Hi everyone, it’s Kevin. Today is Wednesday, July 14th (date recorded). As part of a series of Quonset Point Town Hall discussions, Sean Davies, who is with me today, recently held a session with employees to provide updates on our programs and take questions from the Quonset Point team. Sean is joining me on the podcast today to share his recent update with the wider EB audience.
So Sean, thank you, and let’s get started by giving folks a sense for how QP is performing against the defined Employee Incentive Goals. Safety features prominently as our number-one priority, and in my recent podcast I talked about some of the positive trends at QP, including a 27% reduction in the recordable injury rate, which is a historic low recordable rate, which is really encouraging. Let’s talk about what you’re doing, what’s working, and why we think it is working.
Thanks Kevin. We’ve been working on several initiatives this year to reduce the number of injuries and as you pointed out, we’ve made notable improvement across the site. The highest-value initiatives underway are really focused on increasing employee engagement on safety-related issues and opportunities.
For example, earlier this year, we established a Safe Worker Program for any employee with two or more injuries within the last year. Our objective is to improve employee Safety behaviors and performance by providing training and coaching to help employees learn safe work techniques and safe work habits. The program can be completed in about three months with satisfactory progress toward improving those safety behaviors and performance. So far, we’ve graduated a number of employees from the program that have remained injury free and are now some of our strongest safety advocates for their teams.
You’ve hit on something from an employee engagement perspective; I’m a big believer in that. There’s no way any of us from the management team can dictate safety. We’ve got to make people really want to make it a habit and make it something they want to do, not because we say so but because it will keep them safe and healthy. You’ve started some stuff that involves our employees via these hourly safety committees; let’s talk about that.
About a month and a half ago we started an Hourly Safety Committee that’s comprised of about 30 Lead Safety Advisors across two shifts—first and second shift at Quonset. Those advisors are embedded in each of the key work centers across the site to act as advocates for safety improvements. Our objective with this committee is to create a culture where safety is a shared responsibility, where everyone has each other’s back and we’re all taking action on safety improvements—hourly, salary and so forth—that are identified by the workforce.
The Hourly Safety Committee has identified already a number of opportunities that we’re acting on to improve sharing safety best practices, as an example, sharing those best practices from department to department, accelerating the repairs of personally issued tools, reducing strain and sprain injuries by group stretching before starting work and improving the safety of parking lots, and we’re doing a few things there to that end.
I really believe that the Safe Worker Program and the Hourly Safety Committee have been instrumental in helping us improve safety performance this year, and we’re seeing positive change in both our rates, but more importantly changes in the safety mindset of our workforce.
I think that’s terrific. We’ve got to keep that up and look for other ways to keep folks engaged and really be pushing this zero-injury goal that we’ve established for ourselves going forward. Let’s talk about quality and productivity as well; we’re making some progress in those areas. Let’s talk about quality first.
Sure, our two main objectives at Quonset this year are to increase the voice of quality and improve the quality of structural welding. Increasing the voice of quality is all about putting quality on the same plane as safety, so that’s above our other business objectives in the areas of cost and schedule. Many of our routine meetings and site communications do a better job of shining a light on quality much more than we’ve done in the past. Achieving first- time quality requires not just the right tools and skills, but also the right mindset for performing every job to the best of our ability, and the management team and their support is critical to ensure that safety and quality are never sacrificed for schedule or cost.
We’ve seen a lot of examples where when we focus on quality and we achieve first-time quality, we’re getting improvements in our schedule performance almost for free; it becomes a by-product of getting that first-time quality right. You’ve been doing some work with regard to structural welding—let’s talk a little bit about that because that’s a big contributor to our overall performance.
Improving the quality of structural welding is one of our most important objectives for the reason you just stated. The better we can do with first-time welding quality, the better that we can do supporting downstream stages of construction at Quonset to better deliver to our customers. For perspective, at Quonset we do about two million man hours of structural welding per year and about 1/3 are welds that require magnetic particle or MT inspection. Since last fall, we’ve hired many new welders and over a period of several months we experienced a declining trend in the first-time quality of our MT welding. Strengthening our new-hire training at New England Tech here in Rhode Island and at our Active Learning Centers, along with improved communication and oversight, has enabled improved weld quality over the last three months. In fact, we’ve been able to improve our MT weld quality from about 80% acceptance to 87% first-time acceptance with a goal to achieve 90% by the end of this year. This will require a strong and continuous commitment to excellence from everyone involved in the performance, oversight and inspection of MT welding.
