Human Resource Management Digitalisation in Multidisciplinary Ship Design Companies

Abstract The digitalisation in the ship design sector is currently applied to the design process itself and is well defined, partially standardised and practically implemented by both independent design companies and the design departments of shipyards. The situation is similar in other sectors of engineering. However, the requirements for the digitalisation of other processes in design and engineering companies have not previously been studied, and the limited financial resources of ship design companies mean that there is a need for research on the digitalisation needs of multidisciplinary ship design companies. The implementation of building information modelling (BIM) solutions is costly for design companies and generates benefits mainly for shipyards and shipowners. The lack of benefits for design companies leads to the hesitation of managers whenever digitalisation is considered; the scope and scale of the digitalisation, as well as the selected software and BIM level, are defined by the shipyard requirements. The participation and support of management in the digitalisation process is one of the key success factors; the expected benefits caused by digitalisation for the organisation will increase the motivation of managers to invest limited resources in digitalisation. There are no data that indicate the processes with a high potential for digitalisation and the scale of expected improvements in ship design companies; therefore, research in this area was performed with a group of project managers from design and engineering companies. The research focused on collecting the opinions and experiences of the managers related to the manual management of resources and comparing the poll results with the conclusions from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system data analyses. The paper analyses if the digital automation of the resource management process can lead to the substantial improvement of the operations of multi-project, multidisciplinary engineering ship design companies.