As we near the end of 2018 and the New Year, it’s a good time for marine environments to consider their operations and procedures. Looking at your past strategies and determining if there are improvements that can be made will help you make the necessary adjustments in your shipyard for 2019. Even if you take the time throughout the year to review your operations, you should always be encouraged to step back and look at your shipyard from a new perspective. Here are three ways you can improve your operations for the coming year.
- Consider a Lean initiative. There is a lot of information available about transitioning your environment to a more energy and materially efficient production facility. Reducing waste, conserving energy, and more can all give you a competitive edge in the marine industry. You can start by conducting an audit of your energy and material use as well as determining your output of waste. This will give you an idea of where to start to improve processes for the coming year to create a leaner manufacturing environment.
- Take time for a visual inspection. Try this experiment. Walk through your shipyard during production hours. Through quick visual observation, determine the efficiencies of your processes, the organization of the environment, and the individual cleanliness of each workstation. Then do another walk through after hours. Observe how the shipyard looks after your staff has gone home. Is it neat and clean? Does it look exactly as they left it or was some initiative taken to organize before the end of the day? There may be room for organizational improvements.
- Evaluate safety protocol. Safety is a number one concern for ship builders, so you can never evaluate enough. What is your current safety orientation and how does your team participate? Were there any injuries or accidents in 2018? How were these handled? What prevention policies are in place? Consider new ways to reinforce safety in the shipyard and create a plan for improvement in 2019.
Do you want to improve your operations in the coming year? Contact the team at Hutco to see how we can help.