This list seems to be largely populated by government, academic and
medical/bioscience folk so maybe the sad events at Longbridge have passed
you all by. However there are two issues as far as the statistics are
concerned so I don't feel this is out of line.
Firstly, as usual the reporting seems to be rather sensationalised. I
heard this morning for example that Nissan in Sunderland makes some 320
cars per person per year whereas MGR made about 16. Now I thought the
total sales were about 120,000 and if there are 6000 workers at Longbridge
that makes 60 not 16. I don't think I misheard in my slumbers - it was
Saturday morning after all - but this raises the question of what does
'made' mean.
The value added for a typical Japanese assembly plant is actually very
small - I have heard it said that about 87% of the car value is actually
bought in which leaves only 13% added by the workers. If this is not
comparable at Longbridge - for whatever reason - then it was an insult to
the workers there who have just lost their jobs. eg If in fact only 60%
was bought in, then the effective productivity was 180 cars per person per
year. The media should get used to presenting the full facts and not to
doing some simple sums to prove the case that they have already decided by
prejudice.
Of course even 180<320 so there are questions to be asked. It would seem
that there may be quite a lot of money missing from the assets that MGR
enjoyed when it was sold by BMW. Has there been corporate fraud going on
- on a massive scale? Why were - and for how much - the intellectual
properties of some of the cars and engines sold to SAIC before the deal
was finalised? Was that in fact all they wanted so SAIC screwed MGR
deliberately? Who owns the MG brand now? Are the Phoenix 4 villains or
failed heroes?
Hopefully an inquiry will get to the bottom of this.
But the whole sorry saga raises another issue that, as some will know, is
quite close to my heart. That of the use of statistics in industry - or
rather the lack of use of statistics. For there is no doubt that the lack
of direction from the top to making a quality product has bedevilled much
of British manufacturing industry. And quality means optimising the
design, reducing the variability, controlling the assembly process, etc
etc. In other words, the fluent use of statistics.
Two examples spring to mind - that of the more recent Ford small cars that
now have exemplary standards brought about by driving design of
experiments and other statistical approaches into the model. The other is
the SEMATECH programme in the US where imposition of statistical
approaches in the semiconductor industry since the mid 80's has
essentially rescued that industry from domination by the (then top dogs)
Japanese. In fact this latter programme was run jointly by the industry
and the US government who were worried for both commercial and military
reasons about losing the lead.
There is no doubt that in the UK, mechanical engineering type of
manufacturing has all but disappeared. We have some advanced engineering
but with a reduced base of general engineering, the support infrastructure
from supplier of bits to educators will dry up. In the bioscience area
things are rather different with major pharmaceuticals, genetics and other
companies being fairly prosperous and able to invest.
I don't think it is the banks at fault - too much anyway - but that of
total industrial cowardice on the part of our managers particularly in
those 'never had it so good' SuperMac days. The ex-workers of Longbridge
are paying the price of historical bad practices, low investment and a
perception that their goods were poor quality which now they probably were
not.
With the nuclear industry more or less closed down - at least for the
present until it is realised that we can't meet Kyoto on windmills alone -
the only major customer for large mechanical engineering is the military.
Perhaps we need a few more wars to help our engineers - or will that just
mean us buying American?
Any thoughts? What should we as statisticians do? Do we have a role in
industry? Should engineers give up here and go overseas.
Best wishes
John
John Logsdon "Try to make things as simple
Quantex Research Ltd, Manchester UK as possible but not simpler"
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+44(0)161 445 4951/G:+44(0)7717758675 www.quantex-research.com
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