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Presidential Address

Engineering success using teamwork

F Christopher Price, BSc, DMS, FEng, FIMechE Director, Product and Process Development, USM Texon Limited, Leicester

The incoming President reviews his career which has primarily been in the development of shoemaking machinery and materials with British United Shoe Machinery Limited, subsequently USM Texon Limited, and also in the automobile components industry with Rearsby Automotive Limited. He focuses on the process of using teamwork in achieving successes in these businesses and describes two recent successes in highly sophisticated shoemaking machinery-a family of computer-controlled machines used in the process of bonding soles to shoes and an automatic stitching machine using an integrated vision system to identify and locate workpieces. He reflects on his involvement in the Institution running almost continuouslyfrom student membership to his election as the youngest President for 100 years and recommends active involvement as a good contributor to personal and professional development, especially for younger engineers. At a time when the new relationship within the engineering profession is being crystallized, Mr Price discusses the opportunities and challenges for the profession in the light of the ongoing need for strengthening of engineering and manufacturing in the United Kingdom. He concludes that progress has to be achieved by effective teamworking, both within the Institution, with other engineering institutions, with government and with other key organizations in the wider community.

K e y words: teamwork, engineering success, shoemaking machines, automation, safety critical components

1 INTRODUCTION

As is traditional in a Presidential Address to the Institu- tion, I will tell you something of my background-from the beginnings of my move towards engineering, through education and training and into the main part of my career as an engineer in the very specialized field of machinery and materials for shoemaking. This covers over 25 years, punctuated by a brief, but rewarding, period making automobile components.

I will tell you about my long involvement with the Institution which started in the days of my graduate apprenticeship and the way that this involvement has been constructive. This is an opportunity for young engineers and I hope I will encourage them to take it.

I will tell you a little about the fascinating field of engineering for the manufacture of shoes, of my experi- ence in the automobile sector and of my involvement with other engineering bodies. I will close with my views about the present state of engineering in the United Kingdom, the profession and the agenda for the next year.

Throughout, I will be referring to working with other people in teams. My definition of a team is not the first one in my dictionary from my school days, which was two or more beasts of burden harnessed together, but rather a group of people with a mix of skills who are organized to work together towards an objective that they share. I have long held the same view as Alexander Graham Bell, born the year that our Institution was founded and inventor of the telephone, that Great dis- coveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.

2 EARLY YEARS

My family tree does not show a long line of engineers preceding me although there is a vague reference to a bridge builder several generations back on my mothers

The Address was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institution held in London on 24 May 1995. The MS was received on 25 April 1995.

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side and, more recently, a cousin on my fathers side was a civil engineer. I suspect that my maternal grand- mother could have been a professional engineer if she had had the opportunities that young people have today. I remember her as a very practical person around the home and with the cars that she loved to drive. My father worked in the field of patents and licensing in the Lancashire textile industry and I have no doubt that my interest in developing new products was influenced by the new products and textile finishes which he talked about and showed me samples of.

However, it was long before I could understand such concepts that my parents were convinced that their son, born in Manchester in 1946, was going to be an engi- neer. They tell me that when I was reaching the stage of taking my first steps, I spent the early mornings working out how my cots latches and threaded bars contrived to keep me captive and how to disassemble them in order to escape. Later, my pre-school play, at home, included squeezing more performance out of clockwork trains by stripping off the bodywork and applying small quantities of my mothers sewing machine oil. I pressed my tricycle into service to fetch nails from the local hardware store where the very kind shopkeeper was prepared to sell me a pennyworth of mixed nails for my model boats. Meccano was a firm favourite, especially linked to a small static steam engine, firstly to make cranes and later to give it some ungainly wheels and a crude transmission to allow me to make it propel itself up a ramp with an extra meths burner under the cylinder-something I discovered improved its performance.

The family home was in Wilmslow in north Cheshire and about mid-way between Ringway, the commercial airport for Manchester, and Woodford, the factory and airfield of Avro. These were both within easy cycling distance and, with a friend, I often spent days in the school holidays looking at and later taking photo- graphs of whatever was taking off and landing. We were more often at Ringway, partly because there was more to see and partly because Woodford was further off and

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beyond the railway, where we were inclined to stop and often got no further. Also, Avros short test flight route came close to our house so we had excellent views of the Shackletons and thundering Vulcans without break- ing away from whatever else we were up to.

I was born something of an engineer and had the right environment to encourage my interest. The only thing against me was my fathers protective attitude to his best tools, which he kept hidden in his writing desk. It was only years later that I discovered the joys of properly tempered and ground screwdrivers and sharp- ened and set saws that cut straight without any steering effort !

3 EDUCATION AND THE FORMING OF MY CAREER CHOICE

My secondary schooling, at Uppingham, not only gave me a good grounding in maths and science but it also encouraged me towards my engineering career, and not just through its Motor Club, which had a collection of old cars that could be taken apart, re-assembled and occasionally persuaded to run. An excellent feature of two of the terms of each school year was a day of expe- ditions. The whole school set out, by the bus-load, to visit a wide variety of places where we would learn something rather than just being entertained. There were always a number of industrial visits on the list and these were invariably my choice. I clearly remember that I saw cars being built at Standard Triumph, tyres made at Pirelli, steel tubes at Stewarts and Lloyds, fire pumps and the first of the 1.5 litre V-8 Formula 1 racing engines at Coventry Climax, as well as the disil- lusioning processes, at least to schoolboys eyes, that go into the making of biscuits and sweets. This was an excellent programme allowing experiences that were far beyond the scope of the classroom and much more to do with real life. I had another visit, along similar lines, but organized in the holidays by a friend of my father, to some of the aircraft factories in the Manchester area that are now part of British Aerospace. I was fascinated and I think it achieved my fathers objective too: to turn my interest in aircraft towards manufacturing rather than flying, a sensitive subject in our family as my uncle had lost his life in the RAF in the late stages of the 1939-45 war. By the time I was moving on from Uppingham, I had read through the engineering institu- tion literature in the careers library and had secured myself an industrial scholarship and a place to read Mechanical Engineering at Nottingham University. I had been unclear about the relative attractiveness of Mechanical Engineering and Production Engineering until I was interviewed by both departments at Not- tingham on the same day and chose Mechanical, although, as you will see, my interests are mostly where these two branches of the profession grow together.

4 UNIVERSITY

The 1960s were a great time to be young. Universities were expanding and there were lots of jobs around. Uppinghams careers master had made a speciality of listing out industrial scholarships and bursaries and helped with first contacts. It did not take long to get Part 8: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

more than one offer. Of the companies I approached, the one that took most interest in the candidates and took greatest care to explain its business to them was the one from which I finally accepted a generous scholarship, British United Shoe Machinery Company Limited in Leicester. I enjoyed much of the engineering learning at Nottingham, especially after the vast common first year lectures were over and we got into the smaller Mech Eng group. Lectures on thermodyna- mics and design from the then head of department, Pro- fessor Geoffrey Smith, were particularly memorable because he was such an enthusiast that he brought in his Flanders and Swann record of the Laws of Ther- modynamics and positively eulogized about the Electro- lux refrigeration cycle and steam turbines. He captivated us with a story of a steam turbine powered motorcycle which he and a friend had built. He claimed that it ran well but was very dangerous with the rider hidden from view in a cloud of condensing steam before he got going and whenever his speed dropped back below walking pace. I was less enthusiastic about the purer approaches to stress analysis of pressure vessels, a subject that my tutor, Dr Peter Stanley (subsequently a Professor at Manchester University and a prolific author of papers on this subject in the Proceedings of the Institution), persuaded me to research for my final year project. I remember, however, getting plenty of satisfaction as we achieved a good understanding of increased stress levels in pressure vessel end caps in the presence of some kinds of defects.

