Mawei Shipbuilding Driven with Innovation

Gao Xinru

Mawei Shipbuilding Co Ltd has a century history. Since reform and opening up and especially in recent years, driven by innovation, Mawei Shipbuilding has been pursuing lean management,continuously promoting product upgrade,with corporate recognition and influence uplifted and the 100-year shipbuilder maintaining its vitality.

Mawei Shipbuilding has launched global first 227M deepsea mining vessel,84M double-hull semi-submersible multipurpose mobile platform, 5000T offshore cable laying ship, 70-89M electric propulsion platform supply ship, 3-105M series ocean engineering multipurpose vessel, ocean fishing vessel,naval ship and all series of container ships, bulk cargo carriers, oil tanks, etc.,products are exported to more than 20 countries and regions including the UK,Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden,Denmark, Norway, Greece, the US,Australia, Singapore, Malaysia. European feeder container vessel, 84M double-hull semi-submersible multipurpose mobile platform obtained various honorary titles granted by international authoritative institutions.

Three Three Work Method

In enterprise management, Mawei emphasizes management is an important means to internal risk prevention and control, corporate staff training and quality improvement is productivity,enterprise should never stick to convention, must persist in continuous innovation, and only in this way, can corporate progress and development be promoted continuously. For that purpose,Mawei Shipbuilding innovated monthly“Three Three Work Method” on its Leah base, that is, apart from doing three major tasks, each operation team must make great effort in other three minor jobs, so that corporate major reform is closely combined with minor changes,forming the working mechanism of senior executives, middle-level cadres and staff “hold on to both the big and the small”, advancing side by side towards the overall goal of corporate development.

Cavalry-Free Assembly Method

In past few years, Mawei Leah base has complete about 20 new ships each year, with annual output value of more than RMB2 billion. Field operation requires numerous “iron horses”in line with traditional process, which required massive steel, electrode,electric energy, manpower, cutting, steam planing, polishing work, this not only wasted manpower and material, leading to substantial increase in production cost,but also affected aesthetic feeling of hull appearance and quality. This seemingly ordinary "trivial matter" has become a matter of necessity in the minds of Mawei shipbuilders. For that purpose,the company executives have on several occasions been in the construction site for careful observation, analysis and study, through constant testing, finally developed the “cavalry-free assembly method” new technology, which has been extensively used on board export ships, with remarkable results.

After inspection on the production site, ABS surveyor commented the“cavalry-free assembly” technology can effectively prevent hull steel plate wrinkles and ensure smooth and goodlooking of hull planking and it is a major technical breakthrough and process innovation. Industry experts believe“cavalry-free assembly” is a major innovation, can both lower shipbuilding cost and improve product quality and appearance, worthy of application in the industry. Subsequently, many a few enterprise pal have been to Mawei for learning.

Digital Coating

After that, Mawei Shipbuilding developed a new topic of “digital coating”. However, many coating teams and especially old painters held this simply plays figure game and any innovation result is impossible.Nevertheless, Mawei Shipbuilding executives are fully confident, actively guiding the research group in work item by item from rigorous steel plate surface treatment, rational coating matching,standard construction parameters,sophisticated quantitative assessment,overall cost control and specification safety requirements. In the process of “digital coating”, the company took figures as basis for management work, took figures as important basis for assessing individuals and teams,totally changing the old pattern that coating management relied on personal experience, production dispatching,random reduction of work duration and catching up the process.

We learn Mawei Shipbuilding Coating Division applied benchmark and limit management method, by setting up benchmarking, finding out where one lags behind, dividing on measures and promoting progress among other management means, set out benchmarking parameters, decided on target value to be reached, comparing sheets, finding gaps, comparing benchmark to promote progress, applying digital sheet management, exercising control and quantitative assessment over coating construction process, realized coating production digitization. Amidst the current sluggish shipbuilding market,the move effectively reduces coating production cost, manhour and energy loss, remarkably improving corporate market competitions.

Statistics show Mawei Shipbuilding paint purchase cost in past years stood at RMb18.483370 million,its loss coefficient at 2.53; through“digital coating”, lost coefficient was controlled below 2.2, saving paint cost of about RMB2.7 million. On the basis,the company has strengthened innovation management, constantly promoted quality and efficiency improvement, brought sectionalized paint lost coefficient under 1.7, with remarkable cost reduction result.

Equipment Innovation

During self innovation, Mawei Shipbuilding has paid attention to current scientific and technological innovation achievements and new equipment applications. On July 19, 2018, the highprecision NC profile cutting line bought by the Mawei Shipbuilding Manufacturing Department was put into production in the joint workshop, which is expected to further drive up the company to realize cost decreasing and benefit increasing in the production process.

Before introducing the new equipment, profile material preparation completely depended on manual drawing,manual cutting and manual jet drawing of parts code,the traditional blanking method features slow marking out, low cutting efficiency, prone to deviation,much polishing workload, large site occupancy, low turnover efficiency,restricting improvement in sectional parts support and distribution efficiency,unable to meet the production need.

The new profile cutting line can directly program profile laying-off data on the drawing design stage, then cutting equipment automatically identifies command to complete marking-off,cutting and code spraying, not only multiplying lay-off efficiency, but also resulting in precise notch of NC cutting,smoother and flatter than manual cutting, and simple polishing on free edge after cutting is over suffices to collect material. The production line introduction not only boosted the company capacity upgrade, but also obviously improved productivity and quality, resulting in good effect in quality and efficiency improvement.