Ship repair industry is industrial activities performing ship repair, maintenance, alteration. At the same time, it is one of habour-related industry sectors.
Ship repair industry is labor and technology-intensive industry, which creates inductive effect in production and employment effect on related industries such as electrical electronic industry, chemicals, steel, machineries. In addition, ship repair industry is described as a major contributor to the local economy when considering effect of direct increase in production toward associated industries and effect of increase in added value due to stay of seafarers, (the bank of Korea, Busan branch, 2003)
In particular, Busan, Gyeongnam, Ulsan areas hold superior technologies and labors which ranked the top position in the filed of new ship building and have a ideal location to handle shipping traffic ranking as the fifth in the world.
Despite of many positive aspects, Ship repair industry in Korea has vulnerable industrial base due to the aging of skilled workers, difficult to recruit professional and high labor cost (about five times higher than China) and decrease in demand of fishing vessel repair according to fisheries agreement in 1998. Furthermore, ship repair industry has severe problem in recruiting new workforce because the industry is recognized as 3D industry and the lack of systematic plans to foster ship repair industry in Korea is one cause of inhibiting the development.
Moreover, the effort for informatization in ship repair companies is to imitate operational practices of similar companies and take advantage of a simple office tools. And a few of the larger companies stay in the stage of making web page and promotional CD for marketing.
As above, to overcome the difficult situation of ship repair industry, Busan has started with first phase of project since 1999, Currently Busan provides a wide range of assistance as firth phase of project to actively respond to changes in industry trends at home and abroad through the foundation business and software support business. In addition, Busan makes an effort to ensure the competitiveness of maritime industry in order to realize creative economy and industry innovation and increase productivity.
Although the container throughput of Busan port dropped to world's fifth in January 2013, the construction of ship repair complex in Busan are being promoted to develop the Busan port as a high value-added logistics network. Therefore, information strategy to meet industry grouping is needed as well.
In this study, we seek the way to build information network and ICT strategic plan for enhancement with Busan as the center after investigating the informatization case of ship repair industry.