Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding (construction-physics.com) 25
An interesting piece on Construction Physics that examines how Japan transformed discarded American wartime shipbuilding techniques into a revolutionary manufacturing system that captured nearly half the global market by 1970. The story reveals the essential ingredients for industrial dominance: government backing, organizational alignment, relentless will to improve, and the systematic coordination needed to turn existing technologies into something entirely new. A few excerpts: During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany's u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US's most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that's what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world's ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.
But the lessons from the US's shipbuilding machine weren't forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.
[...] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it's impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.
But the lessons from the US's shipbuilding machine weren't forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.
[...] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it's impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.
North Korea should take note (or not) (Score:2, Interesting)
It's probably a good thing they consider anything from the West as decadent or beneath them or else they might not have this problem.
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I wonder how many heads literally rolled from the execution that surely followed this incident...
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History lesson? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare and contrast to the current plan to "rejuvinate" US manufacturing...
Disposable ships (Score:3)
To have become a viable industry, U.S. shipbuilding would have essentially had to restart from scratch with all-new designs. Rather than take on the expense of doing so, the companies pressed into service to make wartime ships returned to their core industries, and the rest is history.
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Right, that's just one of the absurd failures of the premise. You know who else built an "unprecedented shipbuilding machine" during WWII? The Japanese. That's what happens when nations go to war. It doesn't automatically translate to peacetime industry, nor do those countries want it to.
Re:Disposable ships (Score:5, Informative)
a racist premise (Score:1)
"After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world."
The Japanese can build ships because Americans taught them how, right? It couldn't be because the Japanese learned how to do it and they are good at what they do. After all, the Japanese didn't build ships in WWII right?
The entire premise is racist and insulting. Japan is the third largest economy in the world. They ar
uh, no (Score:1)
You know, an intelligent, non-autistic person would know that calling someone "racist" is insanely insulting in our society and therefore you should not say it unless you have very firm evidence against it. It's a lot worse than sexism, for example -- when Mel Gibson was pulled over, drunk, there were two cops, a male jew and a woman, and he insulted both of them (he called the female cop "sugartits") but only one of those made the news.
So to educate you, Japanese manufacturing was heavily influenced by the
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I agree that it wasn't necessarily racist, but I'm also deeply puzzled by the level of offence that people take upon being called "racist." The people who seem the most outraged about it tend to be the ones who hold deeply racist beliefs. Insults tend not to hit home when they have no connection to reality.
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>>and he insulted both of them (he called the female cop "sugartits") but only one of those made the news.
i remember "he called the lady cop 'sugartits'" being all over the news.
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Funny thing is Deming went to Japan because no-one wanted to listen to his ideas in the USA.
China ship grown to gigantic industrial machine (Score:1)
I learned this from AI last week; share it with You:
AI Overview
In 2024, Chinese shipyards, particularly CSSC, built more ships by tonnage than the entire US shipbuilding industry has produced since the end of World War II. One report indicates that CSSC alone delivered over 250 ships, totaling 14 million GT, while the US built only five large ocean-going merchant vessels, with a combined tonnage of 76,000 GT.
My comment: I don't know the quality of Chinese ships, but if the oceans are the highway, I don't
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Now do aerospace/airplanes.
W. Edwards Deming (Score:2)
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The Post War Dream (Score:2)
-- Pink Floyd: The Post War Dream