5 BRITISH UNITED SHOE MACHINERY COMPANY LIMITED

I joined British United Shoe Machinery Company Limited (British United or BU for short) before going to Nottingham. I visited the parent company, United Shoe Machinery Corporation in the United States, working in its vast Central Research Division there during one of my summer vacations, so when I grad- uated in 1968, I was well into the two-year graduate training programme. This was well organized and char- acteristic of the organization which was thorough throughout, being in a very strong position in its market. Indeed, the United shoe machinery companies, almost entirely American owned, had dominated their very specialized branch of engineering since early in the century.

However, cracks were beginning to appear. The American operations were fighting a monopoly anti- trust action and were also discovering that the new ventures they had purchased with the proceeds of the profitable shoe machinery business to broaden their industrial base were proving to be very expensive errors. This in no way affected my training and early career path in product development in the British part of the company, but it was an indication of harder times to come. Decades of strength concealed some areas of growing weakness, a phenomenon known to far too many British companies, many of which did not survive to tell the tale. Shoe production had started its move away from the countries where the shoes would be used to factories in lower labour cost countries. Shoe machinery manufacturers in Italy realized that they could undercut the giant United companies and in the

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1970s their growing strength meant that the giant was forced to slim down and get fitter.

Somewhat surprisingly, I decided, more than once, to stay with British United. I have to say that, despite the slimming down that more than halved the size of the machinery research and development area where I was working, I was being given opportunities to grow and develop and was rising quite quickly through the shrinking structure.

During this period, I had been transformed. I had been narrow in my outlook and very happy to dig into a design or machine performance problem and work on it relatively quietly, perhaps with another engineer or technician. My first project management role must have been something of a gamble, especially as it involved me in co-ordinating and guiding the efforts of professionals from different disciplines in different sections of the department in a programme to devise ways of automa- ting the process of making shoe uppers. The role worked for me even if a lot of the results of our work were too restricted in their applicability to have been real successes. I learnt some of the skills of steering a multi-disciplinary team. Perhaps the catalyst was a course I attended about a structured approach to problem solving. This taught me the value of making a clear distinction between the process of managing a team solving a problem and the subject of the problem itself. It taught me more about teams and it encouraged me to do some things that I was reasonably comfort- able about, to think laterally and to hold a problem and examine it thoroughly from many angles rather than rushing to a solution. I had also relieved the relative boredom of graduate apprenticeship and the first year of career development by taking the postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies by evening study at Leicester Polytechnic. This and other good courses aroused my curiosity about other aspects of business and how people work, rather than how machines work. Today, the Diploma in Engineering Management does much the same for young graduate engineers.

By 1981, there had been many changes in British United and a top management team had been formed. By this, I mean a proper team made up of individuals who had been selected not only because of their skills within their own areas but also because they were capable of working well with each other. Previously, restrictions had existed between the different functions of the business, because the people running them did not make a good team, even though they were good as individuals. Despite good work being done in the indi- vidual functional areas of the business, they were not pulling in the same direction. We broke these restrictions down and turned round the performance of the business. In product development, I concentrated a good deal of my efforts on ensuring effective teamwork using, more than once, the illustration of the way the crew of a rowing eight have to ensure that they work together in perfect harmony whereas the crew of an air- craft carrier are much less interdependent and poor per- formance on the part of the vast majority of the crew has absolutely no influence on the progress of the ships voyage. There had been too much of the aircraft carrier culture and we now needed to change to a much closer teamwork. We changed the emphasis of our R&D work, reducing the expectation that we could make rev- Q IMechE 1995

olutionary changes in the ways shoes are made and concentrating more on ambitious evolutionary develop- ment, but not exclusively so.

1985 started well. We had three innovative major new products that were really selling well and some other new introductions that were performing competently. Unfortunately, this was not true for our sister com- panies in other countries and the group management in the United States seemed to have lost sight of the potential of the business for steady growth with the rise in world shoe production. It was more inclined to trim back to percentage performance targets than to make the most of the opportunities. Worst of all, for me, was the fact that they were not prepared to acknowledge the success of my team, turning a promised halting of the cut-backs into another round of expense reductions. As leader of the whole R&D team, I had had enough. After doing what I could to ensure that the team could con- tinue in reasonable shape, I left.

6 UNITED MACHINERY GROUP LIMITED AND USM TEXON LIMITED

Two years after leaving British United, after a period which I will describe later, I was back. My departure, as much as anything else, had encouraged the rest of the British United top management team to attempt a buy-out and, after much hard work and great uncer- tainty, they had succeeded early in 1987, forcing out the old American group management and inviting me back to re-join the team in the new company, United Machinery Group Limited.

The buy-out concentrated on the shoe machinery business in which we had all been involved. There was a parallel business making structural materials for shoes, mainly fibre and synthetic rubber composite materials, but also metallic parts, all for parts of the shoe that are not seen, that is the insole that with a steel shank form the backbone of the shoe, toe and heel stiffeners and linings. This business stayed with our former parent company in 1987 but was for sale in 1990 and we bought it, adding its key brand name, Texon, to our strong machinery brand name, USM, and renaming the Company USM Texon Limited.

USM and Texon are today the brand names that rep- resent technical and market leadership around the world in shoemaking. The buy-out and the subsequent acquisition of the materials business meant that the Company was dedicated to its core products, rather than being an unfashionable and largely remote division of a foreign mini-conglomerate. It felt much more like a team with the whole workforce responding well to the clear commitment of the leaders to the business.

Against a background of poor world economic condi- tions in recent years and particularly the demise of the economy of the former communist block, which had been a key market for the Company, we have had the support of our investors to continue a reasonable level of investment in the development of new products and processes to maintain our leadership position. While the level of investment in development and new plant has not been unrestricted, we have been more fortunate than some companies that have been held back by excessive short-termism in the investment community. Very recently, a change of ownership of USM Texon

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has brought in additional funding to allow us to increase investment in development and production facilities, taking advantage of the growing market demand for our products.

During the whole of this period, my role has been an international one, controlling product and process development policy and ensuring the success of our developments in our machinery and materials plants around the world.

7 SHOEMAKING

I have told you something of my background and of the main industrial sector that I have worked in without, so far, opening up the fascinating field of engineering that lies behind the very wide variety of the different types, styles and sizes of shoes we wear. It is a vast subject. The group that has recently classified shoemaking machines for the new European Union (EU) machinery regulations listed about 500 different types of machines currently in use in shoemaking. Many of these are for specialist processes that are only used on particular kinds of shoes, but even if I restricted myself to the more common types of machines and the main types of engineered materials that go into shoes, there would be far, far too much to cover in this paper. If you, like many first-time visitors to our Leicester factory, start with the impression that shoemaking machinery is a collection of pieces of relatively simple equipment, like those you see in a modem shoe repairers shop, I can assure you that, like those visitors, you would have such an impression swiftly corrected and would be amazed at the level of technology in use in todays shoe factories.

There have been a few papers about shoemaking machinery published by the Institution in the past, but these do not give any impression of todays computer- controlled machines. Two very comprehensive papers appear in the Proceedings; one by Cooper was published in 1937 (1) and another by Kestell in 1964 (2) and both authors were employed by British United. These papers cover the main types of shoemaking machinery commonly used in the first two thirds of this century, with some continuing in service today. I have seen earlier published references to the fact that shoe- making machinery was developed by Mark Isambard Brunel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 40 years before the Institution was formed. He had seen the need for this machinery when he saw that the sol- diers returning victorious from Corunna were in a very poor state, largely as a result of having very badly made boots that had broken up after just a few days wear. Unfortunately, a lire later destroyed the factory and the machines and records of them were lost.

