There is an extreme amount of pressure on shipbuilding right now to move faster.
This is understandable. Naval fleets need to be recapitalized through acquisition and planned lifecycle extensions. Commercial operators are replacing and modernizing vessels. Governments want more domestic shipbuilding capacity. Meanwhile many shipyards are trying to take on that work while dealing with the same workforce constraints the industry has been talking about for years.
But when I talk with shipbuilders, I am not convinced that simply building faster is the real issue.
Manufacturing and production capabilities certainly matter. Facilities, workforce, capacity, and suppliers of required materials also play a huge role in being able to “go faster.” However, a surprising amount of time on a shipbuilding program is lost before anyone gets to the point of receiving materials, cutting steel, manufacturing assemblies, installing systems and their required equipment or assembling a unit, module, or block.
Time is lost waiting for a decision to be made. Tracking down the right information. Resolving a change. Working out which revision is current. Reworking a design, remanufacturing a part, rebuilding an assembly, or ripping out previous installations, because information did not reach the right team, at the right time, or soon enough to allow the right decision to be made.
And as we anticipate shipbuilding will becomes more distributed, we are adding another challenge to the complexity of shipbuilding. More organizations need to work together, often across different yards, systems, processes and even countries.
That ‘is why I think we need to look at speed differently. The question isn’t only how can we build ships faster. It’s how do we remove more of the challenges that make shipbuilding slow.
We need to talk about predictability
One of the recurring themes I hear in conversations with shipbuilders is predictability.
Programs are missing various project and schedule milestones that could assist in supporting more predictable impacts and outcomes. This is happening in defense and commercial shipbuilding, and it isn’t always because people aren’t working “fast” enough. If anything, they are working harder to try and achieve, retain, or regain schedule through various methods; adding manpower, working multiple shifts, expediting materials, subcontracting work to other manufacturing companies, or looking at the owner to provide schedule relief based on change scenarios and circumstances.
The challenge is often hidden within knowing where the program really stands through missing information or data that facilitates predictability.
A program office needs to understand whether the design is progressing as expected. The project management and project planning need visibility into what is ready and what is not complete. Production needs confidence that the information it receives reflects the latest decisions required to build the right products at the right time. Owners and operators need a realistic picture of progress to help with various approvals required during the lifecycle.
When that visibility isn’t available or clear, problems find their way to the surface and become obvious later than they should.
By then, there are fewer good options to mitigate additional risk or regain schedule time that is required for making necessary changes.
This is one reason why SSI has been putting more emphasis on the connection between engineering information and program predictability. The value of that information is not limited to the people creating the 3D product model. It can help others responsible for the overall program progress to understand what has happened, what is changing, and where attention may be needed to address impacts to the project before things get even worse.
It does not necessarily make shipbuilding predictable in the sense that everything suddenly will go according to plan. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows better than that.
However, people have a better chance of seeing what is coming if there is connected information available and visible across the shipyard enterprise.
More capacity is going to require more collaboration
There’s another shift in the industry occurring that I believe is just as important as predictability.
For a long time, we thought about shipbuilding capacity in terms of individual shipyards: what can a certain shipyard design, build, and deliver?
The current state of our industry has shown that this is becoming harder to sustain.
The demand we are seeing, particularly in naval and government shipbuilding, is encouraging governments and shipbuilders to think much more broadly about where capacity comes from. We are seeing more work shared between organizations, international shipbuilders entering new markets, and major programs drawing on expertise and capacity across multiple countries.
The ICE Pact between Canada, Finland and the United States is a good example of where this is heading.
The three countries are combining their respective strengths to increase their collective ability to design, build and maintain Arctic and polar icebreakers. That includes sharing technical expertise and information, developing the workforce, and finding ways to better coordinate industrial capacity across the three countries.
And we’re already seeing what that can look like in practice. Canada and Finland are supporting the U.S. Arctic Security Cutter program through an industrial arrangement that brings together designs, expertise, and shipyard capacity from across the three countries.
That’s significant, but I think the broader lesson matters even more.
We aren’t going to solve every capacity challenge by asking individual shipyards to do more on their own. Increasingly, we’re going to have to get better at bringing together the capacity, expertise and resources that already exist across the industry. Shipbuilding increasingly needs companies that have not traditionally worked together to work together, especially when it comes to national defense across allied countries.
We talk internally at SSI about radical collaboration, and I believe we are going to hear much more about this need across the global shipbuilding industry. Not collaboration as a slogan. Actual collaboration: with one yard doing work for another, engineering being performed somewhere other than where the ship is built, a proven design being chosen from another country, or production being distributed because no single facility has enough capacity to do everything itself within the timeframes and program milestones per the demand required.
This all creates some very practical problems that could yield more complex ones that the industry will need to manage.
The other shipyard doesn’t work like you do
Anyone who has worked across multiple shipyards knows there is not one universal way to build a ship.
Shipyards have developed their specific business processes over decades. They structure their information differently. They organize their production differently. They have different standards, naming conventions, and workflows. Those differences usually exist for a reason.
So, when work is contracted from one shipyard to another, requiring that yard to change the way it works is not necessarily the fastest approach in completing a ship program.
In fact, it can introduce exactly the kind of friction that should be avoided by distributing the work in the first place. Adding capacity is not very useful if connecting that capacity to the ship program becomes the bottleneck. This is an area where SSI has been very deliberate with our technology. We do not believe every shipyard has to work “exactly the same way” in order to work together.
