Presently, the LPD 17 construction program is structured and shared between the Northrop Grumman shipyards at Avondale, La., and Pascagoula, Miss. What have you accomplished so far with the two yards supporting each other?

We’re still working our way through a lot of that. The New York is from our Avondale yard, and if you look at the next four ships we have under contract, two of them are going to be delivered from Pascagoula, and two of them will be delivered from Avondale. The delivery of New York from Avondale will greatly inform the delivery team in terms of the construction processes and procedures. One of the things we did when we decided to do this integration business was put a test-and-trials team together that is responsible for the tests and trials of all the ships we’re going to deliver from the Gulf Coast.

You’re talking about a single trials and test team for all the ships you build at both Avondale and Pascagoula? Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and two classes of amphibious ships (Wasp-class [LHD 1] and San Antonio-class [LPD 17])?

Exactly. One team. And it has been a busy summer 2009 for them, because they have been going through the trials of a destroyer out of Pascagoula, and they’ve turned right around in a matter of just days and gone over to Avondale to lead a very successful set of trials on New York. That same team is then scheduled to come back and lead the builder’s trials on Waesche, a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter out of Pascagoula. This is just one area where we are taking the lessons we have learned in each yard and integrating them into our delivery teams. The integration effort of Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding includes our efforts to incorporate quality workmanship into all of these ships, whether it’s pipe and welding quality, or electrical quality, or even the hull and mechanical quality. We also have developed and implemented the exchange forms to make sure we standardize our processes, track our quality metrics, and continue to drive first-time quality into everything that we’re doing.

Obviously, some of the early units of this ship class (LPD 17) had some quality problems, many of which pre-date the acquisition of either yard (Avondale and Pascagoula) by Northrop Grumman. What is the current state of the program from a quality standpoint at delivery, and what are you doing to make them better?

Well, first of all we’re absolutely committed to the quality of the product [the LPD 17 amphibious transport dock ships], and our emphasis has been on trying to improve the quality further upstream during the construction process. My word for that is “first-time quality.” By this I mean the quality of the work that is being done early in construction to be of “delivery” quality. It is incredibly disruptive to the shipbuilding process to do something at the beginning of construction, only to have to do it over later in construction. It’s harder to get at, and it’s disruptive to all the workers around it.

What we are seeing now is that by giving our people the tools they need, by setting the expectations for them, and then by finding the right metrics and tracking their performance earlier in the stages of ship construction, we are seeing some pretty impressive improvements in those first-time quality metrics. The proof of this will be seen in the delivery of the ships. I believe the trials that we just ran on New York represent just that. It is a data point of “1,” but I believe that trial is indicative of the kind of improvement we’re going to see over this class of ships as we go forward building the later units of the class.

Forgive me please, but a dozen years ago a young shipwright here at Newport News, I believe on the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) – and that was you – once explained the differences to me in costs between “shop time” and “waterfront time.” Given the passing of the years, can you explain that to our readers please?

You know, shipbuilding is an incredibly complex process, with more variables than you can count. The complexities of the manufacturing processes themselves involve the highest standards of workmanship and quality. There are a lot of hand-offs between workers and teams in that process. There are the engineers, there are the quality control guys, there are the craftsmen, and there are all these people who are trying to work and make that building process as good as it can be.

And that’s just for the work that we at Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding control. We also have a supplier base throughout the United States with whom we spend two to $2.5 billion a year buying components, supplies, and services for the ships we’re building. We have their quality, cost, and schedule issues that also impact our bottom line.

In the shipbuilding business, you’d like to think you could build a construction plan where absolutely everything comes together in exactly the right sequence, at exactly the right time, at exactly the right cost. The truth is that’s not the real world, as we know it. So, when that does not happen, our shipbuilders have to be very, very creative. They have tremendous flexibility and capability to develop “work around situations,” that are a result of something that needs to be re-engineered. Perhaps the quality of the product we got from the vendor is not right, or something that we did is not right. When you go and you do that workaround, it’s pretty neat to watch them do that.

But then you have to come back and bring in that work at a later time in the construction plan than originally scheduled, and it’s going to cost more when you have do that. It’s going to be disruptive to other parts of the construction effort to work around it. And it’s going to be more expensive, too, because it’s not done in the time or schedule that we originally planned to do it. So, that’s why getting things right the first time – in engineering, planning, and construction – is where we are focusing to drive enhanced quality into the final products we deliver to our customers.