The papers of Cooper and Kestell reveal the peak of the mechanical art, with the pinnacle being the so-called BU No. 10 sole stitching machine (Fig. 1). Kestell had produced this version of the machine and given it the capability to stitch leather almost an inch thick at a speed of 10oO stitches per minute, using a curved awl to punch the stitch holes and a curved hook to pull the thread through the leather (as a threaded needle would jam in the hole). It always placed the lock of the stitch, formed by separate waxed upper and lower threads two-thirds of the distance through the assembly of the welt and the sole, so that the sole could wear down, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Fig. 1 BU No. 10 sole stitching machine

wearing away part of the stitches without the sole de- taching. For the student of mechanisms, I believe there is nothing more ingenious than the combination of cranks, cams and linkages in this machine. In 1980 we thought there was going to be a revival in shoe con- structions in which the sole is stitched to the shoe and thought that it should be possible to use modem tech- nology instead of the complex and expensive mecha- nisms of the No. 10 stitcher. To investigate this, we sponsored a large group MSc project in machine design at Cranfield. The new technology that proved to be valuable was for computer aided design and dynamic analysis of mechanisms, while attempts to find suitable independent high-force actuators that could be cooord- inated electronically to perform the stitching operation failed. The result was a prototype for a substantially simpler machine still featuring two crankshafts like the original design. Unfortunately, it never reached pro- duction as the anticipated fashion trend towards more stitched soles did not materialize.

More recent publications in the Institutions library (3, 4) and papers presented at Institution conferences record the introduction of the computer, both as a design tool for shoes and as the heart of a system to automate the assembly of the upper parts of the shoe, something I will come on to shortly. Again, at least one of the authors of each of these papers works for British United or has done so.

Before looking at examples of current technology, I must explain the key features of the pattern of shoe- making around the world. Production is approximately 10 billion pairs per year, roughly twice the world popu- lation. In the West, we consume an average of 5 pairs

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per head per year, while others clearly do not get as many as one new pair annually. High-volume pro- duction is based around the Pacific, with the Peoples Republic of China making 30 per cent of the worlds production, including close to half the shoes bought in the largest consumer nation in the world, the United States. However, the production of many of these shoes is controlled by Taiwanese and Koreans who have recently scaled back production in their own countries, due to rapidly rising labour costs, but retain detailed design and manufacturing control over enormous volumes of shoes. This part of the shoe market is driven by very low labour costs for the inevitably complex tasks of making inherently awkwardly shaped products like shoes from wide varieties of flexible and non- Newtonian materials. High-volume, relatively stable styles and low labour costs go together. There is a rela- tively low degree of mechanization in this part of shoe- making, although there is much more here than there is with the smallest producers in the Third World, where shoemakers are typically one man businesses with just a few lasts and some hand tools. At the other end of the spectrum, manufacturers who are close to sophisticated consumer markets aim to satisfy these markets with the latest fashions and colours with minimum lead times. They work with very small batches and introduce new styles very quickly, earning relatively high margins that accommodate their much higher labour costs and the cost of the much more sophisticated machinery they use.

To give you a firmer idea, shoe production, analysed by geographic area, is shown in Fig 2. It shows where the production is today and how the moves in pro- duction that I mentioned earlier have changed the picture over the last 30 years.

Sources: SATRA 1980-1990 Others, USM Texon estimates

Fig. 2 World-wide shoe production trends

What makes engineering for shoemaking so inter- esting is that it involves many very different kinds of operations as well as enormous variety of types of shoe, styles and sizes as well as a great variety of materials used in their construction. Fashions change increasingly frequently so machinery must have a very wide capabil- ity and be quickly adaptable to new styles. Styles that run to a million or more pairs are rare and becoming rarer. Fashion styles often run for less than loo00 pairs and some do not reach 1o00, and remember that even those are spread over at least nine sizes and sometimes half sizes and different width fittings. Because of this great variety, batches of shoes progress from the cutting of the pieces through to the boxing of the shoes before they leave the factory by way of a series of operations where the partly made shoes are processed by very dif- ferent machines. These range from simple ones that rely on operators to guide the workpieces through to much more complex ones that perform several operations at once and only require the operator to load the partly made shoe and check that the machine is set for the correct style. Automatic transfer from one operation to the next is featured in some cases, although attempts to use robots for this have, except in a few special circum- stances, proved to be significantly slower and more expensive than using human skills which instantly adapt to the style and size changes that can occur as frequently as every two or three minutes of the pro- duction day. There have been several attempts to inte- grate shoemaking lines with automatic transfer systems linking all the operations but, to date, none has reached a high enough degree of flexibility or a low enough cost to be successful.

I do not want to leave the impression that there is no place for sophisticated machinery in the countries where the high-volume production has migrated to take advantage of low labour costs. While it is generally true that simple machines are used in these areas, there are some sophisticated machines for key parts of the shoe production process that are popular in these low labour cost countries where the traditional justification for investment in expensive machinery to reduce labour requirements is not a significant factor with labour costs of US $2 per day. Here, as well as elsewhere, these par- ticular machines are used because they have a major impact on the ability of the manufacturer to put new styles into production quickly, or to minimize material costs through high-yield cutting, or to ensure consis- tently high quality on key features of shoe quality such as stitched seam integrity and sole attachment bonds.

In this paper, I will describe in detail some sophisti- cated machines that are most popular in the high- variety, high-quality, close-to-market shoe factories. Firstly, I will describe two machines that are used to prepare for adhesively bonding soles onto shoes. British United received a Queens Award for Technological Achievement for these machines in 1989 and has enjoyed great commercial success with successive models of this family of machines for the past ten years.

7.1 Automatic, computercontrolled roughing and

These machines are for preparing the lasted part of shoe uppers, roughmg, and for applying adhesive to shoe

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Note. The adhesive layers are not shown to scale.

Fig. 3 Cross-section of a shoe made by the flat lasted process

They are typically only 0.1-0.2 mrn thick.

bottoms, cementing. These are operations performed during the manufacture of most types of shoes.

Firstly, I must explain the basic process. The majority of shoes are manufactured by the so-called flat lasted process (see Fig. 3). In this, the upper (the normally visible part of the shoe) is formed over a last and attached to the underside of the insole (which the wearers foot presses onto). The sole is bonded to the part of the upper which has been attached under the insole and consequently faces the ground when the shoe is worn. To be satisfactory for use in an upper, a material needs to be supple and have a fine finish. These are not ideal properties for the structural integrity of the finished shoe and the critical bonding of the sole, which must form a strong but flexible joint. To overcome this, the surface of the part of the upper which will be bonded to the sole is roughed with abrasives and/or sharpened wire brushes to remove the surface layer and finishes and reveal the stronger fibres which are present deeper in many upper materials, notably leather. Subse- Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

quently, adhesive (typically solvent-borne polyurethane, but now including water-borne and hot-melt types) is applied to the prepared surface of the upper and to the sole before attaching the sole to the shoe under pressure after heating.

The roughing machine, the BU No. 4 automatic upper roughing machine, and the cementing machines, the BU No. 1 and No. 2 automatic bottom cementing machines, introduced new levels of quality and increases of productivity to these critical shoemaking operations. Failure of sole attachment, which can be caused by poor roughing or cementing, has historically been the largest cause of shoes being returned to manufacturers by dissatisfied customers. The previous manual rough- ing and cementing operations were difficult to learn, unpleasant to perform and the results were subject to the inconsistent performance of the operators. Rela- tively inflexible roughing machines using older control technologies were superseded by these flexible and accu- rate computer-controlled machines. Machine-controlled cementing of shoe bottoms was introduced to the market for the first time by these models. These rough- ing and cementing machines (Fig. 4) are essentially the same machine fitted with different operating heads (Figs 5 and 6).

