The National Shipbuilding Research Program. 1997 Ship Production Symposium, Paper Number 16: Towards a Generic Product-Oriented Work Breakdown Structure for Shipbuilding

U.S. Navy ship acquisitions are currently managed using the Ship Work Breakdown Structure, or SWBS, which decomposes ships by separating out their operational systems. This was effective in an era when the entire ship procurement program was physically accomplished using a ship system orientation. However, this is no longer the case and the right type of design and management information is not being collected and analyzed under SWBS. This paper reports the results of a cooperative effort on the part of shipyards, academia, and the Navy to develop a generic product-oriented work breakdown structure. This new work breakdown structure is a cross-shipyard hierarchical representation of work associated with the design and production of a ship using today's industry practice. It is designed to (a) support design for production trade-offs and investigation of alternative design and production scenarios at the early stages of ship acquisition, (b) supply a framework for improved cost and schedule modeling, (c) translate into and out of existing shipbuilding work breakdown structures, (d) incorporate system specifiers within its overall product-oriented environment, (e) improve data transfer among design, production planning, cost estimating, procurement, and production personnel using a common framework and description of both the material and labor content of a ship project, and (f) provide a structure for 3-D product modeling data organization.