Blog 2-7: Perspectives from the past

Before I start this blog, I need to clarify an important point.

When you read these blogs, you may interpret them as being about me and my history from the First-person perspective. This is not the intention. These blogs should be interpreted from the Third-person perspective, as I believe this history resonates with many engineering and manufacturing people that were born in the late 60´s, early 70´s.

I started my career early, sixteen years old with an Electrical Engineering apprenticeship within Metal Box in Arbroath, Scotland for a princely sum of 70 British Pounds per week. Apprenticeships were extremely common during this period, teaching broad technical skills ranging across Electronics to Switchgear, and Arc Welding to Machining. They also taught you teamwork, interpersonal skills and common sense from day one. They also taught you how things are made – you work for a can-maker, so it is important you know how cans are made. For a youngster this was also fascinating and exhilarating to see how printed 2-piece Beverage cans are made at speeds of 2000 per minute, or 3-piece food cans being welded together at 500 per minute, it opens your eyes to just how cool and interesting manufacturing and technology can be.

As these blogs are about learning from the past, it is probably good to point out right now that I feel the above is already one key area lacking in today’s world. Many youngsters nowadays head straight to university or tend to serve their “apprenticeships” on social media in the hope they can make a life for themselves as an influencer. Industrial apprenticeships today have never reached the levels of the 80s and 90s. This is evident nowadays when trying to find those that “DO” or even understand how it is “DONE”. It’s a dwindling skillset being that many now simply want to jump straight into management (or consulting). I am not convinced that four years of university should enable this level of self-entitlement. There is still no substitute for exposure and experience and apprenticeships are an awesome way to gain this.

So back to the matter in hand. Why bring up Metal Box (which became CarnaudMetalbox, then Crown Cork & Seal)? Well back in 1987, they already started putting in place what I believe to be a foundational element to enable activities like digital transformation. They went “all-in” with the Toyota Production System (TPS) principles, focusing heavily on TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) and TQM (Total Quality Management).

If you walked into a factory back then, you would be met with gleaming RAL9010 (pure white) machinery and spotless floors that you could eat your Haggis, Neap and Tatties off. This in part was thanks to Autonomous Maintenance and the 5S foundational principles (and “Jidoka” - Automation with a Human Touch), resetting to datums, and eliminating problems. More importantly, it put in place processes and procedures that every single employee was involved in and more importantly, bought into. Seeing the plant manager up to his eyeballs in grease during autonomous maintenance sessions, alongside the canteen staff was an eye opener!

You may think – what does that have to do with Digital? In my view, everything. The principles of World Class Manufacturing are old, but still completely relevant. The use of tools like Lean Six Sigma relies heavily on discipline in the workplace, making work better and making work faster. What we did in ´87 was to put the foundation (and the discipline) in place to build a transformation upon.

It was not all mechanical and procedural activities at this time, there was also the introduction of technology to support the “better and faster” methodology.

Even though they were invented in the late 60´s, PLCs were still relatively new in the 80´s, and very different from todays. The first one I had the pleasure of working on was the 5TI system from Texas Instruments. Big and Bulky! Even the programming device needed a large trolley to move it around, even though its green screen was barely 6” in size!

As a GenX´er, I loved this, it was exciting, but for my Baby Boomer Journeyman, he was ever so slightly sceptical - in his words “computers will never take off”! His preference for a hardwired control systems versus logic programming was a difficult, almost generational culture to change.

Back then we also started our journey on OEE Reporting (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), even though in today’s world many still talk as if this is a relatively new concept. OK we did not have the fancy software tools, instead we started with simple Trigger Counters, displaying number of stops, and length of stop, wired to the main contactors on machines. If you wanted any further detail on downtime reasons, it was down to whether the operator wrote it down on their machine log. Building a Pareto – no chance! Microsoft Excel didn’t even exist then to create a pretty chart. Certainly there were no downtime alerts getting sent to a mobile phone, as they hadn´t been invented yet either. Interestingly though, even with this pitiful level of data and intelligence, it still drove actions due to the culture that had been created!

One other technological advance that was taking place at speed at this time was the introduction of the Enterprise Resource Planning tools. My first exposure was with JDE (not the coffee company). It did not touch manufacturing at this stage, it was a tool for the financial community, helping them massively with the management of the business finances from suppliers through to the customers.

Even at this early stage with ERP systems, you could see a “missing link”, one which could be argued is still missing in many companies today. That is the focus on the most important piece of the value chain – the MAKE piece. Great you manage the financials across the enterprise, but the part of the value chain that creates (and destroys) value, is often where and how you make your stuff!

As ERP systems were driven TOP-DOWN, via IT and Financial folks, along with consultants in this space, the OT piece was forgotten about. Move forward 35 years – is it any different? Still a great divide, one of the “digital battlefields” – OT facing off against IT.

Before I go too broad, I would like to go back and reflect on the core foundational elements I aim to expose in this blog, or at least stimulate some thoughts and dialogue around.

1. There is a shortage of “those that know how to DO” within manufacturing – experience.

2. Those that do know, are in the twilight of their careers – but is their knowledge getting codified?

3. Those companies that have historically put in place World Class Manufacturing principles should have the robust foundation to leverage technology as an enabler to advance fastest and have a culture within the workforce to accept it.

4. Many of today’s technologies / solutions / approaches are not new, but we talk like they are, rather than learning why they were ineffective in the past and fixing it.

5. People were and always will be, the most important “asset”, you must bring them along on the journey.

To close out this blog, I will share one other perspective I have which has been gained from the pleasure of being able to visiting many factories across the globe over this 35-year period.

I will generalise here, but what used to be Modern and White factories in the past (i.e., the “west”), look like they are stuck in the past (ageing and worn out). Look to the “east”, and what was dirty and out of control in the past, is now Gleaming and High Tech. For me, this suggests that the laggards learnt well and progressed faster.

Perhaps in the “west”, the jump from Industry 3.0 to 4.0 is too difficult, as it is a little bit too ambiguous and ill-defined. Whereas for the “east”, in many cases going from Industry 2.0 to 4.0 was obvious and almost mandatory.

Look out for the next blog that will dig into just what Industry 3.0 did for us, and why maybe it makes the step to Industry 4.0 so ill-defined and difficult.

Blog 3-7: The Forgotten Impact of Industry 3.0, coming in a weeks time.