7.1.1 Development history In the 1970s British United had a strong position in the market for automatic roughing machines; in its first automatic roughing machines the brush paths were con- trolled by templates. At the same time, it was clear to the management that the time would come when it would become economical to employ computer control in shoemaking machines. Roughing was selected as a prime application in view of the inherent flexibility of this type of control system and the need for flexibility in the roughing process inasmuch as the roughing brushes need to follow different paths on different sizes and styles of shoes which are processed through the same equipment in small batches. British United therefore undertook some research work in its own R&D depart- ment to explore the feasibility of using computer control for the roughing operation. By 1980, the research phase had established the feasibility of this approach and projected control system costs were reaching an acceptable level, the processing capability we needed no longer coming in the wardrobe-sized cabinet it had when we started or in the drawer-sized box but on a single printed circuit board.

There were signs that the market for the template- controlled machines was reaching saturation, given their limited flexibility with different templates to be made for each size of each style, effectively restricting their use to less fashionable types of shoes made in large batches. They also needed trained support for template making, which also restricted their market growth. The results of the research were fed into a development project and, after some specification changes to avoid excessive cost and delay in attempting to meet an over- stated market specification, this was successfully con- cluded. The first production machines were sold in 1985, The first model was suitable for low-heel shoes and development of a version with a modified roughing head also capable of processing high-heel shoes fol-

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Fig. 4 The BU No. 4 automatic upper roughing machine and the BU auto- matic bottom cementing machine

lowed immediately; this was introduced to the market in 1986. Development effort was then moved on to the cementing operation (using over 85 per cent of the machine hardware and control software of the roughing machine) and a low-heel cementing machine (the No. 1) was introduced at the end of 1987 with the full range version (No. 2) following at the end of 1988. Other

machines for edge roughing for work boots with deep soles and for cementing soles were developed subse- quently, as were new versions of the roughing and cementing machines, which added new control features and made it easier for one operator to work both a roughing machine and a cementing machine at the same time.

Fig. 5 The roughing brush mechanism

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Fig. 6 The cementing brush mechanism

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7.1.2 Process and product background I have mentioned the previous template-controlled roughmg machines and the manually controlled oper- ation. In this traditional method, a skilled worker manipulates the shoes in contact with an abrasive tool on a simple powered spindle machine. This method of roughing, which is still widely used and particularly so in lower labour cost countries, requires considerable operator skill and concentration, as anybody who has experienced the large and variable forces as a sharp wire brush bites into a soft material like leather will appre- ciate. It is easy to rough excessively and weaken the material so that the upper may break in wear where it joins the sole. Equally, it is easy to rough insufficiently so that the adhesive that attaches the sole is inade- quately keyed to the upper material, resulting in the sole separating from the shoe in wear.

As the template-controlled machines approached market saturation, British Uniteds competitors intro- duced a machine with servo control, giving it the advantage of needing no templates but suffering some inaccuracy as a result of the difficulty of the servo sensor following the edge of the shoe whose profile changes significantly around its periphery. Despite being relatively slow, complex and costly, these machines achieved some success in the market until the BU No. 4 machine was introduced. Another competitor introduced a machine with a form of digital control, but this did not give accurate control of the brush path and its sales were restricted to a few makers of military and work boots.

Cementing of the shoe bottom after roughing had been done with either dipped or pressure-fed brushes or with a simple applying machine, but in each case it has been entirely up to the skill of the operator to apply the adhesive right up to the edge of the area to be covered by the sole and not over that edge. Inconsistency of this manual operation was widespread and still is where it continues to be used. Operators often work in a solvent- laden environment. Cleaning off incorrectly applied adhesive was accepted as one of the finishing operations in shoe manufacture, effectively increasing the cost of the manual cementing operation.

7.1.3 Innovations in the British United roughing and

In the low-heel version of the roughing machine, the relative movement of the shoe to the roughing brush is controlled by a three-axis computer numerical control system developed by BU and incorporating a 16-bit microprocessor and stepping motor drives. The cost of this system is substantially less than equivalent machine tool and robot controllers, which would have made the machines unacceptably expensive, and yet it is robust and reliable enough to transmit the considerable and unbalanced forces required for the roughing operation. While the control of the movements along and across the shoe bottom is driven directly, the heightwise move- ment incorporates numerical control and a short pneu- matic suspension to allow for small variations from shoe to shoe. Consistently good roughing results are achieved and there are none of the inaccuracies that were found with the servo-controlled machines.

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Entering data for a new style can be done on the machine and is within the capability of relatively unskilled machine operators. Most of the information is entered in a teach mode, with the operator positioning the brush correctly to the edge of the shoe at successive points along the shoe. Only one size of each style needs to be taught and typically only 26 points are needed, which are automatically spaced by the control system. In use, the operator only has to key in the appropriate style number and the machine finds the correct data, recalculates the data points according to the size of the shoe with which it has been loaded and interpolates the path through the points, steering the brush accordingly. It adjusts automatically for left and right shoes, which it detects in its shoe holder, which very cleverly takes the awkwardly shaped shoes and locates them very consis- tently, without any kind of location plate and in a way that allows the machine to match the required brush path for each size to the data it has learnt from the taught size and modified to suit the actual size of shoe with it which has been loaded. The machine is capable of high productivity with a big work mix and very small batches, which are becoming more and more popular with the moves towards just-in-time manufacturing. Outputs in the range 1400-1800 pairs per 8 hour day are regularly achieved on these machines, but some shoemakers with factories making only a few hundred pairs per day are prepared to buy these machines for their quality and other benefits. Where both roughing and cementing machines are under the control of a single operator, outputs regularly exceed loo0 pairs of shoes per day.

The control system allows the machine to calibrate itself and automatically compensate for wear and sharp- ening of the roughing brushes. An additional motorized axis is incorporated to operate these functions and this is locked during normal operation of the machine. Style data can be extracted for archive purposes and for transfer to other machines that may be required to process the same styles. Data for nearly 200 styles can be held in the machine with 20 styles available imme- diately and a system that automatically selects the most recently used 20 styles when the machine is powered-up at the beginning of the working day. The system is very friendly and the machine has been readily accepted in shoe factories world-wide. Training of shoe factory workers to load and operate the machine has proved to be quick and easy and, compared with the manual method, sub-standard shoes are not produced during the training period. Several languages are available on the machine display and control panel. Diagnostic fea- tures built into the software identify faults and assist in their solution.

The cementing machines feature a rotating brush, fed from its centre with the adhesive. The action of scrub- bing the adhesive into the surface has been found to increase the average level of sole bond strength com- pared with shoes manually cemented. Less adhesive is used than with traditional methods, operator training is much faster and there is much less need to clean exces- sive adhesive from the shoes after the soles are attached. Solvent loss from the adhesive is substantially reduced by the use of a closed system up to the brush and the machine is provided with air extraction pipes to remove any solvent-laden air from the working environment.

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Successive versions of the machine have included additional control axes, either with pre-set increments of movement or full numerical control, for example to allow the roughing or cementing brush to stay perpen- dicular to the shoe bottom as it progresses around the shoe, notably on high-heeled shoes.

7.1.4 Conclusion I have described the factors that account for the success of these machines. Essentially, the basic design of the shoe holder and the mechanisms was conceived in a way that would allow the control task to be simplified. The control system was very carefully specified to achieve a lot of performance for a reasonable cost, mainly by using the system to do many calculations every time it processes a shoe rather than to use rela- tively expensive memory to store a large amount of data, as is needed for all the style/size combinations.

In the decade since the first machines were sold, costs of the logic elements of control systems have reduced dramatically, enabling the latest versions of these machines to have new transputer-based control systems with many additional features for the users and with the potential for recognition systems and process control features to be added in the future. The in-house research team put the basic technology in place, keeping the machine concept as simple as possible. The develop- ment team took over and followed the theme with a simple and robust machine design. We paid enormous attention to proving the reliability of this, our first computer-controlled machine, by running prototypes round the clock at elevated temperature for months on end.

Sales of this family of machines have exceeded 2500, making it one of the highest selling machines to the industry over the last ten years. Several competitors have tried to get a share of this market and a number, with designs that were more complex than necessary, have failed to get beyond the prototype stage. The others have a long way to go to catch up with our present sales volumes for these machines.

