CINCINNATI, Ohio - December 16, 2003 - VT Shipbuilding (formerly Vosper Thornycroft), part of the VT Group and one of the world's leading shipbuilding companies, has selected the latest web version of Cincom's CONTROL* enterprise management system as its manufacturing management solution for the future.
CONTROL has been selected for its ability to accommodate the huge variety of projects that VT Shipbuilding has to work on, ranging from naval destroyers to civil vessels.
To cement its market leading status, VT Shipbuilding has invested more than $86 million in a project to consolidate its manufacturing facilities to Portsmouth, making it the most advanced facility in Europe. To support this, it needed a manufacturing system to meet the demands of the modern shipbuilding industry. VT Shipbuilding's challenges are to deliver products on time and on budget and to improve its efficiencies, especially in the face of growing competition from emerging shipbuilding nations. MP> With regard to systems, flexibility is the key. The ability to cater to a huge variety of projects is essential for VT Shipbuilding's manufacturing system. Contracts for naval destroyers vary enormously from those of civil vessels. Each project needs to be managed individually. Since VT Shipbuilding can be a prime or subcontractor there is little repeat business, and no two orders are the same. A vessel may include many common assemblies and sub assemblies, with configurations nearly always being unique. In the case of building a series of vessels and the timescales involved, the specifications change over time.
"Cincom's CONTROL provides us with the ability to cater for the large variety of products and projects and to manage all sales orders, purchasing, manufacturing and costing requirements to an individual program level," stated Colin Beames, Information Systems Director at VT Shipbuilding.
VT realized that the upgrade of its system had to be accomplished at a time when it was physically relocating its three separate manufacturing sites to the new facility in Portsmouth, embarking on new projects such as building the Type 45 Destroyer for the Royal Navy, and re-organizing the company to cater for domestic and export requirements.
According to Beames, "Cincom helped us through the transition, especially with defining how the system would support our business processes such that new orders are inputted into the new system and carried right through from build to delivery. We now have a supported product, have reduced our dependence on bespoke code and since the system is web based, we are reducing our support costs. We went live within three months and the implementation was within budget. The migration had no real impact on the daily running of our business which is how it should be, albeit to support the detailed use of the new system we have provided training and ongoing support."
