TECHNOLOGY TRANSFERRAL

摘要

As with so many other aspects or our lives, information technology is transforming shipbuilding in many ways. One potential effect of this transformation is improving the efficiency and safety of ferries in the developing world, mainly by improving producibility. Put simply, if better ferries can be built for less money, they can be built safely-and aging, dangerous vessels can be more economically replaced, maintained, or upgraded. Although shipbuilding labor rates in the developing world may be low by Western standards, they are still comparable to other costs in the developing world that apply to locally used ships. It therefore is always wise to improve labor productivity if it can be done economically. In addition, there are more job opportunities as the economy of the regions improves, so other industries compete with shipbuilding for workers. Fortunately, U.S. experience-especially much of the work done under the National Shipbuilding Research Program (NSRP)-has shown that there is a wide range of process improvements that can yield radical increases in productivity. An important common theme of these improvements is that most of them are enabled by information technology, especially the three-dimensional product data model.