7.2 The Autoscan stitcher My second example is a vision-controlled machine for an earlier part of the shoemaking process, the stitching of parts of the shoe upper. This is at the beginning of its commercial life and is causing a great deal of interest in the shoemaking industry. We had the pleasure of showing the prototype two years ago at a soirke at the Royal Society, emphasizing the origins of the tech- nology for this machine in research at universities and its subsequent development in our Company. This is another element of teamwork which we have managed to make work successfully, in this case using a dedicated project manager staying in close contact with the differ- ent parts of the team and ensuring, unlike less well con- trolled university research, that the project stayed on line with the target and the intellectual property of the process established as a result of the research was ade- quately protected, a subject not without difficulty in view of academics need to publish.

Automation of the assembly of shoe uppers has long been a goal. As the worlds largest supplier of shoe- (D IMechE 1995

making machinery and materials, the USM group has always led in this technology. Early attempts were based on the provision of jigs designed to locate the various components in their relative positions, but the flexibility required in this fashion-driven industry made this approach impractical.

Some practical automation of the assembly of shoe uppers was achieved, starting nearly 20 years ago, when the advent of relatively small, relatively inexpensive computers enabled the introduction of automatic stitch- ing machinery. Although very expensive compared with conventional sewing machines used by an operator manipulating the workpiece, these were justified in the incredibly labour-intensive decorative stitching of cowboy boots. Complex designs took over an hour per piece whereas the machine took just a few minutes and held the rows of stitches exactly parallel. In these first applications, the workpiece was held in a simple outline frame pallet and manipulated by computer numerical control under a sewing head. Development of the pallets soon led to multi-leaf designs capable of holding several upper pieces to be stitched together by the machine. Today, complex athletic shoes, some with in excess of thirty different pieces of material per upper, are assembled on these machines. They are remarkable in many ways, achieving, as they do, small and accurate movements of their pallets, with a mass of around 2 kg, between adjacent stitch positions during the very short periods while the sewing needle is out of the workpiece when stitching at up to 2500 stitches per minute. The servo drive achieves very high pallet accelerations, in the range of 5-79.

However, as in the case of the template-controlled roughing machines referred to earlier, the market for these machines is limited to the longer-running styles due to the cost of pallets and the time taken to make them (despite simple procedures available for use in shoe factories for making pallets and defining stitch paths, either on the machine or from a computer aided shoe design system). British United recognized these limitations of its automatic stitching machinery and the lack of other automated processes in shoe upper assembly and started a search for methodologies that might enable automated assembly to be more widely applicable.

I was involved in the first stages of this in my first project management role in the early 1970s, when our thinking was turning away from the fully tooled approach to upper making. I classified the many differ- ent operations in upper making, distinguishing them by such factors as whether the operation required access to one or both sides of the piece and whether the oper- ation was best done by progressive or one-shot methods. How to locate the many differently shaped components became the key issue. We could design pro- grammable location systems relatively easily but they had restrictions. The best solution was going to be one in which the machine could work out for itself exactly where the component was. As I was promoted to a position in a completely different part of the R&D department and left this investigation, a colleague started to move it forward. He had been trying to simu- late the different work flows caused by several different styles being produced simultaneously through a tradi- tional upper-making room in order to be able to control

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the work flow better. As that was extremely complex, he added the requirement for the automated assembly system to identify what the components were as well, so that workpieces could flow through the making area in whatever order they happened to be, eliminating many of the scheduling problems. The then embryonic tech- nology of machine vision came to the top of the list of technologies we thought we would need.

The Company decided to take an approach involving collaboration with experts, rather than commit itself to recruiting or training existing staff in machine vision and other specialist technologies. After some false starts, this approach led to the series of partnerships which eventually put in place the technologies for the Auto- scan stitcher and, potentially, for further automation of upper making.

A number of exploratory projects were started in various universities and we finally gave a detailed spe- cification of our objectives to Len Norton-Wayne, who was then in the Department of Systems Science at The City University. The specification was a tough one-to be able to recognize a part uniquely from a population of up to ten thousand different ones, many almost iden- tical, and to establish its position and orientation to within 0.1 mm. The target rate for this was four parts per second and the system had to make no special demands for features to be added to enable identifica- tion. Within three years, we had a system that would do what we had asked except that, even on a computer that was much too expensive to build into a shoe- making machine, the process took 20 minutes, roughly 5000 times longer than our target!

The project had to be shelved but was not forgotten. About 5 years later, in the mid 1980s, we could config- ure a control system with an acceptable cost to apply the recognition technology and achieve a result over 1000 times faster than the first demonstration and close to our target. The moment had arrived to address the next set of problems-handling and manipulation. We knew that we would have to adapt process method- ologies to accept the constraints of automation. To help us with this we decided we needed further collaborators and were pleased to find that, through its ACME Direc- torate, the Science and Engineering Research Council was anxious to support academic research in manufac- turing processes. We were able to form a team with key researchers at the University of Hull and at the Uni- versity of Durham to tackle the problems associated with manipulating workpieces for stitching and for other operations in upper making. We made a tech- nology demonstrator for marking shoe upper pieces, and after considering the input from customers that we invited to see it, we decided to press ahead with the vision-controlled automatic stitching machine using this technology.

The team at Hull was tasked to provide a demonstra- tion of the necessary handling techniques to integrate machine vision with the stitching of shoe upper com- ponents. This was achieved and the machine has since been developed by the in-house development team at British United directly from this research. The demon- stration machine (Fig. 7) and the current commercial machine (Fig. 8) are essentially very similar apart from the better looks and more robust design of the com- mercial machine. Most significantly, the workpiece Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Fig. 7 Autoscan demonstration machine assembled at the University of Hull

transport system has been developed to achieve more precise control by using belts coated with grit rather than the earlier multiple rollers, and the software has been enhanced to meet the needs of some parts that are very difficult to recognize. We have also reached the target recognition time.

Fig. 8 BU MPCS Autoscan automatic stitching machine

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Fig. 9 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the scanning position

7.2.1 The machine Any component for which the machine has been 'trained' can be loaded into the machine by the operator in any orientation. As the belts feed it, the component is scanned by a high-resolution camera and its outline shape is passed to a transputer. This calculates the value of a limited number of features which uniquely identify the part and its orientation. As soon as the component is recognized, the numerical data file of the appropriate stitch pattern is retrieved from the com- puter disk and recalculated by the transputer to match the actual orientation of the workpiece. Finally the modified pattern data are passed to a conventional 16-bit microprocessor which controls the motion of the component under the stitching head.

The key elements of the machine are shown in Figs 9, 10 and 11. The workpiece manipulator is a carriage, driven in one axis, with pairs of upper and lower drive belts that grip and drive the workpiece in the other axis. There is a narrow gap between the sets of belts that first provides a window through which the vision system operates (Fig. 9) and then gives the stitching head access to the workpiece while keeping control of its position and manipulating it to stitch the required pattern (Figs 10 and 11). A batch loading system with a matching workpiece removal system is also provided.

The essence of the system is in the highly condensed set of identification and orientation data which is extracted from the mass of data that the camera gener- ates. The feature set was designed specifically to avoid problems with the small size variations that inevitably occur between nominally identical pieces cut from shoe- making materials, as well as with component edges that are not entirely cleanly cut. Equally, it can distinguish between the small differences between pieces for adja- cent half shoe sizes and near-symmetrical parts for left and right shoes. The condensed data, comprising fea- tures such as area, position of the centre of area, lengths of radii from it and second moments of area, keep file sizes small and allow very rapid searching.

Initially, the machine was intended to produce deco- rative stitching on single pieces, but applications where two or three pieces are stitched together are being

developed by the first users. Simple methods are being used to locate and temporarily hold the pieces together until the stitching starts, and the recognition system has the advantage that it rejects incorrectly pre-assembled pieces as it does not recognize them.

