Examination of the Shipbuilding Industry

RT-232 investigated the potential for adapting shipbuilding techniques to the construction industry. RT-232 was specifically focused on what enabled the shipbuilding market share to shift from the U.S. to Europe and Asia in roughly two decades. It found that this transition was done by the shipbuilding industry transitioning from a “stick-built” philosophy to one of “product-oriented” structures. This transition brought about a dramatic reduction in cost and construction cycle times without an erosion in quality or employee safety.

This research concluded that similar practices that transitioned the shipbuilding process are and will be applied to the construction industry, and the story of the U.S. shipbuilding industry could be the story of the U.S. construction industry in two decades. The research identified characteristics by which the European and Asian shipbuilding industry evolved. The Interim Product Database (IPD) process is a distinct set of standardized, configurable modules, grouped by production process similarity and built in a manufacturing-type environment. RT-255 focused on the adaptation of IPD to construction as a follow-on to RT-232.