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Title: Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/23/0959224/j...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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