A yard using SSI can establish the processes that make sense for the way they build ships. If part of a ship program is being performed elsewhere, the technology needs to accommodate that reality rather than assuming every organization involved will adopt an identical process.
Technology that enables flexibility is going to matter more as shipbuilding becomes more collaborative.
What if the ship design comes from somewhere else?
We are seeing the same issue emerge around ship designs.
There are good reasons for a shipyard to build from an existing ship design. If a proven ship design already meets much of what an owner or program requires, investigating a new ship design that requires “starting over again” is not necessarily the best use of time, especially when speed to build is the reason the proven ship design was chosen to execute “fast” in the first place.
And we are likely to see more of this due to the current state of our industry need. More international companies are looking to do business within the U.S. market. More design organizations are participating in programs outside their traditional markets. Naval programs are sharing technology and designs across borders as allied partners. Shipyards looking for ways to increase throughput are naturally asking what they can reuse instead of recreating.
But there is a huge assumption, and a catch. Getting a ship design does not mean you can immediately build the ship.
The ship design may have been developed using a proprietary software platform or product. The ship design or ship model may be structured around another shipyard’s business and shipbuilding processes. The information needed by production may not be organized the way the receiving yard needs it, so that it can be processed through their enterprise systems.
You can easily give back the anticipated time savings by using an existing design by spending months trying to fit that design into the shipyards’ enterprise business systems and shipbuilding environment.
This is why SSI has been doing a lot of work around management of third-party design models. A shipyard should not have to choose between using an existing design and maintaining the proven business processes it already knows work.
SSI allows shipbuilders to bring third-party design information into their environment and turn it into information they can then use efficiently and effectively for their shipbuilding processes. This allows a shipyard to receive a design originating in another system and continue moving it toward production within established and proven SSI workflows.
This sounds like a software interoperability issue, and technically it is. Meanwhile the bigger issue that still remains is the issue of capacity. If we want shipyards to share work, reuse proven designs, and bring more organizations into major shipbuilding programs, moving information between those organizations needs to become easier to consume and utilize.
Otherwise, digital data borders will be created at exactly the point where the industry is trying to remove industrial ones.
Good information saves more time than rushed decisions
None of this means moving faster at any cost. There are plenty of decisions in shipbuilding that should take time. What should not take time is determining whether you have the right information to make them.
That distinction matters.
If an engineer has to search through multiple places to establish which information is current, that is delay. If production planning has to stop to clarify a change, that is delay. If a program manager can not see that the project is falling behind until it begins affecting downstream milestones, that’s delay, too.
This is where connected information becomes much more than a technology discussion. The more complex and distributed a program becomes, the harder it is to manage through manual coordination alone. Shipbuilders need to be able to see what is happening without piecing the picture together from spreadsheets, emails, meetings and disconnected systems. And importantly, different people need different views of that information so they can utilize what is needed to efficiently and effectively complete their daily tasks.
An engineer does not need the same information as a production planner. A program manager does not need the same level of detail as a designer. An owner or operator simply needs the confidence that the program is progressing against the milestones that matter to them.
The underlying information can be connected without everyone having to interact with it in the same way. This is where I see a great deal of opportunity for the industry.
We can’t solve a capacity problem by adding more work
The workforce challenge makes all of this more urgent. Shipbuilding is trying to grow at the same time some of its most experienced shipbuilders are retiring. These shipbuilders know things that are difficult to document. They have seen what happens when a design decision reaches production. They understand the consequences of a late change. They know which questions to ask because they have seen the problem before.
We need to train more people, certainly. But we also need to stop asking experienced people to spend so much of their time compensating for disconnected information and processes. If someone with 25 or 30 years of shipbuilding experience is spending part of their day finding files, reconciling revisions, or manually passing information between systems, that is not a good use of a scarce resource.
The same is true for the next generation entering this industry. We should be giving them better access to the information and context they need to do their jobs, not teaching them how to navigate around the same information gaps we have lived and dealt with as perceived normal processes for decades.
Technology will not replace shipbuilding experience and knowledge. It can help us use that experience and captured knowledge much better.
So where does shipbuilding actually need speed?
I do not think there is one answer.
We need faster access to reliable information. Faster awareness and communication of change. Faster ways to understand where a program is against its milestones and in potential jeopardy. We need to make it easier for one shipyard to work with another without spending months aligning every process and system first. We need to be able to take a useful design from somewhere else and build from it without starting over. And we need better ways to connect the people who understand the work with the people who need that knowledge.
None of that requires us to lower the bar for engineering or production. Quite the opposite. It gives people more time to concentrate on the parts of shipbuilding where care, judgement, and experience really matter.
The demand is here. The industry needs more capacity. But that capacity is not necessarily going to come from asking individual shipyards to simply do more of what they are already doing. Some of it will come from being much better at working together.
This means sharing work between shipyards. Making better use of proven designs. Bringing new organizations and expertise into established programs. Connecting engineering and production information across systems. And giving people a clearer picture of what is happening so they can make decisions before problems become delays within a project.
Shipbuilding has always been collaborative. What is changing is the scale of that collaboration and the number of boundaries the work now must cross. If we are going to build more ships, those boundaries need to become easier to cross too.
That is where I believe some of the biggest opportunities for speed are going to come from.