This project has involved several sub-teams and, in this case, the benefits of participating have been wider

Fig. 10 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the sewing position

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Fig. 11 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the sewing position (end view)

than just the achievement of the target machine. Much has been gained by the universities working together and with British United under the close guidance of its Research Manager, David Reedman.

7.3 Conclusion I have picked two of the best examples of today's shoe- making technology but there are other impressive machines and systems. I have enjoyed playing my part in the process that has enabled the teams working on these machines to achieve success. The Autoscan stitcher is one of the answers to the automation of upper making, which was the subject of my first project management role, early in my career, so it is particu- larly satisfying to see it working so well today. There

are many other development projects where I have played a more direct part and I have had my name on over 20 patents, but the details of these are mostly too intricate to explain here. Equally, the technology of some of our processes to make composite materials for shoes is fascinating, but, again, an exposition of these would take me far beyond my limit for this paper.

8 REARSBY AUTOMOTIVE LIMITED 1985-87

I have described my two-part career in shoemaking machinery and materials for 20 years up to 1985 and since 1987. What of those intervening two years?

In 1985 I set out for a permanent career change, but the unexpected happened and the permanent change was soon reversed. These two years were not merely an interlude, but a new venture that I entered into whole- heartedly with a view to a long-term involvement.

I was fortunate to secure the position of Engineering Director at Rearsby Automotive Limited shortly after leaving British United. I had moved from an environ- ment that I found very oppressive, for reasons I have explained and because the next higher level of manage- ment was trying to apply detailed control of the business in the United Kingdom from 3000 miles away and was not doing it well. Rearsby, by contrast, was a single-site operation with the small team of owner direc- tors who were all closely involved in running the business. Frrme years earlier they had bought out their business from the British Leyland organization which did not consider Rearsby to be one of its core activities and therefore was unwilling to support the management in its requests for capital expenditure to improve the business. Being part of British Leyland had not suited Rearsby for other reasons too, mainly because the bureaucracy and poor industrial relations of the parent, at that time, infected the subsidiary.

The buy-out team was led by Ivor Vaughan who had been climbing up the British Leyland ladder following a distinguished early career at Austin and had reached the stage of being a managing director of a remote subsid- iary, Rearsby. He is charismatic and has been an excel- lent leader for Rearsby. Arriving at Rearsby I felt instantly refreshed by the degree of control that Rearsby had over its own development.

Rearsby Automotive was then, and still is today, a leading supplier of what can be described as mecha- nisms that provide the physical driver interfaces to motor vehicles. These are instantly recognizable as gear- change mechanisms, pedal assemblies, steering columns and parking brake levers (Fig. 12). These and other

Fig. 12 Typical products in the Rearsby Automotive range

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parts, including suspension sub-assemblies, made by the company are safety critical components.

Rearsbys specialization in these had been built up over the previous 30 years from its first move to diver- sify from the light aircraft business for which it had been formed in the late 1930s to build the famous Auster. This specialization was one of Rearsbys strengths and it had moved from the simple role of making components to vehicle manufacturers designs to one where it was starting to design the components to fit in with the vehicle designs as well as designing the complete manufacturing tooling. Whereas the average vehicle designer would only design a parking brake lever once or twice in a career, Rearsby was dealing with several new designs each year, supplying all the significant British vehicle builders. At this time, vehicle designers were becoming receptive to offers of specialists to design the components for them and, very import- antly, to apply their experience to the vital steps of design proving and endurance testing. My design and development experience, albeit in a different part of mechanical engineering, was the new element that I brought to the position of Engineering Director, which had previously been more exclusively a production engineering role.

I must say that at Rearsby I learnt a lot about the art of forming metal to give great functionality for little cost. Rearsby had a good team of production engineers and technicians with a small sub-group working on design. It was good to work with them to solve the difi- cult problems of design; to use new materials and pro- cesses; to put novel components into manufacture, even a very reliable and cost effective electrical switch for the parking brake warning light; to find new ways to save fractions of a penny in the manufacturing cost of a com- ponent to win the business; to purchase and install new equipment ; to introduce statistical process control and build quality systems, including BS 5750; and to redesign the manufacturing systems. Rather than going into these in detail, I will just pick up on three points that are very significant to me. They address different aspects of change that were occurring at the time.

Firstly, team working between the vehicle builders and their suppliers, like Rearsby, was beginning to be established. There were big contrasts between the vehicle builders who were still using the old adversarial methods and those who were building team spirit in preparation for working together for each others benefit. With some of the vehicle builders we were still playing the game of he who quotes lowest gets the work-and well shout at each other to solve the prob- lems when the assembly line is running. It would be unfair to quote examples of the horrific problems that arose out of this approach, because the perpetrators have realized the errors of their ways, or most of them, and are no longer threatening their own businesses in this way. In the middle ground, there were the efforts on the part of some vehicle manufacturers to build more constructive relationships through comprehensive, if somewhat mechanistic, quality systems in the supplier companies and by providing training as well as making examinations. The new breed, just establishing them- selves in the North East, imported their much simpler techniques. Initially they gave us a very tough exami- nation and saw how well we could do working by our- @ IMechE 1995

selves, although they made it clear that if we qualified to supply them, they would form teams of their people and ours to achieve better results. They were clearly think- ing far ahead, insisting on having trial parts made on production tools a full 12 months before they started using them for production vehicle build. Methods and tooling had to be made mistake proof, ensuring that even the most ingenious workers could not make errors, and there had to be written contingency plans for even the most unlikely of potential problems. By contrast, the shout brigade were introducing instant changes which could not be thoroughly checked and proved before they were fitted to production vehicles. I was only involved in the first stages of the constructive teamworking approach, but I have since heard that a real spirit of co-operation has been built up-designs and methods have been improved by the efforts of the joint teams. What is even more remarkable is that there is no attempt to restrict the suppliers improvements to the products made for their customer partner in the improvement team. However, with the suppliers involved in teams with several of their customers, there must be plenty of chances for compound improvements.

Secondly, I found that there was a need for change within Rearsby which reflected its relationships with its customers. On the surface, there were signs of far too much fire-fighting despite many longer term ideas to improve and expand the business. There was something missing in the mid-term. While the target was manufac- ture and supply just in time, we were too often getting there only just in time. As a newcomer, I had an advantage and could see some difficulties in the relationships between directors and managers and could see where decisions were being left for others to take when they should have been taken at lower levels. We discussed this around the boardroom table and then, with characteristic swiftness, we formed a small team to devise a solution. We had to make the team smaller, inviting the people who could only rush to apply their preconceived solutions to come back later. This enabled us to take the essential step of understanding and sim- plifying the problem first, something I specialize in. We sorted out the real objective for the future of Rearsby. Soon we started a programme to help people through- out the business to feel and act more as members of the business team, not just as individuals or as members of their department or section teams. Different parts of the programme covered the business systems and the man- agement responsibilities. A major part of these would today be described as a total quality approach of which there are countless examples, some very suc- cessful examples having been related in recent lectures at Ordinary Meetings of the Institution. As in these, and in a similar programme we are spreading through USM Texon and British United today, the experience at Rearsby was rewarding for the participants and I was pleased to see more effective teamworking established although I had to leave when the programme still had a way to go.

