By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s Program Executive Office (PEO) Ships is taking a renewed look at how shipbuilding can be more efficient and affordable, not just across individual platforms, but focusing across the entire PEO, according to a top service official.
In the past, the Navy’s shipbuilding efforts have focused on reducing risk, stable requirements and affordability, from an individual program’s perspective, Rear Adm. William Landay, PEO Ships, told reporters at a roundtable last week at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).
As the PEO Ships leadership sat down and began critiquing themselves on programs such as the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)–what did they not do well, what did they know, what should they have done differently but allowed themselves to continue doing the same thing anyway–there was a lot of discussion about how to stop those things, Landay said.
After discussions with Navy leadership and shipbuilders, Landay said it came down to looking at what can be improved and how does the Navy go and attack those things.
And Landay made it clear that these efforts should not be seen as a new start or new path forward.
“I would tell you it’s more of a refocus and reemphasis on this. I certainly would not claim that these are things we have invented in the last six months or last year,” he said. “It’s really saying these are the things that are important and how do we focus on those things that are important even better than we may have in the past.”
While Landay and his team still conduct program reviews, they are also conducting quarterly reviews…fairly in depth program reviews examining the execution plan and the ability to transfer lessons learned from one program to another.
“The next thing that we do after we go through our individual programs we go back and do it yard by yard,” he said. “We look at all the work we have at Ingalls, and Bath, at NASSCO, and at Austal. And we look across those programs and say ‘we ought to be performing about the same in all those programs in the yard. If we are not, what’s different?”
For example, what might the DDG-51 program be doing better than another program at Northrop Grumman [NOC] Shipbuilding’s Ingalls facility in Mississippi? “What are the differences and how do we go capture that and how do we go drive that,” Landay said.
“Maybe it’s the yard has different priorities and how do we go reorient those priorities? Or maybe, quite frankly, the programs are coming at it quite differently,” he added. “So a lot of what we are trying to do is transfer those best [practices] and treat this as a PEO.”
It really is a matter of bringing together program managers and production personnel and sitting down and looking across the PEO asking what’s different, why is one program better than another and what can be done, Landay added.
PEO Ships did some analysis and started to see some very interesting trends, he noted.
“We find for example every program that we had looked at where we did 50 percent of the work before erection…in no case was the final EAC (estimate at completion) of that program within about 35 percent of what the target EAC was,” Landay said. “And we found in almost every case where we did more than 50…50 to 60 percent…we were fairly close to our target EACs.”
That’s critical to the Navy, Landay added.
“That’s something we had paid not much attention to before that we now go take a look at. But we go to individual program managers now and when they come back to me and say they went through their production readiness review or they went through their plan and here’s the plan, we say ‘why are you going to go down that path? Our data says this is very high risk…why are we doing that?'”
The idea again, Landay said, is that the Navy is trying to attack those issues up front. “Not from what an individual program manager may have known but what we have learned over the program…and this applies to little boats as it does to big ships Those concepts stay the same.”
By end of 2009, the Navy will have delivered or commissioned 10 major surface combatants and about 200 to 250 small boats and craft, Landay said.
In addition to those that the service will deliver in ’09, it will also have about 20 major surface combatants, in seven different yards, that are under constriction, along with another 190 small boats and craft, he added.
“We do business across 25 to 30 shipyards, seven or eight major key kind of shipyards…Tier 1 and Tier 2 as we call them,” Landay said. “The remainder are smaller, specialty builders.”
The Navy anticipates a workload of about 25 to 30 additional major combatants that it will have under contract by the end of the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP). “That will change as you go year to year across the FYDP,” Landay noted.
“That gives us significant challenges–a lot of ships, a lot of classes of ships spread across a lot of yards,” he added.
But it also gives the Navy a lot of opportunities, Landay said.
“It allows us to look at how various shipyards do business, how we execute various programs and try to transfer good lessons from one program to another, good ideas from one shipyard to another, as much as we can within the business constraints, the business practices, within the yards,” he said.