Improving flow to achieve lean manufacturing in shipbuilding

As the world has moved closer to a global economy, competition between manufacturing companies has also become global. This increasingly competitive environment has led tointense study ofthe companies that are at the top in terms of competitive position. As a result of this study, the concepts of lean thinking and lean manufacturing have been described. The shipbuilding industry, especially outside Japan, has not yet responded to the need to apply these principles. This paper explores the potential application of one of these principles, flow, to the shipbuilding industry. It proposes an approach to move the industry closer tolean manufacturing in terms offlow, and offers a metric by which to determine how close to ideal flow a shipbuilding system is. The basis for the establishment of lean thinking in shipbuilding is the appropriate application of group technology through the use of a product-oriented workbreakdown structure. This paper also considers how these ideas may be generalized to any large assembly manufacturing system.