Thirdly, in my section about Rearsby, I must record a patent application on a nove! parking brake lever. I had been struck by the contrast between the parking brake levers that we supplied to some vehicle manufacturers for less than 1.50 (all complete and ready to fix into the car with a couple of bolts, have the cable pinned in and

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stay with the vehicle with no noticeable attention for the next 20 years) and others that were well over 5 each. Added to this, some vehicles had elaborate separate self-adjusting systems to take the slack out of the parking brake cable, some with disc brakes all round had additional drum brakes specifically for the parking brake function, while others had manual adjus- ters built into the lever. There were variable rate designs at the time, but these were costly and unsightly and had to be concealed under bulky trim. These initially pulled at a high ratio, taking up the slack in the cable. Further up, the ratio reduced, making it easy for the driver to apply a high force, as required especially for cars with all-round disc brakes. As much to stimulate discussion and to show what we had to offer, I designed an inex- pensive variable-rate mechanism that was hidden inside the lever. This design was followed by others, helping Rearsby to establish its design credentials and win business with both relatively simple conventional designs and its own innovative designs.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I had an opportunity to return to the world of shoemaking machinery and this was too good to miss. I therefore had to pull away from Rearsby, reluctantly. The company has enjoyed increasing success since 1987. It supplies all the long- established British vehicle builders and all the new- comers from the East, with the rare distinction of even exporting some of its components for vehicle building in Japan.

There is one other enduring and instructive memory from Rearsby that I will mention at this stage. There was a lot of good humour in our work at Rearsby and many good stories, especially from Ivor Vaughans wide experience.

I shall introduce this one in the form of a maths ques- tion for GCSE: n + n + n = ?

So as not to make it too challenging, I will make it a multiple choice question where it is only necessary to select the answer (a), (b) or (c), where

(a) = n3, (b) = 3n, (c) = n. I have to tell you that the answer is not as straightfor- ward as you might think from conventional mathe- matics. Let me explain.

Just before I joined Rearsby, Ivor Vaughan had been visiting Japan to learn something of the ways that they were achieving greater success. After visiting an impres- sive manufacturing operation, he asked about the staff- ing.

How many research engineers and technicians do you have? he asked.

600 was the answer. How many development engineers . . .? 600. How many manufacturing engineers . . .? 600. At this stage, the visitor, who like me had had some

experience of communications across this cultural barrier, decided to ask a check question because the communication might not have been exactly what it appeared to be on the surface. So how big is your total engineering staff? 600.

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A few more questions revealed answers what would have made this comprehensive response : We have a team of 600 engineers and technicians covering research, development and manufacturing engineering and while we have specialists in different aspects of engineering, we keep moving most of the team through different parts of the process and dont give individuals titles that keep them in boxes. This develops our people and makes them more effective for our Company.

This is something we need to remember and con- stantly work towards. At British United, we achieved benefits of this kind of approach when we moved from a company-wide functional organization to separate product businesses incorporating their own product development teams. You can see the difficulty with finding the best answer to my little equation. Perhaps the best answer would be N-indicating the same number with greater stature.

9 THE INSTITUTION

I have had a lot of involvement with the Institution and I know that it has played a very significant part in my personal and professional development.

I joined, as a student member, while I was at Uni- versity but, apart from attending a few evening lectures, only became involved after graduating when I was per- suaded to attend a meeting of the Leicester Graduate and Student Members Panel. The opportunity to meet people from other companies and to work with them to organize meetings was useful, despite the commitment I had to evening classes for the Diploma in Management Studies at the time. Perhaps the venue for the meeting, the New Road Inn in Leicester, had something to do with it. The progression towards greater involvement was steady and natural, with me representing the panel in the East Midlands G&S Section Committee and at the local senior members panel committee meetings. I had the advantage that senior people in British Uniteds R&D department were involved in the local panel and in the branch committee too, giving them a chance to encourage me and for me to show initiative beyond my daily work. I was soon representing the East Midlands G&S Section in the national young member committee meeting at Birdcage Walk and from that allowed myself to be the young member representative on a working party on Institution activities, chaired by Diarmuid Downs, helping Council recover from a vote which rejected a subscription increase and putting in place a mechanism to greatly reduce the chances of this hap- pening again. By the time I achieved chartered member- ship in 1976, I was known on the branch committee, having represented the young members section on it, so I stayed involved, although not quite continuously, and was chairman of the branch from 1986 to 1988. I was first elected to Council in 1977 and many times since.

Through this involvement, I have had many opportunities to learn, to discuss and to develop ideas in fields that I would not have entered otherwise, as well as to get to know people with different experiences. I have had the chance to work with good teams of members and staff, and, as in my career, I have seen how achievements are much more likely if I get the objective clear first, prepare some alternative strategies

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and then get a team to work from them towards a solu- tion.

I have also observed that it is perfectly possible for members to attend the kind of Institution meetings that I have attended over the years only to sit on the side- lines. I have taken the opportunities to get involved and I am sure that, without this experience, I would be much less well rounded than I am today. I recommend this kind of active involvement, especially to younger engineers, as a very good route to personal development and for continuing professional development (CPD).

I am conscious that this Institution is the Institution of Mechanical Engineers-of not for. The members belong to the Institution to meet others, to improve their knowledge and skills and, mostly, to qualify as professionals. They also belong so that, together, they can do things that they could not do as isolated individ- uals. The Institution provides the structure, but much of the promotion of mechanical engineering, in the nation- al interest, is in the hands of the members. Those of us who take part not only help by making progress in this but also benefit personally.

10 OTHER ENGINEERING ASSOCIATIONS

I have spent so many evenings, and a lot of days too, with the Institution that you might not think I could want to mention anything else along remotely similar lines. There are, however two subjects to mention.

10.1 The 1984 Club and the 1994 Club As a result of an initiative by members of the local IMechE panel in Leicester and, in particular Phil Davies and Rod England who worked at Pedigree Pet- foods in Melton Mowbray at the time, a remarkably simple and effective Club of professional engineers and managers was formed at the beginning of 1984. It has been my pleasure and to my benefit to have been a member of the Club. The aim is simply to provide a forum for key people in local businesses to exchange information and views about manufacturing and other matters of common interest. This seems to me to have a lot in common with the objects of our larger national professional engineering institutions, although perhaps they lost the directness and freshness that the 1984 Club has when they grew in membership numbers and in the geographical areas they covered. The Club meets infre- quently, just twice or three times each year, the meet- ings being held, in turn, at the members places of work. To describe the meetings simply as visits to the factories where the members work, with talks about the nature of the business and a meal in a restaurant or pub after, is reasonably accurate but gives too much impression of pure industrial tourism. The fact that it is a club and that many of the members know each other well means that there are few inhibitions and discussions go to the heart of matters affecting the businesses visited. We started with nominated discussion topics for each meeting but soon found that this was not necessary as subjects such as various aspects of industrial relations, regulations or customer/supplier relationships are always plentiful as a result of the visit and talk about the Company visited. The number of members is tiny and hovers around 20, with a few who, like me, have Q IMechE 1995

been in since the first year. Over the years, there have been many members who have joined, by invitation of another member, and many who have moved out of the area. Meetings have been held in a very wide range of businesses ranging from coal mines to food and drink can manufacture, from aircraft maintenance to factory architecture.

The whole thing is very simple. There are no formal- ities, no subscriptions, only a fde of member names and addresses that are passed to the next volunteer to host a meeting. He organizes that next meeting, everybody pays for their own meal and the file gets passed on again. Why not try the same idea? It provides a local focus that a national organization cannot.

The 1984 Club was my inspiration for a similar one at British United and USM Texon. We have a total of lo00 employees in Leicester, organized in a number of product businesses with limited interaction between them. Having organized a presidential visit for Dr Tony Denton to the Company just over a year ago, it became clear that the professional engineers in the Company were not in touch with each other and were interested to know a lot more about what was going on in other business units within the Company. I therefore formed the 1994 Club which meets after hours and allows volunteers from the members who are largely drawn from the members of engineering institutions, both chartered and incorporated, and professional scientific bodies working in our companies to present their work to other members of the Club and for discussion after- wards over a beer and some sandwiches. I offer this to you as an example of another opportunity that you may like to take to enable you to start a self-sustaining pro- fessional activity that, if these two examples are any- thing to go by, will prove itself by the eagerness of the members to conclude one meeting by agreeing to the date for the next.

