An integrated approach for ship block manufacturing process performance evaluation: Case from a Korean shipbuilding company

For effective ship manufacturing, a ship is divided into hundreds of properly sized blocks in the design stage. Each block is produced in its own manufacturing process, and subsequently the blocks are assembled into the body of a ship. Performance evaluation of the block manufacturing process (BMP) has been an important issue in the shipbuilding industry, since the BMP is related to overall shipbuilding productivity. However, performance evaluation of BMP entails many difficulties due to the many block types and many differences between actual and planned operations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a systematic approach to evaluate the performance of BMPs by integrating process mining (PM) and data envelopment analysis (DEA). The approach evaluates performance based on actual work data, which are saved in the databases of production information systems, and provides guidelines for the improvement of underperforming BMPs in relation to the manufacturing processes. For demonstrative purpose, the proposed approach is applied to a Korean shipbuilding company. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.