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Category: Production Management

Louisiana Center for Manufacturing Sciences (LCMS)

The LCMS initiative studied measures for improving production planning in the U.S. shipbuilding industry.  This study involved a comprehensive survey of current production practices in Tier 1 and Tier 2 shipyards and development of a TO-BE production planning environment for these shipyards.

KBSI was awarded a contract by the Louisiana Center for Manufacturing Sciences (LCMS) to study measures for improving production planning in the U.S. shipbuilding industry.  The study involved a comprehensive survey of current production planning practices in Tier 1 and Tier 2 shipyards, development of a TO-BE production planning environment for these shipyards, and development of a roadmap for implementing and achieving the TO-BE vision.

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Common Parts Catalog (CPC™)

The CPC™ initiative developed a standardized process and methodology for product characteristics/data modeling that allows Tier 2 shipyards to represent and communicate part information without ambiguity or redundancy.

A common problem in the shipbuilding industry is the lack of standardization in parts catalogs; in other words, the industry lacks a standardized process or methodology for product characteristics/data modeling that would allow them to represent and communicate part information without ambiguity or redundancy.  For individual organizations, this void results in large, unwieldy, and unorganized catalog systems that make it difficult to search for and re-use parts.  A typical second tier shipyard has a parts catalog with at least three to four times the number of parts currently in use by the enterprise.  Over time, when existing parts cannot easily be located, duplicate parts with new part numbers are created, perpetuating and exacerbating the cataloging problems.

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Facility Engineering Work Products System (FEWPS)

In the FEWPS initiative, KBSI leveraged the eTEAM solution for life cycle product management to create a system for tracking and managing requests in the development of facility engineering work products.

The process of developing complex systems or products typically requires participation from multiple specialties and organizations:  domain stakeholders, technology engineers, modeling and simulation analysts, system engineers, and managers.  Managing this development, because of the inherently complex, long-term, and multi-organizational nature of the work, is a challenging proposition that involves a number of facets and tasks:  request instantiation, disposition, and monitoring; generating and submitting a requirements package; tracking the outcomes of submissions; monitoring the status of outcomes; and generating reports, budgeting, and prioritization.  These operations currently tend to be performed manually and, as a consequence, are labor intensive and prone to errors.  There is no collaborative working environment and no centralized access to data.

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Medical Materiel Knowledge Discoverer (MMKD)

MMKD is a configurable, dashboard driven knowledge discovery system that allows users without data mining expertise to perform cutting edge knowledge discovery.  The technology helps the DoD Medical Logistics community meet the challenges of troop deployments in ever widening combat scenarios.

The Medical Materiel Knowledge Discoverer (MMKD) is a knowledge discovery system for the Department of Defense (DoD) Medical Logistics community that goes beyond simple data mining.  The changing nature of military conflicts in the world favor an emphasis on the rapid deployment of troops in an ever-widening variety of scenarios and locales.  These developments raise significant logistical challenges and risks for, among other military branches, the DoD medical community.

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Agile, Wireless-Enabled Workflows for Ship Manufacturing & Repair (AWSM™)

The AWSM™ technology represents a new paradigm for ship manufacturing that redesigns manufacturing processes and uses computing and wireless technologies to deliver information–activity statuses, resource availability, design and scheduling changes–to every user, work crew, or process involved in the project.

A central challenge in any large-scale manufacturing environment is to effectively adjust to production and procurement glitches that ripple across and continually threaten manufacturing schedules.  The ship manufacturing industry is no exception.  With manufacturing projects that stretch over years and involve numerous divisions, materials, facilities, and manpower, how can U.S. shipyards achieve the kind of proactive flexibility needed to develop and maintain the most efficient and cost-effective production schedules?

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