TKMS New Submarine Production Facility in Kiel

German shipbuilder thyssenKrupp Marine Systems hosted Naval News for a tour of their brand new submarine production facility in Kiel.

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Philipp Schön, Head of Sales, Submarines, at TKMS, answered our questions about why the need for this new submarine facility, production capabilities, any challenges in terms of workforce and supply chain.

We also asked the representative about the Walrus-class replacement program in the Netherlands for which the German company is competing with the Type 212 CD E submarine design.

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Hi everyone welcome to kill in Germany this morning I bring you another exclusive access as German ship Builder tson C Marine systems is taking us on the tour of their submarine production facility here in K they recently conducted a massive upgrade of the of the shipyard and to support current and

Future programs so without further Ado let’s get inside and take a look Philip sh good morning good morning to you thank you so much for welcoming us uh in your Shipyard that’s uh very an exclusive access so I appreciate it uh you’re the head of uh cells for

Submarines at Cent group Marine systems can you please first briefly introduce the the the shipyard here in K all right we are sitting here in in the shipyard in K of tarine systems a company of around 8,000 employees this is The Pinacle of our submarine uh building

Sites we produce here round about two to three submarines per year which are uh leaving the shipyard we are actually standing here on the Terrace of our new ship building Hall where we’re going to show you later on the production facilities that we have buil up and this

Is a historical site because it’s been producing submarines since the late 1800 is that is that right yes we have been building here on different brand names uh submarines since over 180 years um all in all since the second world war we have been producing 170 submarines delivered to customers all over the

World so as you mentioned we are standing on top of the new ship building Hall so uh the shipyard has been going through some extensive modernization and upgrade why is that is it related to the type to2 CD program of the royal noran Navy and German Navy it’s a mix and

Match of a lot of influences that have been faced by the yard we have been modernizing uh engineering production sites we wanted to be able to utilize what technology provides us to be able to faster produce the vessels to have them up to state-of-the-art um also maintaining factors like uh cyber

Security into these things but also to factor in uh production facilities for bigger boats as the 212 CD is of a size that is unprecedented and uh also second customers uh had given us an order for building submarines which are even even bigger so the the the submarines are

Getting bigger and more complex and yet you can uh produce them them faster thanks to this facility exactly we still have the old facilities but we do not get uh the number of boats in there like before um we have changed the production methods and methodologies we have a stronger interface in between

Engineering and production so this gives us a real uh Edge on producing state-of-the-art uh less um time consuming and in a better quality uh what’s the most uh challenging for you in terms of uh submarine uh production uh is it like in the rest of Europe and

Even in the US uh reling to supply chains and and Human Resources I think we are lucky here um that we can can uh Source the employees that we need we have been building up uh additional employees over the course of the last year even during the crisis so

Uh we feel that we are an attractive uh employer and uh the same goes for the supply chain yes there are challenges in Supply Chain management but we have a partnership with most of our suppliers uh so that we can scale up and down uh these these

Efforts uh you are currently uh involved in a competition in the Netherlands for the replacement of the world class submarines for the Royal Netherlands Navy in your opinion why is the type 22 CD e the right uh the right answer for the Netherlands I think that what really sets up part is

Is on the one hand the delivery time we would be adding I customized eect to an existing class which just went through CDR so we have already consumed the first two years of the program and now adding on additional customers with uh adaptations which might set them apart

From uh what the capabilities are that are already embedded in the design is easy and very time effective so we could deliver uh somewhere in 2031 uh which is from my perspective a must have if I look at The Fleets that are running there second factor for me

Is um we have been monitoring many customers who have been looking at extremely customized boats individualization uh these so-called orphan designs are running into problems when it comes to obsolescence and maintenance over the longer period we can now offer with Norway and Germany partnering navies uh so the entire fleet

Would be at least 10 boats this gives an incentive to Industry and by the way I include also the Netherlands industry there um to to keep availability of of parts that are necessary there there’s also synergies in between the Navies that can run these boats and these are

Effects that that really sets us apart independent from all these technological Advan ENC Ms uh like stealth and and uh things like that uh my last question Philip is about production capacities uh so should you receive uh the order from the Netherlands and maybe down the road

More submarine orders uh can you easily ramp up production thanks to your new upgrades here at the shipyard yes we can ramp up we have uh bought a second Shipyard dedicatedly for sunmarine production because we are also talking to other C customers who would uh require production facilities in the

Case of the Netherlands uh we at least plan to to have a stronghold in the Netherlands with a production partner there and uh we would run into these collaboration uh phases where we would see that there are synergies to be brought into the place not necessarily uh really necessary bringing up uh

Capabilities here in the yard so what we have have here is sufficient for four more boats definitely um if we even need these capacities it’s a question depending on the uh local Partners Philip again thank you very much for your warm welcome here at your upgraded submarine production facility thank you

Very much enjoy your day at the Shipyard H his BR good to see you again yeah good to see you ex you you are the head of the Netherlands submarine replacement program at tkms so we are now inside one of the halls in the new uh ship building facility how many hols are in total in

This new production facility so we have allog together seven uh construction halls and uh this enables us to work on 11 sections in parallel and this way we are able to really uh reduce and speed up our construction uh capacity up to uh 20% this includes also the new technologies digital Shipyard um

Augmented reality maybe we can uh go up and um I show you a little bit well let’s let’s go and take take a look H the ship Builders at tent C Marine systems are also using augmented reality to streamline their production processes I am now standing inside a test module from a 24 uh submarine and with the augmented reality uh glasses and Technology I can see uh equipments inside the pressure Hall so the ship

Builders are using this again to make sure that equipments are placed according to plan they can check the progress on the ship building uh schedule and they also can check and to make sure that the pressure hole is assembled according to to plan and all these combine again that’s an important

Element in streamlining helping uh speed up their uh production uh Processes