PPT: Advanced planning and scheduling for ship production

Production Planning

Shipbuilding and offshore projects (characterised by their complexity as well as one-of-a-kind, made-to-custom order nature) require reliable forecasts of project duration and cost estimation. This proves to be particularly difficult during bidding or project planning stages.

There exists a difficult trade-off between precision and effort leading to high commercial risks due to:

  • traditional scheduling tools do not consider technical aspects of work (e.g. facilities used for carrying out tasks, product geometry etc.), thus a lot of empirical input and judgement is required
  • changes in design require numerous modifications to be reflected in tasks and schedules
  • investigation of technical and/or organizational alternatives is cumbersome

 

 

The Topgallant® Project Planning Suite provides the functionality for rapid, optimised and detailed one-of-a-kind planning in all project stages. To progress efficiently with the definition of requirements and tasks, product- and process-related data are directly derived from specifications (e.g. as provided by the ship owner/operator) using the combination of:

  • customisable requirement engineering techniques
  • a catalogue manager (allows the definition of general data such as material and equipment items, standards like SFI grouping codes or task templates derived from finished projects)
  • multi-project, multi-user capable data management
  • scheduling, optimization
Production Planning Solution

 

Workflow of Production Planning
Planning Workflow

 

Once the project specific data is derived using the requirement engineering techniques and catalogue manager functions,  Topgallant® Information Server is used to integrate this data into a scheduling and optimization component.

This way full-scale project scheduling and cost estimation is supported, including optimisation tools for targeting configurable goals (e.g. shortest time, best utilization, and minimized cost). Most importantly this solution relates scheduling information to all underlying engineering and planning data - which goes well beyond the capabilities of common scheduling tools.