ABSTRACT
ocean wharves is an old European shipbuilding company, which does most of its own engineering, and until recently carried out repair jobs as stop-gap work. Shipbuilding is not very easily susceptible to modernization, since it is essentially batch-work of a type that does not lend itself readily to mechanization and automatization. Although important progress has been made in this field – e.g. by standardization and welding (Liberty-ships in the usa), and by application of the ‘extrusion process’ (Goteborg) – completion after launching constitutes about half of the work, and this cannot be done at present without much time-consuming manual work.
