Lean Built-Up Panel Assembly in a Newbuilding Shipyard

Abstract

The main shipbuilding assembly processes greatly influence the flow of interim products in a newbuilding shipyard. The panel assembly line is a major process located upstream of all the other shipyard assembly processes. In a previous paper, the application of lean principles enabled a balanced and smaller takt time along the workstations and yielded significant savings in man-hours. Although a panel consists of butt-welded steel plates with multiple fillet-welded longitudinal stiffeners, a built-up panel is this same panel fitted with longitudinal and transverse steel elements. Since there are many internal structural elements, the man-hours along a traditional built-up panel assembly line are multiple times greater than that of panel assembly. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and map built-up panel assembly in an actual newbuilding shipyard. Using value stream mapping along with kaizen principles of continual improvement to determine the transformative steps to make the traditional built-up panel assembly line leaner. This enables significant man-hour reductions of about 60%, which yields remarkable cost savings to the shipyard.

Lean IHOP Transformation of Shipyard Erection Block Construction

“…Micropanel assembly was likely mapped using lean manufacturing techniques which resulted in improved micropanel assembly (Kolich et al 2014). Similar treatment for panel assembly and built-up panel assembly likewise (Kolich et al 2015a(Kolich et al , 2016(Kolich et al , 2017a(Kolich et al , 2017b. The savings are significant 80% and 60% successively.…”

“…The complete assembly of an outfitted and painted block ready for erection to the slipway or dry dock is analyzed and mapped using a value stream mapping methodology developed in earlier papers (Kolich et al 2012b(Kolich et al , 2014(Kolich et al , 2015a(Kolich et al , 2016(Kolich et al , 2017a(Kolich et al , 2017b. The lean value stream mapping method is used to show the flow of interim products which are assembled similar to lego blocks.…”

Lean production of ship-pipe parts based on lot-sizing optimization and PFB control strategy

“…To improve production efficiency, group technology (GT) was used in the shipbuilding factory, and the artificial neural network was proposed to categorize the product families based on similarity value (Zhong et al , 2014). To promote lean achievement, the value stream mapping method had been used to decide the transformative steps of a built-up panel assembly line, contributing to cost reduction and productivity improvement (Kolich et al , 2017).…”

PWBS Best Practice Analysis of Two Shipyards

“…Value stream mapping methodology has been demonstrated to aid in improving panel assembly process [8,9], the built-up panel assembly process [10,11] and the large block erection process [12]. However, the purpose of this paper is to determine and demonstrate how the PWBS of two shipyards should be compared, and the one with the best system should be adopted by the other.…”