10.2 Universities I cannot let this opportunity pass without mentioning my involvement, as an industrialist, with universities. I will not go into any more detail about the benefits of contacts through a well-managed research programme as I referred to it when describing the Autoscan stitcher.

I was fortunate to be invited to join industrial/ academic steering panels for MSc courses at Cranfield, in part of the university now called the School of Indus- trial and Manufacturing Science, and also at De Mont- fort University, where I have been honoured to receive a senior industrial fellowship which makes me an hon- orary visiting professor in the School of Engineering and Manufacture. Through occasional meetings in both of these educational institutions, I have learnt a lot. I understand that involvement of industrialists with uni- versitia was out of fashion for a number of years but is back in now, and in my opinion this will be to the benefit of all involved.

11 AGENDA FOR THE PROFESSION

The early part of 1995 6nds the country facing many contradictory indicators. The pound is weak. Unem- ployment is falling. The various surveys of industrial and personal confidence indicate that some people and

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businesses are more optimistic while others feel more threatened.

Employment in manufacturing industry has risen in recent months, albeit by a tiny amount and after decades of decline. Compared with 15 years ago, employment in the production and construction sector has fallen from 7.9 to 5.3 million while the service sector has grown from 13.2 to 15.5 million (5). The march of new technology is reducing jobs in parts of the service sector, and I am sure that the trend will continue. New jobs are being announced in manufacturing while others are still being lost. Many of the new jobs are with foreign companies setting up plants in the United Kingdom with the benefits of access to Europe, rela- tively low labour costs and an excellent infrastructure.

Our manufacturing base has been eroded, as is clear from the trade figures for 1994 showing a continuing large deficit in this sector, although the overall national position is of almost achieving a balance of trade against a background of the national economy growing by 3.9 per cent in the year, the biggest rise for six years. Manufacturing output is at a 20 year high in some sectors but, overall, is just about holding steady year on year. In the trade figures, earnings from overseas oper- ations of British-owned businesses made a good contri- bution to the balance of trade, and there must be some credit here for our professional engineers and managers who have responsibilities for overseas operations of British companies.

Can we be satisfied that we have a strong enough manufacturing base to sustain our economy and create the additional jobs we need? I think not.

Are we doing enough to strengthen our manufac- turing base? Well, we are doing something. With the publication of the recent white papers on realizing our potential and competitiveness, the government has clearly acknowledged the importance of manufacturing. The conclusions of the first foresight exercises have just been published. Science Week has, for a time at least, enthused large numbers of our young people. The broadcast media did something to support Science Week, but, on average through the year, its technology- based output falls short of the same kind of material broadcast in Japan. We really need a clear focus on the importance, the challenge and the satisfaction of working in science, engineering and manufacturing every week, in the media and in government, if we are to overcome the preferences that young people have to study subjects further towards the arts end of the spec- trum. Years ago, it may have made everybody feel good to see a few able young people supported by wealthy patrons to study and be creative in such subjects, but today we cannot expect to extend national patronage to all who would prefer to follow such courses. Equally, I hope we have dispelled the view that innovation and design are, like good art and music, things that we should have simply as a matter of national pride. Inno- vation and design are essential for the long-term main- tenance of our living standards. Should we take comfort from the fact that national R&D expenditure is report- ed, by the Central Statistical Ofice, to have increased from 10.9 billion in 1992 to 11.7 billion in 1993 (excluding military R&D of about 2.1 billion in both years)? It is another move in the right direction but falls short of our competitor nations where governments Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

take a much more pro-active role in ensuring that their manufacturing industries have the technology and equipment to be fully world competitive. My visits to newly industrializing nations have convinced me that, although their economies have some way to go to catch us up, they are gaining on us rapidly and they will not slow their pace of improvement as they draw level with us; therefore, relatively, we will decline.

Our education system is under fire. The Engineering Council concludes that first year university engineering students are weaker in maths that was the case ten years ago. Companies testing potential apprentices have found very low standards of maths. Another survey has shown that it is more difficult to get good A level grades in maths and science than in arts courses and some have consequently proposed to reduce the standards in maths and science. Meanwhile, bodies responsible for A levels in Asian countries which use the British system, but claim to have maintained standards over the last decade, report that our present A levels rank at only 70 per cent of theirs. The introduction of a starred A grade in GCSE is another sign of falling standards. Even the standards of some of our degrees are being questioned. We cannot let our standards slip and expect to stay competitive. If education standards are taken more seri- ously in countries that we compete with internationally, they will win in the long run.

At last, through the initiative of Sir John Fairclough and the follow-on work of teams of members of the Engineering Council and the Institutions, the engineer- ing profession is set to form a new relationship and to come together to present a united front to the nation while maintaining the excellence of the different special- ist areas represented by the individual institutions. We must make this new relationship work well and visibly so that we contribute to addressing all these issues and increase the national emphasis on the importance of our technology and manufacturing. We cannot hide from the fact that the engineering institutions have some responsibility for the present lack of national emphasis on this, and if fragmentation of the profession has been partly to blame, we now have the means to correct the situation. Some good teamworking of groups of engin- eering institutions, both among themselves and with other organizations and government, is what we must put in place to make this a reality. This, as well as ensuring that this Institution achieves greater recogni- tion within its own part of the engineering spectrum, will be a major theme of my presidential year. I will be encouraging young members to play a larger and more effective part in the Institution, keeping an emphasis on the high standard of qualification and ensuring that the Institutions Continuing Professional Development activities are fully developed. I will also be adding emphasis to the provision, by the Institution, of valu- able services to other organizations and people outside its qualified membership as well as those within it, both at home and abroad. Working in teams and providing or ensuring proper leadership will be the means.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have mentioned just a few names of people I have worked with in my career and I extend my thanks to them and to all my other fellow team members over the

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS USING TEAMWORK 345

years at BU, USM Texon and Rearsby, where my par- ticular thanks are to Ivor Vaughan for letting me use Rearsby material in this paper.

I must also include Institution members and staff who have encouraged me and worked with me in my endeavours in several parts of the board and committee structure, especially those who pushed me to take bigger challenges and supported me in the early days after I accepted them. You will be aware, from the annual report for 1994, that our immediate past Presi- dent, Brian Kent, has promoted some presidential team- work and I am most grateful to him for keeping me fully informed and directly involved so that I can take up the position knowing a great deal about the current issues and be ready to grasp the baton and run. The second deputy has been involved too, although to a lesser extent. I will follow Mr Kents example and involve my deputies so that our team can be very effec- tive.

As my year as President starts, I owe particular thanks to my colleagues on the board of USM Texon and my staff and colleagues in the Company for sup- porting me up to and through this very important year.

I also thank my family for encouragement and toler- ance of the time that my Institutional involvement has taken. My greatest thanks are to my new wife, Sylvia, who married me just two months ago knowing that, while we can share some of the events of the year, I will inevitably be away from home and from her more than either of us would choose.

REFERENCES 1 Cooper, B. P. Shoe machinery. Proc. Instn Mech. Engrs, 1937, 136,

13. 2 Kestell, T. A. Evolution and design of machinery primarily used in

the manufacture of boots and shoes. Proc. lnstn Mech. Engrs, 1963-

3 Lord, M., Fo~~lston, J. and Smith, P. Technical evaluation of a CAD system for orthopaedic shoe-upper design. Proc. Instn Mech. Engrs,

4 Tout, N. R., Reedmen, D. C., Preece, C. and Simmons, J. E. L. Intelligent automated assembly of the upper parts of shoes. Pro- ceedings of IMechE Conference on Mechatronics, Cambridge, 12-13 September 1990, paper C419/028, pp. 103-108 (Mechanical Engineering Publications, London).

4,178(1), 625-660.

Part H, 1991,2M(H2), 109-115.

5 Employment Gazette, March 1995.

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