Hi everyone and welcome to the podcast. It’s Tuesday, September 8. I hope you all had a chance to enjoy the holiday weekend. Today I’m speaking with Sean Davies, Vice President of Operations at Quonset Point.  Through this conversation you’ll learn a little bit about Sean, have a sense for the scope of our work at Quonset Point and better understand the role QP plays in achieving our mission, and they are absolutely critical to Electric Boat.

Sean, welcome to the podcast. Please share a little bit of your background with our audience.

SD: Thanks Kevin. I started at EB in January of 1997 in the Virginia class program in the non-pressure hull engineering area.  After my first year, I completed a one-year shipyard rotation, and had an opportunity to work through various organizations. As a matter of fact, part of that rotation included Quonset Point back in 1998 for about a three-month stint. When I completed the shipyard rotation, I filtered back into Engineering. Then I went over to the Jimmy Carter program, SSN 23, and was working on pressure hull and non-pressure hull structures there and then ultimately got into the Seawolf program office in 2001. It was around that time that I had a chance to participate in the first cohort of the Business Leader Group that led to a rotation in the Facilities organization in 2004 to help with recovery of the Graving Dock 3 failure and with the restoration of Graving Docks 1 and 2.  What I thought might be a one-year rotation turned into eight years and was an awesome experience overall in Facilities for the time I was there.

Lastly, I was asked to take the helm at Quonset in January of 2013 and have been here ever since.  It’s by far the most challenging and rewarding position I’ve had at EB to date.

Thanks Sean. You and I spend a lot of time talking about operations; we could probably spend a whole hour talking about everything we’re chasing from an operations perspective. But I want to focus on the work that’s going on at QP because some people don’t get a regular opportunity to get out there and see firsthand what you’re doing. Let’s start by talking about our folks—how many people do we have there and what are we working on?

SD: Our current on-roll is about 3,900 employees supporting Virginia and Columbia. About 80%-plus of our folks are working Virginia with the balance on Columbia. We’ve been operating under our staffing plan for some time due to issues we had early on with purchased material availability. That was across all contracts and there was also some initial perturbations and issues with the timeliness and the quality of work instruction primarily on Columbia. The good news is that notable improvement has been made in both areas, and we’ve got confidence now to crank up the hiring machine again. In fact, we’ve just recently started a pretty aggressive hiring campaign; we’ve on-boarded about 100 people in the last several weeks and expect to add about 400 new employees by Christmas and then another 500 by the summer of next year. Our new hires will be a 50/50 split between both Virginia and Columbia.

You and I also spend a lot of time talking about the need to get the material available, get the design done, get the planning paperwork and then get out of the way of the operations team so they can get their job done, and we’re making a lot of good progress. The fact that we’re hiring again in this COVID environment is good news as well and certainly welcome. We’ve got a lot of work to do to recover some of that schedule time, and those new folks are coming in at a great time. Let’s turn to the construction of the Virginia and Columbia programs—give us a rundown of where we stand; let’s start with Virginia.

SD: I’ll start with Virginia Block IV. We’re 88% complete with the ten-ship sets of modules that comprise Block IV.  We’ve delivered all the modules to Groton and the Newport News waterfront for the first six hulls, 792 – 797.  Our last module delivery to round out the block is the 801 2B/5 which is scheduled to deliver to Groton in June of 2022. We’re not far away from really getting out of the Block IV business and from a Virginia perspective, being solely focused on Block V. Despite getting a late start on the block and material issues across the program, we have been able to maintain module delivery schedules to support both our final assembly and test customers in Groton and Newport News.

Moving onto Block V, we’re currently working on the first five hulls, 802 – 806.  For perspective, we’re almost 30% complete on the 802 and just over 10% complete on the 803. A little tidbit there is that the first VPM missile tube arrived here at Quonset just a few weeks ago and the first VPM cylinder we recently placed into a new tube installation fixture in the VPM special fixtures building.

It’s really great to hear about the progress on the Virginia program. VPM is a demonstration of just how flexible the Virginia-class submarine is and how we can adapt it to a whole wide range of missions, so certainly a testament to the design and the longevity that the design is going to be out there protecting our nation going into the future. How about Columbia?

SD: We started construction on Columbia some time ago; we cut the first pieces of steel back in the summer of 2016, and since that time we’ve learned quite a bit. I would say that a lot of our early work on non-shipboard and shipboard prototypes was impacted by some issues in design, engineering and work instructions, but I think that the company overall has learned from many of those early mistakes, and we’re much better positioned today. We’re also getting smarter every day on what it actually takes to build the lead ship both from a cost and schedule perspective, and we’re making sure we’re working with the right folks to capture those lessons going forward. 

