How can shipbuilding companies improve engineering productivity?
Shipbuilding has become increasingly complex, with a growing number of owner and sustainability requirements, new technologies, suppliers, and co-makers. Engineers are critical to successfully meeting these requirements. Yet, engineers regularly lose productivity to non-value-add tasks that rob them of their ability to innovate and threaten their company’s ability to compete, differentiate, and grow. Plus, this wasted time leaves little bandwidth to respond agilely to the fluctuating needs of the global economy. Also, wasted time increases the risk of late delivery penalties. Imagine the potential of identifying and removing the most common non-value-add activities engineers face and empowering them to focus on designing better ships.
This research examines how engineers spend their time, where they lose productivity, and the impact on the business. It then identifies solutions and approaches to reduce time wasters. Based on a survey of 228 manufacturers across industries, this report looks at the challenges and opportunities from the perspective of shipbuilding companies.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Siemens (registration required).
This report is based off the research published in The Business Value of Reducing Engineering Time Wasters which takes a look across all industries.
For other industry-specific related research, read:
- Reducing Engineering Time Wasters in Aerospace & Defense
- Reducing Engineering Time Wasters in Heavy Equipment
- Reducing Engineering Time Wasters in Consumer Products
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Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Product Development is Critical to Business Strategies
- The Time Wasters
- Implications of Time Wasters to the Business
- A Solution to Avoid Time Wasters
- Business Value from PLM
- Extending PLM Use Results in Greater Satisfaction
- How Companies Implement PLM
- Additional Values Due to the Cloud
- Conclusions
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Engineers Impact Business Success
Engineering is critical to exceptional ship design. Likewise, engineers are crucial to ensure designs incorporate owner requirements, leverage new technology, meet environmental and compliance regulations, stay within budget, and meet delivery dates. Therefore, empowering engineers is key to the successful execution of business strategies.
Too Many Time Wasters
Unfortunately, engineers report spending too much time on non-value-added work with too many interruptions, taking them away from critical innovation work. Furthermore, 87% of companies developing complex products, such as ships, say this loss in engineering productivity comes at a significant business cost due to missed deadlines, higher costs, less innovation, and poor quality. One way to overcome productivity losses is to manage product data better and make it accessible to those who need it, when they need it, especially suppliers.
Reclaiming Wasted Time
This report identifies substantial engineering time wasters and examines them from the perspective of shipbuilding companies. It explores how companies of all sizes reclaim lost time by examining the use and value of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solutions to centralize data across multiple domains, manage processes, and collaborate better including with suppliers. Incidentally, PLM users reported fewer changes due to outdated information and errors, significantly reducing non-value-added work and shortening development times. This report also examines how companies select and use PLM solutions, including cloud-based implementations.
The Time Wasters
What Slows Engineers Down?
The graph identifies the top engineering time wasters faced by companies developing complex products like ships. The findings highlight how much time engineers waste on non-value-added work. They need better ways to automate tedious tasks so engineers can focus more energy on meeting customer requirements. Another top-ranking time waster, too many manual processes/bottlenecks such as spreadsheet-driven processes, emphasizes this further.
Interruptions
Similarly, constant interruptions to answer questions, share data, collaborate with internal team members, the supply chain, class societies, and clients also slow engineers down. These interruptions break an engineer’s train of thought and distract them from their work.
Finding Needed Data
Companies developing complex products such as ships also waste efforts because they can’t find what they need. They waste time recreating what they can’t find, wasting time and risking introducing new errors that could be avoided with more reuse. In particular, data locked in spreadsheets can be difficult to find. Better methods to centralize access to data would avoid all that searching and help get that time back.
Consolidating Data
Considering the number of disciplines involved in ship development, it can be difficult to get a consolidated view of all data associated with a ship. This makes it difficult to find, update, and share data. Instead, engineers waste time searching for it or fixing errors due to outdated data. Further, these challenges negatively impact suppliers and co-makers if they can’t get an accurate view of the data. Downstream lifecycle processes such as servicing, maintenance, and decommissioning may also suffer.
Conclusions
Reclaiming Lost Time
Shipbuilders prioritize their future growth and sustained success with a market-leading product of superior quality, on time, and within budget. To support this, they can significantly boost their product development capabilities by eliminating time wasters that consume engineers’ valuable time.
Companies developing complex products such as ships find that PLM can empower their engineers to innovate by significantly reducing engineers’ time on non-value-added tasks. As a result, they can enjoy a competitive advantage. In addition, technological advances, such as cloud-based offerings, can reduce implementation time, cost, and difficulty, making PLM more accessible.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor Siemens.
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