Abstract
As the largest shipbuilding company in the world and the leader in the Korean merchant shipbuilding industry, Hyundai Heavy Industries is currently struggling to carry out intensive productivity improvement efforts in order to be the global merchant shipbuilding market leader by surpassing in the competition with Japan and being free from the defiance of China armed with very cheap labor costs. This paper introduces the academy-and-industry collaborative project, a part of the productivity improvement efforts, which has conducted on the steel stockyard operations. As a pilot project that researches for the way of improving the stockyard operations and ignites further projects on the stockyard operations, the project defined the stockyard operations, measured current situations, and analyzed management dilemmas. In addition, the project developed the steel stockyard operations simulator. Besides that the simulator is used by the operations manager who has heavily relied on his work-experienced intuition when making decisions, this paper expects that further projects on the stockyard operations utilize the simulator for their own purposes.