Serial production needs repeatable designs. Substructures arrive bespoke.
You know what repetition is worth: stable weld procedures, learning between units, predictable station times. But every substructure family arrives engineered as a one-off. I’m quantifying what standardization is actually worth in fabrication — and I can’t do that without people who run yards.
Sound familiar?
Every contract restarts the clock
Designs arrive as one-offs, so you re-plan, re-qualify welds, and burn first-of-kind hours on structures that could be near-identical. Unit ten costs what unit one did.
No seat at the design table
The standardize-or-customize call is made at FEED, before a yard is even selected. Manufacturability enters as a rule of thumb — if at all.
Investment decisions in the dark
Welding automation and serial fixtures pay off only above certain volumes and commonality. Nobody can tell you today where that threshold sits.
What participation buys you
Nothing below rests on a promise. Today you get influence and early access. The computational results arrive on the published research schedule through 2028 — and participants see each step first.
Your constraints shape the cost model
I build the cost side from how fabrication actually works: stage times, weld hours, learning between units. The interviews decide what it must capture.
Early sight of the numbers
You see the over-design penalty and serial-production results as they come out — before publication, checked against your own intuition.
Yard economics in the FEED conversation
The results target the FEED stage, where manufacturability is today a judgment call. A published model is how yard economics gets into that room.
The cost of participating
The entry point is one conversation about production repeatability, learning effects, and what design commonality is worth on the shop floor. Interviews run under NTNU research-ethics procedures and are anonymized by default — organisations are never named without written consent. Everything beyond the interview is optional and separately agreed.
A 45-minute interview
With a production, estimating, or methods manager. Anonymized, no confidential figures — I ask how fabrication effort behaves, not what your rates are.
Later, optionally: anonymized effort data
Relative weld-hours or stage times under an NTNU research data agreement. Aggregated before any publication; the yard is never named.
A funded NTNU doctoral program, not a vendor
This is a three-year NTNU-funded doctoral fellowship (2026–2029) in the Production Management group, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. Methods and code are published openly. There is nothing for sale.
You talk to me directly — Evgeny Ramenskiy, PhD candidate. Data is handled under NTNU research data agreements. Interviews run on informed consent, with the right to withdraw at any time.
Next step
Two minutes: tell me who you are and what you'd want out of it. You get a concrete interview proposal — topics, anonymity terms, scheduling — within a few days.
Express interestOr email directly: evgeny.ramenskiy@ntnu.no