Construction of a modern warship can occupy a period of more than three years, during which time more than three million manhours may be expended, and it is necessary to control the acquisition, production and installation of some 250,000 items of material and equipment. To execute the process effectively requires an efficient means of planning and control, and this paper describes the approach to that task adopted by a United Kingdom shipyard. The concepts of Build Strategy, Work Packaging, Materials Definition, Process Engineering and Labour Cost Control, as related to the shipyard's organisation structure are explored. The paper describes the establishment and operation of a system of planning and control based on task definition.
In quest of increased efficiency to make better use of financial resources, industry, both public and private sector, have often been turning to the industrial engineering community for help. And while there has been progress in measuring the efficiency of human resources and establishing work standards, similar efforts in the use of equipment have, in recent years, become of greater interest and will continue to do so in the coming years.
In any job, project, program, or complex undertaking there exists a need to understand all aspects of the work. This understanding is necessary to satisfy all requirements in the most effective and efficient way. The methods available to plan and accomplish these tasks are as vary as much as the tasks themselves. They range from job shop techniques to Material Requirements Planning (MRP) to Project-Based Management Information System (PBMS) to continuous manufacturing. This paper is a critical analysis aimed at classifying two of these system approaches as they relate to the ship repair equation. Material Requirements Planning (MRP I) tracks a need for material through a project. The production process on the material determines how labor is applied to transform raw materials into finished products. MRP material needs are determined by sales forecasting; while requirements are determined algorithmically from material take-offs. Another form is Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II). This form of MRP is a management process, supported by computers, which results in monthly production plans based outlooks, etc., and is far sales more comprehensive in scope and integration than MRP I.
SEAWOLF Producibility initiatives have been presented to past Ship Production Symposiums. The technical content of these papers was based on work accomplished during the SEAWOLF Detail Design effort and articulated the point of view that the SEAWOLF Producibility Program was an important step in advanced ship production. The lead shiv of the SEAWOLF Class started construction in late 1989. The opportunity now exists to validate a number of the elements of the design for production. Electric Boat Division, as Lead Shipbuilder, has the opportunity to review a number of the specific initiatives, such as Digital Data Transfer, Sectional Construction Drawings, Planning and Sequence Documents, Computer Integration of information processing and the combination of SEAWOLF products that support improved work control. The method of approach is to describe the SEAWOLF producibilitv element developed during detail -design and then assess the benefit to the shipbuilding process.
"Management in the United States often falls into the trap of invoking Theory Y programs in Theory X ways" Perhaps nothing conceptualizes the plight of American businesses implementing new programs and techniques quite as succinctly as the preceding statement. Many of the buzz words of celebrated methods and techniques used in Japan have been popularized in the U.S. Unfortunately, the implementation of these techniques is not given the careful consideration it demands. Although participative management did not achieve full potential in the U.S. with the introduction of quality circles, the foundation was laid and lessons were learned. The organization and operation of a company needs to be considered for a successful implementation. System Strategy Teams represent an adaptation of participative management developed specifically to function within Peterson Builders.
Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) technologies offer significant benefits in the design, construction, and life cycle support of today's complex Navy ships. CAD provides the capability to create three dimensional (3D) product models which can realistically represent geometry and associated design data of the ship prior to construction. Building of a computer model of the ship prior to construction reduces interferences and improves design accuracy and completeness. The 3D computer models consist of geometry and associated design data for components and systems, and provide a tool to design and evaluate form, fit, and function. Efforts such as interference detection and resolution, simulated walk-throughs, change-impact analysis, and improved production sequence planning can be conducted concurrently with design development. Detail design drawings, manufacturing sketches and Numerical Control (NC) instructions can be developed and extracted directly from the design database. This reduces duplication of data, saves time, and lowers costs - for both the construction of the ship and the life cycle maintenance functions that follow. The most significant benefits of 3D CAD/CAM functions that follow. The most significant benefits of 3D CAD/CAM methodologies as applied to complex Navy surface combatants are improved design and manufacturing accuracy and consistency, which in turn result in savings in production time and cost. On the U.S. Navy's ARLEIGH BURKE (DDG 51) Class AEGIS Destroyer program, CAD/CAM technology is being implemented to take full advantage of these savings.
This symposium, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 21-24 August 1990, was comprised of technical presentations on a variety of topics including, ship design, planning and acqusition of naval ships, environmental health and safety issues at naval shipyards, cost effectiveness, hazardous materials handling, fabrication, maintenance, life cycle maintenance, machinery for fabrication, shipbuilding materials and other topics of interest.
In the past two decades, the U.S. Navy has undertaken significant projects in the computer aided design, manufacturing, and service life support areas. A few of the those most related to the shipbuilding programs are listed in Table 1 along with the phase in the ship's life cycle they were primarily supporting. CASDAC (Computer Aided Ship Design and Construction) was the grandaddy of them all, dating back to the late 60s when the Navy was designing and building its own ships. The project's goal was to develop software for doing early stage design, through contract design, and detail design at the naval shipyards. They labored under the dual burdens of expensive hardware and relatively unfriendly software development environment, with clumsy operating systems, occasional need for assembly language programming, and early compiler limitations ions. Nevertheless, many programs that are still with us today began during that era, including: SHCP (Ship Hull Characteristic Program) ; SSDP (Ship Structural Design Program) ; HULDEF (Hull form Definition); and SDWE (Ship Design Weight Estimating). The state of CASDACVs progress by the early and mid 7Os is well described in references [1] and [2]. The monument al CASDOS (Computer Aided Structural Detailing of Ships) was developed under CASDAC's sponsorship and actually used to build 6 LCUs for the Army and for Saudi Arabia. Over half of CASDAC's efforts were oriented toward shipyard product ion software, including electrical wiring and fluid piping systems programs. In 193l, long after the end of new ship construction at the Navy yards, CASDAC was subdivided into two distinct programs, the CSD (Computer Supported Design) programs, carrying on the ship design software development, and portions of the MANTECH (manufacturing and technology) program for advancing industry's efforts to improve shipbuilding productivitiy through automation and technology.
The SNAME Ship Production committees SP-8 Panel on Industrial Engineering's primary objective has been to increase productivity in the Shipbuilding Industry. Since the Panel's conception, it has introduced a number of Industrial Engineering techniques to improve the utilization of our two most important resources, men and machines. One can not function without the other, and only through proper management will optimum productivity be achieved. One of the elements of good management is to encourage and pursue Methods Improvement at all levels of the organization. Cue to the size of our product, we are led to believe that in order to improve, a major Methods change must occur. To some extent, this is true--such as the introduction of Group Technology, which has an effect on our entire organization. Changes like this must occur; however, we must not forget the importance of productivity improvement of each individual task, which, when combined has a tremendous impact on the total productivity picture.
