When a shipyard orders a watertight door, the finished product is only part of what they're buying. What often matters more — but is rarely visible — is everything that happens before delivery: how the door was designed, who cut the steel, who built the control system, and how many hands and companies it passed through along the way.
For many suppliers, that journey involves several external partners: one company designs, another cuts steel, a third builds the control system. Every handover adds a delay, a possible miscommunication, and one more link that can break.
At IMS Technologies, that chain doesn't exist. Design, steel cutting, control system engineering, assembly and testing all happen under one roof in Risør, Norway.
What does in-house production actually mean?
For watertight doors, it means the process starts with our own engineers drawing the door to the vessel's exact specifications, and ends with a certified, pressure-tested unit — without the design, the steel, or the control system ever leaving our building.
Two capabilities in particular make that possible. Our laser and bending department cuts and forms the steel components for every door on our own machines — a sideline of the business that also serves external industrial customers, but exists first and foremost to keep door production self-contained. And our automation team designs and builds the control systems that operate the doors: the panels and software that tell a watertight door when to close and confirm that it has.
Nothing in that chain is outsourced.
Why does this matter for shipowners and shipyards?
For a shipyard on a tight construction schedule, a delayed delivery from a subcontractor can hold up an entire build. When steel cutting, panel building or control software sit with different companies, one supplier's capacity problem becomes the shipyard's problem too.
Keeping the full process in-house removes that risk. If a project needs adjusted dimensions, a modified control sequence, or a faster turnaround, the change doesn't need to travel through three companies and back — it happens on the same factory floor, often the same day.
This is also what makes tailor-made dimensions realistic rather than a costly exception. Because steel processing, panel building and engineering sit right next to each other, doors can be individually calculated and controlled for each vessel — without the lead time a purely custom order would normally require elsewhere.
How does in-house manufacturing affect quality control?
Every step — from the first cut to the final pressure test of the finished door and its control system — is carried out and documented by the same organization, under the same quality system.
That matters most when things must work under pressure, quite literally. A watertight door is a safety-critical component: it has to seal, every time, in an emergency, and the panel controlling it has to respond correctly every time too. Full control over materials, welding, assembly and control software is what makes it possible to guarantee that performance consistently, door after door — rather than hoping every subcontracted batch and every third-party control box meets the same standard.
It's also why traceability is straightforward. If a class surveyor or shipowner has a question about a specific door years after delivery — mechanical or electrical — IMS can trace it back through the exact same in-house process that built it, not through a chain of suppliers that may no longer exist or hold the records.
What has decades of in-house production built?
Since acquiring the rights to produce watertight doors in the 1980s, IMS Technologies has kept expanding what it does in-house rather than outsourcing it — from steel processing to control system engineering. The laser and bending department have grown into one of Norway's most capable cutting facilities, and the automation team now builds control systems not only for IMS's own doors but for ship, deck and industrial equipment more broadly.
That investment is what allows the same organization to deliver more than 20,000 watertight doors worldwide, each one built and controlled to the same standard, on the same site, by the same people.
A supply chain shipowners can rely on today
Choosing a supplier isn't only about the product on paper — it's about how reliably that product can be delivered, adjusted, and traced over time. For shipyards planning a build and shipowners planning decades of operation, a shorter, self-contained production chain means fewer surprises and faster answers when it counts.
That's the practical case for in-house development: not a slogan, but a production line — mechanical and electrical — shipowners can actually see the end of.
