A day in Shipyard Process Improvement
The last years Marstrat allocated a significant part of its consulting capacity to operational management in leading shipyards. One of the leading shipbuilding companies in the Netherlands used the Marstrat expertise in a major change program. A more cost-effective process, with better re-use of information and better exchangeability of personnel between different business units was the goal; a complete new ICT landscape architecture was the means, and is now being implemented. Marstrat partner Dr. ir. Jenny Coenen gives an insight in the daily challenges of a complex program.
The extent of shipbuilding processes is definitely wide-ranging. It goes beyond the production facilities and logistics one usually associates with building ships or offshore installations. In fact, the main challenge is the interface between departments, process stages or software applications, requiring smart and edgy solutions.
In order to change the extensive process of defining and making a complex product as a ship it should first be properly mapped out, in both the as-is and future state situation. Data architecture should be designed, functional specifications should be written; all even before new software can be selected and evaluated. Then, the aforementioned interfaces and all required customizations to make it work for a specific shipyard organisation, have to be specified and configured. To proceed you have to migrate data and develop training material. And then, to maintain this new situation, you need to have a proper strategy for data and process quality management. Marstrat contributed to all these elements, also for less conventional ingredients like for instance development of ‘serious games’ and data cleansing.
All this doesn’t imply that we consider more ‘classical’ production topics like production automation, shipyard logistics, scheduling and simulation as ‘out-of-scope’. But it is hard to separate this from a solid information infrastructure and that is exactly with what we can help you.
