How land factories made the leap
Behind twenty years of productivity gains in land-based manufacturing sits one shared piece of infrastructure: ERP and MES. Plan the work, collect actuals in real time, and close the gap between the two. In Korea's smart factory performance study, adopting companies showed an average 30% productivity gain and a 15.5% improvement in on-time delivery.
The premise that makes the system work is simple: actuals are collected automatically. Parts carry barcodes, machines carry PLCs, everything crossing the line passes a scanner. Nobody has to count for the system to know how many of what are at which process in what state.
In a shipyard that premise collapses
A shipyard works on ship blocks weighing hundreds of tonnes. There is no standard place to put a barcode, nothing passes a conveyor, every shape differs, and cranes move them around an outdoor yard. So a shipyard's actuals are still made by people. A manager walks the site, looks, tallies by hand, and enters it into the system afterwards.
The ERP is there. The MES is there.
What is missing is trustworthy real-time data to put in them.
The gap between plan and actual is found days later, by which time the bottleneck has already spread into the next process. With four years of orders on the books and a chronic shortage of production labour, the cost of that lag has never been higher. This is an industry where delivery is the margin.
Reading space instead of barcodes
What LiOps builds is that missing layer. LiDAR sensors installed in the yard scan the site in 3D and the spatial model recognises every block inside it. The core of it is automatic CAD registration: among hundreds of the customer's drawings the system searches out by itself which one the block in front of the sensor is, then compares current shape against finished shape to measure progress per block.
Nobody matches by hand, no barcode is needed, and it holds wherever the block is moved. Space itself becomes data. We call this layer Spatial MES. What barcodes and PLCs do for an MES in a land factory, sensors and spatial intelligence do in a shipyard.
What matters is that Spatial MES does not replace the systems a yard already runs. The ERP and the MES stay. Spatial MES sits underneath them and supplies automatically the measured actuals that human eyes and manual entry have been carrying. A manager sees, in real time, which block of which hull is at which position in which shop and at what percentage of completion.
The industry is already heading this way
This is not our view alone. HD Hyundai is investing more than 320 billion won by 2030 in its Future of Shipyard programme, and the name of its first phase is exactly the visible shipyard: real-time process visualisation. The stated targets are a 30% productivity gain and a 30% reduction in build time. Other shipbuilders are making smart yard investments in the same direction.
HD Hyundai has also announced a design and production platform with Siemens, starting development in 2026 and rolling out across affiliated yards from 2028. The more sophisticated the platform, the more acutely it needs real site data flowing through it. Spatial MES does not compete with that platform. It fills it.
It is already on site
LiOps Spatial MES is working its way through all three of Korea's largest shipbuilders.
When space becomes data, robots work
What Spatial MES produces does not stop at a dashboard. The moment a block's position and state are known as coordinates, those coordinates become a language robots can consume. Our second axis, the robot welding crew, performs real work such as free-form welding on top of them. The Spatial MES that reads the site and the crew that works above it connect into a single 3D work model.
A plant where the space turns itself into data and robots work from that data, on sites emptying out because nobody can be hired. That is the future LiOps is building in shipbuilding and heavy industry.
Sources: Ministry of SMEs and Startups smart factory performance analysis, Ministry of Employment and Labour occupational labour force survey (first half of 2024), HD Hyundai FOS announcements, and the HD Hyundai and Siemens platform announcement. This article sets out our technical and market view and does not describe contract terms with any specific customer.