Typically, Paint Shop supervision does not have tools available to compare shop performance to the budget nearly the end of a contract. The lack of information required for recognizing causes of low productivity results in cost overruns that cannot be explained. The purpose of this study was to develop a system for a Paint Department which could provide shop supervision with timely information concerning cost performance. Three areas were investigated in Phase III: Lost Time, Abnormal Conditions, and Hotwork Identification. Lost Time occurs when a worker is physically ready to perform the work defined by the work order, but must wait for some event to occur before work can be started. Abnormal conditions are those factors which hamper productivity and drive costs. Hotwork Identification was found to be important in quantifying the amount of rework resulting from hotwork not completed before blast and paint.

The objective of Phase III of "The Economics of Shipyard Painting" was to develop a system for the Paint Department which would provide shop supervision with timely information concerning cost overruns. In many cases, shop supervision had very little knowledge concerning work order performance, especially on broadly-scoped work orders covering a long time span. The need existed for accurate information of unfavorable cost performance at an earlier stage of production. This information was needed not only to explain cost overruns, but to facilitate midstream corrections.

The first phase of this three phase effort dealt with identifying the costs of painting in the shipyard. The surface preparation and coating process was broken down into its respective activities and it was discovered that the Paint Department did a lot more than just lay paint. In fact, 84% of the time the Paint Department personnel were performing support operations. Phase II looks at how the additional operations involved in laying paint can be organized and incorporated into an automated bid estimating process. Centuries have passed and the same techniques of estimating are still being utilized. Contracts are compared to past work and an estimate is extrapolated. This was sufficient when contracts were plenty, but in todays market such estimates can end a company company's era. Unfortunately, this type of estimating is all too common in the non-repetitive manufacturing environment. This report presents a bid estimating program that is presented not as a panacea, but as an estimating tool. The program performs all the calculations and totaling required to generate the estimate. The program also maintains the historical data that is used to perform past contract comparisons. The bidder is left to do what he does best: provide management with a detailed estimate that can be carefully scrutinized. Consequently, management can carefully review the bid and the data that was used in its development. Only then can management respond with meaningful questions about the bid. To expect more with less information is a dangerous situation and often creates confusion and unmanageable budgets.