I think it would be worthwhile to share a couple of noteworthy points on construction. We’ve delivered six outfitted missile tubes and over 30 kits to the UK since we started, and we’re roughly 70% complete with our work on the UK’s lead ship Dreadnought. On the SSBN 826, Columbia, our pressure hull is about 40% complete including both the missile compartment and forward engine room sections. We recently started, several months ago actually, a lot of the ship’s major decks, and we’ve got about 70% of the ship’s major decks where we’ve started construction across the site. Looking at the big picture on Columbia, we’re roughly 5% complete—that’s actually prior to the official construction start which is on October 1st. For perspective, that’s more than 20 times the volume of work, at least in hours, than what we did with the lead ship Virginia prior to construction start.

Good update. It’s easy to forget about the fact that the common missile compartment between the Columbia class and the UK’s Dreadnought class is something we’ve been working on for some time, and we’re making good progress getting our partners in the UK the parts of the ship they need to be successful. That’s a lot of missile tube work and great work by our team getting that stuff accounted for and shipped to the UK to support that program.

I spent some time with Joe Drake in a previous podcast talking about our facilities master plan and what we’re doing to expand here at Groton and at Quonset Point to get to delivering two Virginias and one Columbia per year.  Every time I go to Quonset Point, I’m just amazed at how the skyline in that facility has changed with the buildings that have popped up. It’s also worth noting that this is a commitment by our corporation to invest about $1.8 billion dollars in Electric Boat for our future. We should be proud that they’re willing to invest and those buildings are making a tremendous difference. How are you adjusting your game plan to accommodate the new facilities?

SD: A few years ago, the team here developed a strategy to move people and major products into these new facilities as our workload grows on VPM and Columbia.  At that time we worked with all of the key players and established some key tenants or elements of our strategy and to the greatest extent possible co-locate like work, make best use of both legacy and new spaces, and most importantly, minimize disruption to Virginia-class construction. The recent addition of Buildings 9A and Building 9B added more than 300,000 square feet of module outfitting space. It’s really enabled us in many ways to begin in-earnest execution of that plan to co-locate primarily post-paint module outfitting work in those buildings. At the same time, we were also freeing up space in other buildings like 2003 and Bay 4, all in an effort to support near-term structural fabrication work on Columbia decks. In particular, with the 9-series buildings, we’ve already moved a tremendous amount of product in there. We’ve got 500 people operating across two shifts that support work in that building. Some of the things that have been moved in there include both sub-modules and super-modules that comprise sections 2B/5, 6/7/mids and 8/9. 

We also just moved the Virginia-class Command and Control Systems modules over there from their previous location in Bay 4. Two weeks ago we moved three Columbia vertical cylinders that will shortly be outfitted in Building 9B. Our current plan of record for the longer horizon is to expand the 9-series buildings by about another 250,000 square feet to support full-rate production or steady-state production of Virginia and Columbia.  In the end, the 9-Series buildings will be about 14 acres of module outfitting space under one roof.  In my view, this building in particular presents our greatest opportunity to improve our efficiency of module outfitting and construction.

Those are the big in-process buildings that we’ve recently completed and on the horizon there are a couple of other things I’d like to mention briefly. We recently commissioned a second 5,000-ton press in Bay 4 for increased capacity to support rolling the Columbia and VPM plates; in fact, we’re going to roll our first plate here in a couple of weeks in Bay 4. I would also tell you that the FMP team has made excellent progress on expanding the Columbia Automated Frame and Cylinder Building (Bldg. 2019) here. The foundations were recently completed, and we started erecting steel within the last few days. We’re tracking toward completion by next summer. We recently also completed a new two-cell blast and coatings facility, issued two purchase orders for heavy-lift cranes to support turn-down of the heavier modules that come with VPM and Columbia cylinders. We’re starting construction of a new pier in December that’s required to support the heavier barge capacity interface that will carry the heavier modules up and down the East Coast to both Newport News and the Groton Waterfront. Lastly, we’re expanding our pipe packaging operations in the very near future. There’s a lot of moving parts to manage as we transition into these new spaces and configure old spaces for different work.  Even with the best planning and preparation for the moves of people and product that we’ve done so far, we frankly have realized some setbacks in operational performance over the last several months. We’ve got a few years to go to complete some of the projects I mentioned, and I’m confident we’ve got a sound plan and a great team in place to execute.

Thanks Sean, that’s a good update on everything that’s going on. It’s an exciting time to be here at EB; we’ve got some incredible ships ahead of us to build and work as far as the eye can see. That’s what excites me about it. I appreciate the update; Quonset Point is a critical part of our operation and for everybody who is listening, if you get the opportunity, get out there and see what’s going on at Quonset; I think it will open your eyes. In our next podcast we’ll continue the operations theme when I sit down with Jim Gildart, who runs operations here in Groton.

Thanks everyone; we’ll talk soon.

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