The 4th industrial revolution is hitting the entire industry these days, and the Korean shipbuilding industry has been experiencing unprecedented difficulties in the wake of the slowdown of the shipbuilding and offshore industries that started in 2014 and the low-price offensive from China, a late shipbuilding country. As a result, it has been restructuring skilled and high-level personnel for the survival of the industry.
Recently, ship orders from domestic shipyards are increasing due to an increase in ship orders due to oil price hikes. It has regained the world's No. 1 position, which was lost to China, and the ship price is also getting out of the worst situation. Shipbuilding equipment manufacturers that are vertically integrated with shipyards to produce and deliver equipment are also suffering from a double burden of declining shipbuilding volumes and lowering production costs.
Production process innovation and factory automation are essential in order to produce the increasing number of orders for ships according to the set delivery date and production cost in a situation where the infrastructure is collapsing due to the retirement and aging of highly skilled workers. In this situation, shipbuilding equipment makers are focusing their attention on building a smart factory, and some companies are implementing smart factory introduction and digital cluster projects, and more companies are reviewing them.
In particular, the shipbuilding equipment industry, the target industry of this study, is the back-end of the shipbuilding industry that manufactures and supplies 55-60% of the shipbuilding cost of the shipbuilding industry, a key industry in Korea. In this study, in order to suggest alternatives on how these companies should prepare for the establishment of a smart factory, which is absolutely necessary for factory automation and productivity improvement, and to suggest a direction for efficiently promoting the project, new research models and hypotheses were presented based on the theories revealed through the review of previous studies.
In the research model setting, the GPM capability of organization, manpower, and process, which are factors that smart factory establishment has on the performance of SMEs, is set as independent variables, and integrated PM maturity and smart factory introduction level are set as mediating variable, and corporate performance (non-financial perspective and financial perspective) were set as dependent variables to enable hypothesis testing.
For a survey while conducting this study, a total of 341 people were targeted and their opinions were collected, including employees who were related to the research topic while the researcher worked at the shipyard for 33 years, officials from companies that manufacture and deliver shipbuilding equipment, and personnel from the Shipbuilding & Marine Equipment Cooperatives.
Since the answers to the questionnaire were received from the workers of shipyards and equipment companies currently employed, the reality is reflected, and the impact on project performance through smart factory establishment of shipbuilding equipment and equipment companies as well as academic value can be verified in advance. It has great significance as a research study, so it will be a guideline for building a smart factory for shipbuilding equipment makers.
In summary, this is the first study to study the effect of smart factory construction on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) projects in the shipbuilding equipment industry.
This is a meaningful study that can contribute to national competitiveness along with the development of the Korean shipbuilding industry by reducing the number of trial and error and improving the competitiveness of individual companies, as well as improving the trustworthiness of large shipowners through compliance with ship delivery schedules at shipyards and leading to ship orders.