The biggest opportunities are hidden in the detail

It sounds obvious. In practice it is one of the hardest questions in manufacturing, because the honest answer usually sits several layers down, in the way work is planned, sequenced and moved through a yard, rather than in any single machine or team. 

The context is well known. The UK defence sector is being asked to deliver faster, at more predictable cost, on programmes of growing scale. Incremental improvement will not close that gap. And while defence is where the pressure is most visible, the same applies across everything Navantia UK does. Our four yards in Appledore, Arnish, Belfast and Methil deliver shipbuilding and marine manufacturing, and we are investing in the robotics, automation and digital tools of an advanced manufacturing business. The discipline I describe below travels across all of that work. 

Start with the whole picture 

When we begin on a programme, we map the production process end to end, from planning through to delivery. I mean the whole thing, including the parts everyone assumes they already understand. How work actually flows between teams. Which activities add value and which do not. What genuinely drives the delivery timeline, as opposed to what people believe drives it. The two are not always the same. 

From that map we identify the constraints and bottlenecks, and then we prioritise. Where problems arise, we first fix the things that matter most. 

We are not a separate function reviewing production from a distance. We sit with colleagues in production, engineering and planning, building a shared view of each programme, which means the improvements we propose are grounded in how the yard operates and get implemented rather than filed away. And because we apply the same structured methods on each phase of production, the approach carries over from one project to the next. 

Small things, big consequences 

There is an assumption that optimisation means sweeping strategic change. In my experience the entire build strategy can hinge on something small, such as the physical constraints of a facility, or the size, weight and handling of a single component. Found early, these are manageable. Found late, they become disruption, and disruption late in a programme is expensive. 

Production optimisation is driving a fundamental change in how teams approach their work and decision-making, empowering them to adopt a more proactive mindset and take ownership of identifying and implementing improvement opportunities. An example of this can be seen in our steel fabrication work in Belfast. During automated welding, the robots have to stop each time they reach a drainage opening in the steel structure, and each of those welds then must be finished by hand. That added production time, and often extra finishing work afterwards. 

The fix we developed with the production teams was very simple. A temporary cover that lets the robot weld straight across the opening without stopping. It has cut welding time on those sections by more than half, and the weld itself is more consistent because the robot never breaks its run. Nobody would call it glamorous, but it works. 

That, for me, is the case for production optimisation in a sentence. The biggest opportunities are often hidden in the detail, and this process gives us the visibility to see where time and resources are being lost, so we can make better decisions earlier and deliver with greater certainty. 

Data gives us the visibility 

The raw material for all of this is data from planning, engineering and production – task durations, sequencing, the physical characteristics of individual components – brought together so everyone is working from the same picture. 

Navantia UK is also progressing its digitisation journey, part of a wider modernisation that is bringing robotic cutting, automated quality control and digital production tools into the yards. Smart manufacturing gets talked about as if the technology were the point. For us it is a means to something plainer, which is giving teams the information they need when they need it, so emerging issues are spotted before they hit the schedule and resources can be moved as the programme evolves, based on actual progress rather than the plan as written six months ago. 

There is also a longer story behind the way we work. Production optimisation sits at the heart of Navantia’s approach worldwide, a methodology honed over decades of designing, planning and building ships for navies around the world. Through the group, that experience is now embedded in our UK yards, and our customers here are the beneficiaries. 

A team built from more than shipbuilding 

Not everyone on the team came up through shipbuilding. I didn’t. I joined Navantia UK as a Process Engineer from the pharmaceutical industry, bringing experience of highly regulated environments where standardisation, quality assurance and process discipline are integral to day-to-day operations. Colleagues have arrived from advanced manufacturing, materials science and management consulting, and they bring their own methods with them, from programme management in other complex environments to techniques for improving repeatable tasks and raising throughput. 

Shipbuilding has its own character, but no monopoly on good ideas. Some of our best improvements have started with the question of how another industry would deal with the same problem. 

What it means for our customers 

The capability is still maturing, but it is already earning its keep. Early analysis of production constraints is informing decisions on build strategy and facility use before bottlenecks can affect delivery, and targeted process improvements are simplifying workflows and reducing manual effort across the yards. 

For customers, that translates into competitively priced solutions, schedules met with confidence, consistent quality and compliance, and the capacity to surge production and build at scale when required. Many of the benefits will compound over years rather than months. The direction, though, is already clear. Shorter timelines, lower costs and greater certainty, delivered not through any single technology but in the processes that turn plans into reality. That is where innovation matters most.