To succeed in a highly competitive global shipbuilding market, providing the best ship design solutions to the market is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. In addition, a ship design company must develop and practice a ship development process that creates a profitable business in the longer perspective. This is the focus of the DREAMS (Design Re-Engineering and Automation for Marine Systems) project. DREAMS is a four-year research project at NTNU, with Ulstein, DNV, PonPower and the Norwegian Business School as partners. The overall aim is to improve the competitiveness of Norwegian ship design firms. This includes analyzing existing business and design processes to understand both the impact of individual design activities and the ship design tools' use and the customer´s perceived value of the ship design process and the requirements of the design documentation to be used In the transactions among relevant stakeholders. Furthermore, the research work considers the resource expenditure in term of time, manhours and direct cost during the ship design process. This exploration will provide the basis for a re-engineered ship design process, including the automation and digitalization, as well as the “right-sizing”, outsourcing, and insourcing of individual design tasks and corresponding expertise and knowledge elements. Improvements should take place in the product, the process, and the organization and shall include conceptual, basic, and detailed engineering design activities. The findings will be implemented in the industry as well as integrated into the curriculum of the naval architecture MSc programme at NTNU, to ensure industry-wide dissemination.
In our proposed paper we will report from the initial findings from the data analysis of past design projects and present our main hypotheses on the structure and content of a future design process that will be re-engineered both on a strategic, tactical, and operational level.
