Marine contractors have made huge leaps in productivity
Those that build at sea offer lessons for their onshore counterparts
THE Innovation, a 147-metre ship docked in Rotterdam, looks like a cross between an oil rig and a robot from a “Transformers” film. Her crane has been loading on giant pipes throughout the night. Soon the ship will travel to sea, where an automated hammer will drive the pipes into the ocean floor to support wind turbines. “Everything in our industry has become larger,” says Koen Vanderbeke of DEME, a Belgian dredging firm that owns the ship. “But we’ve become smarter, too.”
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Building under water”
Business August 19th 2017
- Efficiency eludes the construction industry
- Marine contractors have made huge leaps in productivity
- American business leaders break with Donald Trump
- A trade dispute threatens America’s booming solar industry
- Computer-game tournaments go mainstream
- China’s digital-payments giant keeps bank chiefs up at night
From the August 19th 2017 edition
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