Integrated Capacity Planning System for Shipyards

This paper introduces a set of integrated software tools that improve a shipyard’s ability to conduct effective capacity planning and analyses as well improve their spatial scheduling throughout all their facilities. The Long-Range Capacity Planning Tool replaces a manually intensive planning process through a user-friendly interface. The Spatial Scheduling Tool is a vastly improved version of previously developed software (Finke et al., 2007; 2008) to determine which areas of the shipyard are in use throughout the build plan. Finally, a Shop-Level Capacity Planning Tool is introduced that provides planners a view of work order schedules and their impact on work center capacity. These tools can be used to generate and save different build plan scenarios to perform what-if analyses and to perform more accurate capacity analyses to explore how adding a new hull to the build plan will affect current production plans. These tools interface with a Central Data System, which extracts information from legacy data systems, and acts as the central repository for all capacity planning data, ensuring that the tools have identical and up to date information. The tools also provide reporting/export functions that enable efficient integration back to the shipyard’s legacy execution system.