Original Date: 02/10/2003
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Bender Shipbuilding and Repair Company, Inc. created a semiautomatic system that uses information stored in a common database to accomplish fully integrated scheduling of a manufacturing focus group. The manufacturing group covers several major industrial practices that occur early in the shipbuilding process: plate and profile processing, and panel fabrication. These disciplines are tracked to control re-work and unplanned work and to accurately plan future work.

Bender Shipbuilding and Repair Company, Inc. previously produced independent schedules for various workshops that were not integrated into a facility-wide master schedule. Scheduling was accomplished at the unit level for batch-processed work. This condition made it impossible to plan work across multiple workshops, or determine facility utilization on multiple contracts, for internal and external customers.

Bender has now initiated a manufacturing focus group that includes integrated scheduling for plate and profile processing and panel fabrication. Performance metrics are established for each workshop to monitor scheduling and produce useful information for more accurate future planning. Naming conventions for material details and labor instructions enable work package kitting and routing. Detailed work breakdown structures are established using the naming convention and a product hierarchy, which were combined with Bills of Material (BOMs) to assign and determine the status of work progress accomplished in the manufacturing focus group. Impending research plans will incorporate pipe fabrication with structural work and implement bar coding throughout the factory for better material tracking.

Benefits of integrated scheduling for the manufacturing focus group enable accurate determination of work status through progress reporting into a common database, level loading of work schedules on multiple projects, compliance with established build strategies, less process work variation, reduced re-work, synchronized manufacturing activities within the focus group, and better organization of workshops to allow time for further research and development activities. While developing this process, Bender defined its role as the leader of the research team that was customizing various applications to achieve a truly unique capability of semi-automatic scheduling.

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