Design for Quality in the Shipbuilding Industry

There is a growing understanding that the quality of a product should be built in at the design phase. More and more reports have shown that this kind of approach, named design for quality, can benefit the company to make it much more competitive. In many Eastern countries such as Japan and Taiwan, such concepts have been used for a while. The so‐called product oriented design (POD) and quality function deployment (QFD) are widely used in many industries. This may be one of the main reasons why many Eastern countries have had a very high economic growth rate during the past two decades. For a coastal nation, the shipbuilding industry is essential for defence purposes. However, to run a shipyard efficiently is not an easy job due to several of its characteristics. They are: (1) the product (a ship) size is very large both in volume and weight and each product has thousands of different components; (2) the design, planning and manufacturing process overlap very significantly and the concept of “teamwork” is therefore greatly emphasized; and (3) the production process is very complex and complicated with very many interdependences. With these characteristics, the methods of “design for quality” and “design for manufacture” seem to be ideal tools for the shipbuilding industry to maintain product quality while raising the shipyard′s efficiency. Describes how a shipbuilding company in Taiwan can apply these positive concepts to improve its performance. Discusses several practical examples to illustrate these concepts.