KG: Today is Thursday, July 9, and for today’s podcast I thought we’d take a moment and talk about the role of planning here at Electric Boat. Since I’ve come aboard, and in my experience at General Dynamics NASSCO, planning is a significantly important part of any shipbuilding enterprise. I think of it as the mortar between the bricks in our shipyard. Our planners translate what the engineers and designers create to enable the tradesmen and women to actually build the ship. And because of how critical I believe planning is, I recently added the vice president of planning role to EB’s leadership team, and that’s a role that has been open for about five years. With me today is Ray Gabriel who was named to that position earlier this year. So Ray, thanks for joining me this morning.
RG: Thanks Kevin, it’s great to be here.
KG: Let’s start to talk a little bit about this. You’re a Navy veteran and quite an accomplished one at that. So talk a little bit about your background before you joined EB.
RG: I was in the Navy for 32 years in submarines as an operator and a submarine warfare officer. I have degrees in engineering power systems and a masters of mechanical engineering. While I was in the Navy, I had the privilege to command two fast-attack submarines right here in Groton, the USS Providence, SSN 719, and USS San Juan, SSN 751. Upon my retirement, I was looking to take that operator knowledge and continue to support the vital interests of the nation and the submarine community, and EB was a natural choice for me. I had the privilege of joining EB and worked in nuclear operations as Manager of both early construction and resources, and then moved on to Director of ship test department 272 before coming onboard in the Planning organization.
KG: Thanks Ray, I appreciate that background, and I appreciate also you being on the senior leadership team. I’ve talked about this with a lot of our folks before, and if you hadn’t heard me talk about it before, I really look at three key elements to making sure that we are building ships efficiently. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re building submarines or surface ships or commercial ships, those three elements are: you need a complete design, you need material available, and you have to have the work instructions. If you get those in front of our trades’ folks, you have knocked down all the barriers that affect the efficiency of that construction, and you’re going to be successful, and I think that’s what we’re working on. So there’s a lot of work we’ve got to go do here. Talk a little bit more about that Ray. Give me some of your philosophy about planning.
RG: I think those things that you stated, those three key elements, planning and construction readiness play a vital role in all three of those elements. When you come to the planning organization, it’s very diverse and covers many aspects of shipbuilding, but the bottom line is we take what the engineers translate in the form of design which come out as drawings, and we provide that bridge to operations both down here in Groton and up in Quonset Point for the shipbuilders to be able to understand and execute every step of the way their responsibilities in making sure that the ship is built to specifications the first time. We pride ourselves in the design/build aspect; we are embedded with the designers as we come up with the design and then translate that to the build, which is ultimately as a direct support role. Our primary responsibility is to the operations department and ensuring their success.
KG: I think that the design/build philosophy that we did on the Virginia program way back in the mid-90s timeframe is now time-tested and there are shipyards all over the country and all over the world who now follow that design/build philosophy. You can’t build something without making sure all stakeholders have a say in how that’s supposed to come together. So let’s talk a little bit about the design/build approach as it relates to the Virginia program; talk about how complex getting the planning done is for a submarine.
RG: If you look at a high level, to build just one of these submarines is about 8 million hours spread over five or so years. So you can imagine the complexity of the plan; if we didn’t have a plan, how hard it would be. Just like if you’re building a house, a surface ship, or a nuclear-powered submarine, the plan must be digestible at the mechanic level. We take this five-or-so-year span, and we just simply put it into chunks. Our first primary chunk is in the form of activities, and this plan comprises over 12,000 activities. These activities form the integrated master plan or schedule or integrated master schedule. I’ll talk a little more about the importance of this master schedule a little later on. We take these 12,000 activities over the duration of five or so years, and then we say, the mechanic works towards instructions, so we break it down even further, and we account for every hour of those 8 million in about 450,000 work instructions to complete this work.
As we were reaffirmed with our Vermont situation, every piece and part must be accounted for and consumed during the build; there can be none left on the table. So this integrated master schedule and work instructions really form the primary basis for certification, showing that we consume all these pieces and parts to specifications that the designers dictate. So when we take this boat out on sea trials with the Navy crew and our shipbuilders, we know it will perform the right way the first time.
KG: That’s so important to the way this business is intended to function. Let’s talk about your role as the vice president of planning. You’ve got a few weeks under your belt now. Talk a little bit about your priorities, in the short-term first.
RG: The primary short-term objective of the organization is to improve our alignment with the operations organizations both here in Groton and Quonset Point and make sure we are aligned with their priorities and execution of the build. The bottom line is the shipbuilders are our end customer. In planning, and really for any support organization, it is the same. So we need to ensure that we stay aligned with them to ensure they have what they need to build their part of the product.
