CORDIS Archive
This page has been archived. It will no longer be updated.
By Hilary Barnes in London
For European companies in industries suffering overcapacity and harried by rivals from developing countries, new technology is a vital tool to maintain competitiveness.
Sometimes even survival is at stake, as was the case at the Odense Steel Shipyard, the biggest in Denmark.
In 1986 the yard, with employee numbers down to about 1,000, was on the verge of closure. A steady improvement in productivity was the only way it could hope to survive the intense competition in the international shipbuilding industry.
The yard is now established as one of the most productive in the world, an achievement arising largely from its participation in the European Union's Esprit programmes. These bring together European companies and research institutes to co-operate in the development of new technology.
"One thing is absolutely certain - we would not be where we are today but for the Esprit programme," says Kurt Andersen, the yard's chief executive.
This is quite an endorsement for what the yard's executives consider to be one of the EU's most successful programmes.
One Esprit programme in which the yard participated was to help develop automatic robot welding technology. Its application has been crucial to the yard's ability to achieve a constant improvement in productivity, says Torben Andersen, executive vice president in charge of the technology programme.
The Odense management claims that productivity has increased by more than 20 per cent over the past five years, with much more still to come. The yard now employs about 2,900 people and has just delivered the first of a series of 12 giant container vessels to its parent, the A.P. Moller-Maersk shipping group.
Each vessel can carry 6,000 standard 20ft containers, making them the largest of this type in the world today.
The associated outlay on containers, about 80,000 40ft and 45ft containers (being built at A.P. Moller's Danish container factory) and on new cranes and other port facilities at Maersk Line's terminals and other ports of call, probably makes this the biggest single industrial investment in Danish history.
A condition of the Esprit projects is that they bring together companies and research institutions from at least two countries. The industrial partners have half their costs covered by the EU; the research institutions have all their marginal costs (costs incurred specifically from participating in a project) covered.
"Joining an Esprit project multiplies the research effort by 10 as compared with what we could do on our own. This is an enormous upgrading of the effort - and the Commission pays half the bill," says Torben Andersen.
But, he adds, there is more to it than that. On its own, the company would probably not have been able to mobilise sufficient resources for achieving success. "Esprit gives us access to other people's creativity, and creativity is one of the most limited resources there are," he says.
Two of seven Esprit projects in which Odense has participated have produced the most spectacular results to date. The first was a heavy welding project, covering the years 1984 to 1989, the aim of which was to analyse and demonstrate the application of computer-integrated manufacturing in heavy welding fabrication.
It brought together computer-aided design, graphic simulation and production robots, showing how to link a series of computers so that a product could be designed, methods for automated production assessed and machine work instructions generated to guarantee efficient manufacture.
The visible result at Odense is a giant robot welding machine in one of the large halls where huge sections are completed before being lifted out for assembly in the dry dock.
The machine has 12 robots, each with eight axes of movement, working simultaneously on a single section. The work of the robots is co-ordinated, a task which calls for supercomputing techniques.
A light sensor system enables the robots to identify and move into the required positions. The job of the welder is to punch the buttons to instruct the robot. "Once welders have tried this work, you can't get them to get back on their knees again," says Torben Andersen.
The second Esprit project, Cleopatra, goes further. It equips the robot with vision, enabling it to adapt programs to changing and complex profiles and to weld complex geometric shapes.
The project is not finished, but Odense is already exploiting the results of the programme. It has robots that work on a concave section, to which it welds sections not at right angles to the base but at an angle of about 70 degrees. This is a more complex task than those carried out by the 12-robot machine, where sections are welded either at 180 or 90 degrees to each other. In Cleopatra, the robot can move around 11 axes compared with the six axes used by most industrial robots.
"The results of the Cleopatra programme are still very speculative, but it goes beyond the limits of traditional robot technology and we expect very exciting advances in coming years," says Torben Andersen.
Copyright © The Financial Times 1996