Overview

Project Number: S2781

Project Title: Work Cell Development

Period of Performance: SEP18 – NOV21

Objective

Huntington Ingalls Industries – Ingalls Shipbuilding (Ingalls) fabricates and assembles a variety of repetitive parts, such as louvers, covers, strainer plates, tanks, filters, vents, lifting lugs, custom bolts and lifting lug repairs. The legacy processes have a significant amount of manual operations performed at workstations in various shop locations. Many of these processes are not automated and require highly skilled labor to efficiently execute.

This Naval Shipbuilding and Advanced Manufacturing (NSAM) Center project developed manufacturing solutions in the Machine Shop, IPD Shop and other support shops focused on improving process efficiency and tooling for production of repetitive and labor-intensive products. The development of manufacturing work cells that automated and/or mechanized various processes, by incorporating lean manufacturing principles and advanced tooling and fixtures, reduced labor, improved quality and increased throughput. Development of improved fabrication processes in these areas also resulted in increased quality.

The project was executed in two phases. Phase I baselined the current processes for fabricating labor-intensive parts and compiled part family data, including size, quantity, manufacturing process, labor hours and rework. Process maps were developed to document current processes for target parts and part families. Time studies were performed and industrial engineering data was gathered to perform cost analysis and document the quality of the target processes. Work cell requirements were developed to identify engineering and operations constraints, processes, tolerances, etc. Phase II performed the design and engineering of the prototypes and produced the prototypes by fabricating and/or modifying commercial off-the-shelf equipment.

Benefits/Payoff

Implementation of the automated / semi-automated processes and the tools developed under this project is estimated to result in annual savings of $972.0K and five-year savings of $4.9M across all U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard platforms constructed at Ingalls.

Implementation

Ingalls deployed the solution in its target environment after initial acceptance tests were completed and engaged affected individuals, groups and organizations to ensure the solution satisfied documented needs and expectations. Implementation into a production environment began in the third quarter of FY2021 on DDG 128, LHA 8, LPD 30 and NCS 11.

*Prepared under ONR Contract N00014-19-D-7001 as part of the Navy ManTech Program.

*DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release: distribution unlimited. DCN# 0543-545-23