The approach
Synchronized TACT Production
one interval of time in which every workstation completes its work, so that the whole yard moves together.
The beat is back-calculated from the contract delivery date. It is built up from the working teams' own procedures, and every other function is set to it: design, procurement, outfitting, painting, the dock and the quay.
Developed by Suh Wan-Chul at Daewoo's Okpo yard from 1987, on the foundation of the U.S. National Shipbuilding Research Program, and since applied in Romania, Lithuania, Korea and Malaysia.
Every recovery answers three questions,
in this order.
Diagnose · Ideal Reality
How far does our capability really extend?
Ideal Reality is the highest performance your existing people, drawings and equipment could deliver if a different structure released them. The diagnosis does not ask whether the current system can deliver on time. It asks what the cleanest configuration of the work would look like if no organizational obstacle stood in its way.
Finding the Wait-and-See cycle
A late yard is seldom short of effort. It is caught in a cycle in which every excuse is true, so every excuse is accepted, until the whole yard agrees that delay is in the nature of things. The most dangerous stage is not conflict but indifference.
The Heartbeat of the Shipyard, §8.2 and §9.1
From Ideal Reality to a unique solution
| Ideal Reality asks for | The unique solution supplies | What it ends |
|---|---|---|
| Proper teams in every zone | Zone-based planning: one controllable zone per team | Borrowed and split crews |
| Work available at the earliest point in time | Continuous production flow, set to one beat | Waiting on the trade before you |
| No interference and no stops | One working team in one zone at a time | Collisions in shared compartments |
| The right method | The team's own work practices, written down by the team | Heroic effort that exhausts people |
After Figure 10 and Table 3 of the book, Boustead Naval Shipyard, November 2013.
The same 25 percent of the work:
fourteen months, then three.
Outfit installation stood at 71 percent against a planned 92 percent on 15 November 2013. Zone-based TACT went live on 6 January 2014 and reached 95.12 percent by the end of March, exactly the intermediate target. Bars drawn to scale.
Read the Boustead case →Design · The success structure
What structure makes the right behavior the easy one?
Behavior follows structure. A late yard's people do not lack the will to deliver on time. They lack a structure in which delivering on time is the path of least resistance. Change the structure, and the behavior follows almost by itself.
The Four-Wheel-Drive Operating System
Five constituents of an effective plan
The same five parts appear in every TACT plan we have built. Their form changes with the yard: four feeder lines into one main line at Okpo in the late 1980s, twenty-six workstations to one beat in 1992, one deck a day at SHM in 2003, zone-based TACT for naval MRO at Boustead in 2014.
| Constituent | Answers | Owned by |
|---|---|---|
| Zone-based work breakdown | What to do | A zone small enough for one team |
| Detailed Work Procedure | How to do it | The team that will do it, in its own words |
| Synchronized production | When | The TACT beat across the project |
| Work Execution Program | Who, today | Each worker's daily packet |
| Regular review | The feedback | Daily monitoring, weekly review |
When engineering works to production's beat,
the work itself shrinks.
These are reductions in physical workload, not procurement savings. The Heartbeat of the Shipyard, §5.2. Bars drawn to scale.
Install and sustain · Co-evolution
How does the new behavior take hold, and last?
Change does not begin in the head. Move the hands first and the conviction follows. A new routine, kept for a hundred days and reviewed as it goes, becomes how people work.
One hundred days of action research
Each new behavior runs inside a loop of acting, observing the effect and reflecting before acting again, so only the changes that prove themselves are kept. Behavior reshapes the person, who reads the workplace anew and then acts at a higher level: Lewin's B = f(P, E), turning as a spiral.
Three stages, all four wheels together
| Aspect | 1 · Standardization | 2 · Total optimization | 3 · Wholeness and mastery |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question | Are we doing things right? | Are we doing the right things? | How do we decide what is right? |
| TACT | Time discipline, standard work | Teams raise their own standard | Autonomous immersion |
| EPP | Understanding and cooperation | Ownership of the production effect | Empathy and technology convergence |
| WORKOUT | Learning at the bottleneck | Confidence and challenge | Collective intelligence |
| Go-and-Check | Sharing problems, motivation | Sharing vision, trust | Insight and inclusion |
| Business result | On-time, on-budget production | The quantity of work itself shrinks | Market leadership: share above 20%, margin above 10% |
| Seen at | Boustead, within months of go-live in 2014 | Okpo, 1990–1992 | Okpo from 1992: ten product lines on one platform |
What keeps the gains
A ratchet of faithful learning. Each raised standard is kept in the daily routine, in the team-written procedure, the weekly Ban Meeting and the scheduled floor walk, so it becomes the floor for the next. The in-house school carries it across turnover.
Why we work with boards, not only the floor
A structure is most at risk in the season after it succeeds, when the problem that mobilized support has eased. We ask owners and boards to rank the structure's survival above the next quarter, and we design for it from the start.
The complete process
Five steps, walked anew for every yard.
The steps do not change. Their form is set by the yard's own condition, history and people. A yard in disorder starts with the morning broom.
- 1Declare the goalWhere are we going?
- 2Name the innovation tasksWhat stands in the way?
- 3Specify the behaviorsWhat must people do differently?
- 4Set the structureWhat arrangement makes that behavior easiest?
- 5Build the four wheelsHow does it run, day to day?
Start with question one.
A diagnosis of one yard: where its capability is being lost, and what structure would release it.