It is encouraging to see that kind of improvement on MT welding Sean, so appreciate the team’s effort in getting that going. We’ve got a lot of focus on productivity; specifically, we’re really concerned about Columbia performance and making sure that we’re hitting that schedule. At the same time, we still have a two-per-year build rate on the Virginia program. Let’s talk about how we’re doing with regard to our productivity incentives.
From a productivity stand point, we’ve been focused on achieving the schedule commitments on both Columbia and sustaining a two-per-year build rate on Virginia. With the Columbia program as our number-one priority, we’ve been shifting a fair number of employees from Virginia to Columbia to ensure that every Columbia product is being worked to the greatest extent possible. As you would imagine, this has put some schedule pressure on Virginia, but with continued hiring and closing the gap on the Columbia staffing plan, I believe we can recover the productivity levels on Virginia, particularly on Block V where that’s needed.
We established a few employee incentive items this year to help keep us focused on safety, quality and productivity. One of those incentives is to achieve 80% participation in continuous improvement by providing at least one idea per employee. I’d say we’re doing pretty well this year, at 40% participation through the end of June, but we’ll need strong focus and participation from everybody through the end of the year to achieve the incentive.
You know, I see a lot of people participating in continuous improvement, but what we don’t necessarily have is people putting their ideas to be counted in the system. I think it’s happening all around us, but we want to make sure people are getting credit for it, and we’re going to be better as an organization the more people we get participating. Imagine 17,000 ideas in a year coming across to help improve the way we perform—that’s going to be a real needle-mover for us. Let’s talk about some of the other incentives, like schedule.
We do have a schedule incentive that’s focused on reducing work order delinquency across the site by 25% by the end of the year. Year-to-date, we’ve reduced work order delinquency by 15%. But over the last several weeks, the number of delinquent work orders, frankly, has increased, and right now we’ve got all hands on deck to reverse the negative trend. This incentive is at risk, but with a lot of hard work between now and the end of the year we can get there.
With a ton of hard work from everyone, we achieved one of our employee incentives by completing and shipping SSN 801 (Utah) Section 6/7 to Groton in early May (5/5/21). That was an all-team effort, and I’m extremely proud of the folks for delivering that unit on time.
We’re also on track with our fifth incentive to complete and ship five outfitted missile tubes to the UK by November. One tube was recently completed and shipped in March and all other four are tracking to ship between July and November of this year.
Our last employee incentive is to complete fabrication of the first Columbia missile tube quad pack, Quad 1, and ship that to paint by December. I’m happy to report that all four missile tubes have been outfitted and we’re currently in the process of welding the missile tubes to the pressure hull. Quad 1 outfitting is underway, and we’re on track to ship to paint by December.
It’s good to hear we are making progress, particularly on the Columbia program given how important that is to our country. We’ve got to make sure we’re knocking that schedule out of the park. Thanks Sean, for that explanation. Town-Hall sessions are a good way to keep everyone informed on our progress; it’s also helpful to hear what’s on people’s minds via feedback and the questions that we receive. I know we’re going to remain committed as a senior leadership team to keep that feedback coming in and keeping people informed as to how the business is performing. If anyone would like to view the video of the Town Hall, you can access the link through Homeport.
While I’ve got you, I want to update you on some of the things that are happening elsewhere; there’s a lot, in particular, happening in our facility expansion to support the Columbia. Over the weekend I had the opportunity to participate in the christening ceremony for our new ocean transport barge Holland, christened as the John P. Holland. It was built down at the Bollinger Shipyard in Louisiana. I really appreciated the opportunity to represent EB and also to thank our fellow American shipbuilders down at Bollinger. It’s rare that American shipbuilders build a vessel for other American shipbuilders. It was a great ceremony and a great opportunity to meet some of the shipbuilders down in Louisiana. That barge will be coming up in the September timeframe. Those of you who work in Groton and then shortly thereafter in Quonset will be able to get a good look at it. It’s a lot bigger than our current barge and well built, I can assure you. That’s all for now; thanks everyone for listening. We’ll talk again soon.
Kevin
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