Steel stock management on the stockyard operations in shipbuilding: a case of Hyundai Heavy Industries

Abstract

As the largest shipbuilding company in the world and the leader in the Korean merchant shipbuilding industry, Hyundai Heavy Industries is currently struggling to carry out intensive productivity improvements. These are needed in order to be the global merchant shipbuilding market leader by surpassing the competition from Japan and the threat from China armed with very cheap labour costs. This paper introduces the academy and industry collaborative project, part of the productivity improvement efforts conducted on the steel stockyard operations. As a pilot project it researched a way of improving the stockyard operations and future projects on the stockyard operations. The project defined the stockyard operations, measured current situations, and analysed operational difficulties. In addition, the project developed the steel stockyard operations simulator. Besides the simulator used by the operations manager, who has relied heavily on his work-experienced intuition when making decisions, this paper expects that further projects on the stockyard operations utilise the simulator for their own purposes.