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 'Quality
ships on Time’ has been the motto of Naval Dockyard,
Visakhapatnam. The Naval Dockyard employs a workforce of
nearly 8000 which includes both service and civilian
personnel. It has over 100 work centres for undertaking
specialised repairs and maintenance of various modern warships
and submarines with sophisticated weapons, missile guidance
systems, advance propulsion system like gas turbine, high
speed diesel engines and other electronic control and
monitoring devices. Quality consciousness has been a major
factor in the repair and refit work that is undertaken.
Towards achieving a better output from the men behind the
advanced machines and techologies in the dockyard, the synergy
of the worker’s motivation and new technology has been
welded into the quality assurance programme.
The Naval Dockyard,
Visakhapatnam has attempted to achieve this synergy by
concentrating on the quality circle movement as an immediate
measure and working towards steps for adopting the ISO 9000
standards. The quality circles concept is simple, though
difficult to practice. Quality circles aim to draw the
experience and dormant potential of the workmen into their
working and to involve them in decisions concerning their work
areas.
The quality circles of
this Naval Dockyard have earned laurels not only in regional
and national conventions but also in international meets. With
an aim to inculcate the quality ethics in the employee of the
yard, the quality circles movement is being integrated
extensively into the work practice.
The need for a
well-documented quality management system requires no
emphasis. World over, all the organisations are on their quest
for achieving total quality management through ISO 9000. As
9000 series of standards and documentation is the first step
in this direction. All documented procedures should be stated
simply and unambiguously. The yard has also prepared a road
map for implementation of a quality management system leading
to ISO 9002 certification of all its centres by the year 2002.
A phased programme of implementation commenced in February
2000. In phase-I, all the work centres in Gas Turbines Repair
Bay, Liferaft Repair Inspection and Servicing Centre, Paint
Manufacturing Facility and the Battery Charging Facility were
taken up and had been certified by Det Norske Veritas,
Netherlands. In phase II of the certification , around 35
centres from 9 departments are being taken up. These centres
are likely to be certified by June 2001 and in phase III,
remaining centres from the production and services divisions
will be taken up.
With increasing technology and costs
of weapon platforms, the dockyards need to rethink their
strategies to ensure high quality services at affordable
costs. Cost optimisation can only be attained if the quality
aspects are properly accounted for and maintained in the
system. The lowest cost and highest quality mix will be the
future yardstick of performance of quality assurance and
control in the yards. Naval Dockyard, Visakhapatanam is
gearing up to meet the challenges of future by continuously
marching towards total quality management.
Lt Y
Sivaramakrishnan
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