Management of a Ferry Construction Project Using a Production- Oriented Design Methodology

In an increasingly globalized sector such as the naval construction sector, the search for reduction in execution terms and production costs becomes essential. With this aim, the vessel project should be analyzed globally and in conjunction with the installations in which it will be built. The present research includes a series of improvement proposals for the construction of a 78-m-long ferry, designed for the transport of 700 passengers and 590 lineal meters of cargo space. These improvements are focused on the standardization of equipment and components in the accommodation area and engine room, as well as in the general arrangement of these spaces, by orienting their design toward manufacturing. All this will lead to a series of results, which demonstrate that the correct application of these changes considerably reduces production time and, consequently, the costs associated with it. In parallel, this study analyzes the facilities of the shipyard, proposing changes in its workshops and identifying new business lines to improve the strategic situation of the organization. Historically, European shipyards have manufactured in their installations a great variety of ships, each one with a high component of technological innovation. The high quality of their products and their adaptability to custom orders from the ship owners have led the naval construction sector to be currently identified at an international level as a sector with highly differentiated products. The impact that international competition has had in the last decades, and more recently the economic crisis and the file opening by the European Commission in relation to the old system of "tax lease" applied in Europe (Curtis 2014), reduced the level of new ships construction contracting in 2011. The published registers (LR-Lloyds-Fairplay 2015) about the new ship constructions places European manufacturers far from the construction volumes of Asian manufacturers in terms of compensated gross tonnage (CGT), which is a measure of the compensated gross arching related to the gross tonnage through a compensation coefficient for each ship type and size, which considers the construction complexity based on the manufacturing work hours needed.