Four vessels left the Marine Engineering dockyard this month inside a single build window — the largest programme the yard has completed since it opened in 1979, and the first delivered without a day of schedule slippage.
The order comprised two inland cargo vessels, a self-propelled barge and a survey craft, all built to class and all destined for domestic river operations. Steel was cut in November. Sea trials finished in June, three weeks before the monsoon closed the working window on the slipway.
How the schedule held
The yard changed one thing: it stopped building vessels sequentially. Hull blocks for all four were fabricated in parallel in the covered shop and only moved to the slipway for assembly, which cut the exposure of the critical path to the weather from eight months to eleven weeks.
We do not simply maintain equipment — we engineer reliability. A schedule you can only hold in good weather is not a schedule.
It also meant a different kind of workforce planning. Welders, fitters and painters worked to a shop rota rather than to a vessel, and the quality regime moved with them: every weld on all four hulls was inspected against the same class-approved procedure, whichever boat it happened to belong to.
What the yard learned
- Parallel block fabrication cut total yard days per vessel by roughly a fifth.
- Rework fell sharply — one inspection standard across four hulls is easier to hold than four in sequence.
- The covered shop is now the constraint. Extending it is the next capital decision in front of the division.
All four vessels are in service. The yard has already taken the follow-on order, and the programme that delivered them is now the way Marine Engineering intends to build.