NSRP LEAN BULLETIN BOARD

This Bulletin Board provides industry members who have a question regarding Lean, a means of publicly soliciting advice from experts or others in the industry that are facing similar challenges.

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1. Seeking information on Work Breakdown Structures as being used in ship repair. posted 7/15/02 by Paul Ziakin

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2. Seeking information on how other shipyards deal with debundling structural steel. Specifically, what means of material handling do shipyards use to get the material on a conveyor system and position it to go through the blast. Any information would be greatly appreciated. posted 9/30/02 by Matthew L. Tompkins
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3. We are beginning a lean transformation at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and since we are a public yard, it is hard to say that lean will get more money for the employees. How do we present it to the workers such that they can internalize the lean concepts and begin to look at ways to remove waste from their areas and be more efficient? How do you prove that Five S actually saved money off the bottom line? Everyone agrees qualitatively that it's a good thing, but how do we show the savings, particularly since we are not for profit? posted 1/29/04 by Dana Simon

There is a book entitled "Lean Transformation" by Henderson et al. that has a very good discussion of the implementation side. A great read to answer your question. posted 5/27/04 by LCDR Frank S. Mulcahy
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4. We did a pilot project at an RMC (Repair and Maintenance Center) this summer to explore the feasibility of Cellular Manufacturing in a shipyard. When it comes to implementing cells, which are the foundation for any comprehensive Lean implementation, an RMC, and probably any shipyard for that matter, will have two constraints: (1) they are organized as process-specialized shops ex. machine shop, pipe shop, sheetmetal shop, etc. and (2) they have numeorus monuments that simply could not be relocated. The result is that traditional cells could not be implemented in many cases. As a result, there is significant material flow, people flow, tooling flow, information flow, etc. Today, this chaos (pardon me!) is addressed via daily production meetings with the RO followed by each shop's rep then having a meeting with his/her shop personnel, inter-shop communicatoins (phone calls, emails, walkarounds, face-to-face, etc.), expediting and, of course, cussing. However, there is no reason why we could not try to implement VIRTUAL CELLS, and rely on shopfloor control software and IT enablers to manage these groups of resources. In our pilot project at this RMC, we used a representative sample of CASREPS (Casualty Reports), determined a routing for each CASREP (this is the set of Lead Workcenters and Assist Workcenters that need to work on the "job") and processed this data using PFAST. PFAST is a software for Group Technology, Cell Design and Facility Layout. The analysis suggested that Virtual Cells do exist even in a repair environment! We would like to validate this concept further by working with other RMC's and shipyards. Our methodology, JOBSHOPLEAN, could be deployed in any of your component-producing shops or it could be used to analyse overall shipyard flows. If you are interested in having us replicate this project in your facility, please contact me. Thank you. Posted 9/13/2006 by Shahrukh A. Irani

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