IMPROVEMENTS IN LEARNING PROCESS AND PRODUCTIVITY. AN ANALYSIS OF THE RETURN OF THE INVESTMENT

摘要

CAD Systems help engineers and designers in various industries, designing and building 3D models of airplanes, bridges... and of course, ships, submarines and floating structures. Nowadays all the industry, an especially shipyards and design offices, uses CAD in order to design better and cheaper boats and floating artefacts. The use of a CAD System provides not only a cost reduction in design, but also a cost reduction in production, including two major aspects: savings in materials due to a more accurate definition of components and material management, as well as savings in materials due to a significant reduction of design changes, and consequently reduction of rework in production; and savings of production man-hours due to the reduction of changes and rework.This paper shows an analysis performed with information compiled as a consequence of the author experience in CAD implementation in numerous shipyards around the world during the last years, to provide a clear idea of the Return on Investment of using CAD Systems (in particular, the FORAN® System) in a generic shipyard. Another key aspect of this paper, is the analysis of the learning curve of a new CAD System implemented in a generic shipyard. The data, hours expended designing blocks and units of different weights, collected for this paper during a couple of years from a generic shipyard, have been a fantastic tool for analysing the factors that affect a learning curve process.