KG: I think it’s important too that we’re helping lift the burden off the shoulders of the supervisors and the general foremen. I think they’ve got a very difficult job, whether you’re talking about Quonset Point or Groton. Those folks particularly don’t need to be burdened with trying to figure out the sequence in the plan. That’s really where the planners can come in and be a strong ally to help those folks be more effective every day. So talk a little bit about the long-term strategy; where are we heading here?
RG: I think when you look at the longer-term strategy, and you bounce it on the discussion we just had at a high level, it’s fundamental that we continue to build the trust and confidence throughout the enterprise and our integrated master schedules. These master schedules are an enterprise-wide product that really captures all the knowledge for all of us to use, whether it’s shipbuilding, and building the product, or manpower planning, or the spatial planning that goes into what will soon be building three separate classes of submarines, both the continuing block-four construction, the block-five construction with the Virginia payload modules, and lastly the Navy’s number-one shipbuilding priority, the Columbia.
In order to have all those things moving in concert, you need integrated master plans, not only for each of those classes of ship, but they need to be integrated together. So ultimately that is the long-term objective. Simply – we plan the work so we work the plan.
KG: We talked a little bit about the planning organization being the mortar between the bricks in the wall of a shipyard. When you think about a brick wall, typically you call it a brick wall, you don’t call it a mortar wall and you kind of ignore that mortar. I think that we need to change the way we think about that because I think the planners are unsung heroes here at Electric Boat. The role they do, and what we all do collectively can’t be done without the planners. So talk to us about the kind of people who make good planners—who do you need and what are the skill sets you’re looking for?
RG: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been in the job for a month, and I’m extremely impressed by all the people that I meet both here in Groton and at Quonset that are proud to call themselves planners writ large. It is a pure, direct support role which requires technical skills for using the tools and the business systems that each one of these planning sectors needs to do their job. If you really want to understand how a shipyard works, I would say become a planner. It provides an insight into operations, into material, into design, you name it. If we do it here at Electric Boat, there’s likely a planner behind-the-scenes assisting. I will say this; our demographics are changing, like everywhere else in the shipyard. Traditionally planners have come from operations after very successful careers, and they provide that perspective. But as our demographics in operations changes, so do our demographics in planning as well. We’re always looking for engineering and operations folks that want to come and join the team in this highly vital, direct support role. The master schedule tells us what our skills are going to be in the future and what we need to look for. We are dedicated to providing our planners with the training and knowledge necessary for them to be confident and competent in their job once they’re hired. I’m proud to say we’ve secured funding for planning training, internal to the company, and we’re looking at the ways operations has leveraged workforce development outside with Three Rivers and the Westerly Education Center to try to get planning as a core curriculum at some of our community college venues. Lastly, you never know the good of the people that you have, writ large, and planning is no different during this COVID-19 situation. I’m very proud to say that the planning and construction readiness organizations in most respects not only maintained their throughput, but in some cases improved their throughput through all the different things that we did to keep our people safe during this pandemic.
KG: I couldn’t agree more. I appreciate the great effort by the planning team and in thinking about the planners and what we do, I’m absolutely convinced that in this yard, what we plan, we do extremely well at and so that role can’t be overemphasized. So thanks Ray, I appreciate you taking the time today to help us understand the planning role especially in the context of all the work, the opportunity, as we grow into Virginia Block Five and the Columbia program, and I’m glad to have you aboard.
Before I close out this week’s podcast, I want to provide a quick update on our COVID-19 case numbers. Since my last report last week, we’ve had three new cases, we’re now up to 80 cases, and 57 of those employees have been returned to work. We’ve had one additional case in Cape Canaveral from a Quonset employee who normally works in department 904. Their last day of work was June 18 and they were tested on June 30. We’ve had two employees last night who had been out of work for approximately a week, both of them at Quonset Point.
COVID is still with us folks. We need to make sure we’re maintaining our social distance and we’re following the protocols for hygiene, especially wearing masks. I can’t reiterate enough: if you don’t feel well, stay home.
Earlier this week, HR published an update to the COVID-19 Wellness, Pay and Benefits Guide. It’s on Homeport; you can check it out there. The guide provides a lot of helpful information, including answers to our employees’ most frequently asked questions on pay and benefits. Simply put, you have options other than coming to work sick with COVID, so please make sure you’re aware of that. Work with your supervisor; make sure that you’ve got a copy of the guide and go through it with him or her.
Thanks for listening; we’ll talk soon.
