Determination of the Effects of the Pre-Outfitting and Pre-Piping Assembly Operations on Shipyard Productivity

The process improvement operations are very significant in shipbuilding industry as the other industries. In recent years, the shipyards attempt to improve their processes by examining their current production system and to reduce the cycle time of the interim product so that they can keep their competitive power. If the cycle time of the interim products is decrease, that may cause to increase the annual production capacity and market share of the shipyard. In order to do this, the shipyards have to analyse their own production system and carry out some improvements on it. In this study, the effects of carrying out the outfitting and piping assembly operations in earlier work stations were investigated by using a methodology presented here. The steps in the methodology were applied to a double bottom block of a container ship. It was shown that if the outfitting and the piping assembly operations are carried out in earlier stations instead of the block assembly station, this may increase the throughput by 33%. The results of the study were discussed in the final section.