventor sell for approx 10.000 USD or Euro, and maintenance (from day one) is maybe 2000 USd or Euro.
We sell Rhino for approx 900 Euro and Alibre for 1000 to 2000 Euro with maintenance at 300 Euro after the first free year.

 

I do not think there is a published official pricing. There are a bunch of modules in Catia, I would say 30 to 50.

Pricing I got for a P2 level, the one that can do more things than Solidworks, years ago, was around 15000€ for one seat, same amount for the yearly maintenance. My employer at that time stopped talks very very fastly.

You are loosing your time looking at Catia if your design office does not employs at least five full time cad designer/conceptors. For general/mechanical cad. ie Not including hydrostatics/stability, seakeeping, powering which are specific nautical fields Catia do not address.