British Manufacturing!

[EINSIGN]

Gwagon111 said:

The downsides are fairly evident, from films such as I robot, 2000 a space odyssey, and lost in space.

Inevitable: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...

[johnfm]

GeraldSmith said:

johnfm said:

Of those cars, how many were made by UK companies?

What is a UK company? Is it where the head office is located or the stock exchange it is listed on or the nationality of the majority of the shareholders? It's a pretty meaningless concept, the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

I'd say Nissan is not a UK car maker.

[Bing o]

freecar said:

Why be shocked, what about all the people who work in finance, retail and the like, not many robots there.

Finance? This will be the industry that has automated or offshored back-office jobs since the early noughties then?

Anyway, we should be looking at how countries like Korea went from 3rd world to first world in a relatively short time frame. Koreans, like Germans, drive Korean made cars, buy korean made phones and TVs etc. They are also the biggest manufacturer of ships I think (overtaking the greeks). Unfortunately, Korean firms expect their workers to do 12 hour days ('bally bally' they call it), so how that will go down in the days of the Working Time Directive....

Edited by Bing o on Monday 16th January 04:28

[Cyder]

johnfm said:

GeraldSmith said:

johnfm said:

Of those cars, how many were made by UK companies?

What is a UK company? Is it where the head office is located or the stock exchange it is listed on or the nationality of the majority of the shareholders? It's a pretty meaningless concept, the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

I'd say Nissan is not a UK car maker.

It's a blurred line though isn't it when things like Qashqai were styled, designed and built here by (mostly) British folk.
Most of the parts used are sourced from within the UK/Europe as well. And I'd hazard a guess that a fair few of the company shareholders are British too.

These days it's very rare to be able to pin a lot of companies down to a single country.

[elster]

johnfm said:

GeraldSmith said:

johnfm said:

Of those cars, how many were made by UK companies?

What is a UK company? Is it where the head office is located or the stock exchange it is listed on or the nationality of the majority of the shareholders? It's a pretty meaningless concept, the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

I'd say Nissan is not a UK car maker.

As much as most UK companies, they are foreign owned. That doesn't mean the manufacturing that is done in this country is not UK manufacturing.

We do still manufacture a significant amount, and more than the Koreans. In fact we do sell to the Chinese, Koreans, Indians. Where do you think they get their high end technology equipment from?

[Use Psychology]

Bing o said:

Finance? This will be the industry that has automated or offshored back-office jobs since the early noughties then?

Anyway, we should be looking at how countries like Korea went from 3rd world to first world in a relatively short time frame. Koreans, like Germans, drive Korean made cars, buy korean made phones and TVs etc. They are also the biggest manufacturer of ships I think (overtaking the greeks). Unfortunately, Korean firms expect their workers to do 12 hour days ('bally bally' they call it), so how that will go down in the days of the Working Time Directive....

Edited by Bing o on Monday 16th January 04:28

so if they expect 12 hour work days, the question that immediately presents itself is: are they really a first world society?

[Digga]

EINSIGN said:

Digga said:

In answer to the OP's question and the matter of robots, one of our firms builds digger buckets amongst other things (hence my PH handle) and, long story short, robot friendly the process aint.

A lot of firms have tried and gone bust to do these particular bits with robots. Perhaps when seam detection moves to the next level it may work, but for now it's good news for us and our welders: http://www.digbits.co.uk/excavator_buckets.htm

Interesting, so what do you feel is the issue for what seems a relatively simple part to make?

Siomple parts but very (almost infinitely) variable specifications.

There are at least 20 mainstream manufacturers selling excavators into the UK market alone and very few of them uise common attachment fittings. As we make custom as well as 'standard' bucket widths (which the cheap 'n' cheerful guys shipping from the Far East or Eastern Europe can't possibly offer) in order to cater for the increasing variations required by architects and plannin regs, we have a huge variety of jobs.

All I know is that, at present, our engineering manager (whose previous firm bought robots and found them to be useless) is constantly reviewing what's out there but does not see any cost benefit over using good, skilled welder fabricating staff. He's by no means averse to technology and automation and has added two new CNC machine tools in the last 12 months: http://www.digbits.co.uk/Engineering_Plant_List.ht...

I know in the past edge/seam detection has been an issue, although it appears to be better now. I also know that of our UK competitors who have tried to use robots for this task, most have failled. If anyone can prove to us otherwise...

As for SME specific industrial and manufaturing investment in general, the UK does seem to lag other markets. I could never figure out how Italian firms financed all their kit (perhaps we're now finding out with Unicredit!) and wodnered what incentives or tax breaks were offered. I think the UK hasn't helped itself by constantly shifting incentives and also with over-prescriptive government grant schemes. Major investments are often a mutli-year project, requiring short to medium term cost benefit analysis, prior to any investment decision. Governments chop and change their approach too fast for there to be stability and grant schemes are largely unfair (pandering to the same names) and inefficient.

[thinfourth2]

GeraldSmith said:

the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

What they want to hear is that the UK is a st country that can't make anything and we have the highest unemployment in the world and our workers are the worst at everything and we export less then any other country in the world.

Its frankly fking pathetic

[GeraldSmith]

johnfm said:

GeraldSmith said:

johnfm said:

Of those cars, how many were made by UK companies?

What is a UK company? Is it where the head office is located or the stock exchange it is listed on or the nationality of the majority of the shareholders? It's a pretty meaningless concept, the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

I'd say Nissan is not a UK car maker.

What would you say they are, Japanese?

Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd designs and builds cars here with a lot of British employees and British suppliers. Obviously they are part of Nissan, less obviously Nissan is 43.4% owned by Renault and in turn owns 15% of Renault. Nissan and Renault own Renault Nissan BV which is a Dutch company that provides strategic management to both countries. Carlos Ghosn (who is Brazilian of Lebanese descent) heads the alliance board and the Nissan board. The rest of Nissan and Renault is owned by....who knows?

The point is that companies are international these days, even on the small scale I operate I own a company in Australia, it employs Australians, rents offices in Australia and pays tax in Australia. But it's owned by me and I'm not Australian. So what is it, British or Australian?

[EINSIGN]

thinfourth2 said:

GeraldSmith said:

the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

What they want to hear is that the UK is a st country that can't make anything and we have the highest unemployment in the world and our workers are the worst at everything and we export less then any other country in the world.

Its frankly fking pathetic

Exactly, and it takes a few positive people to start changing this negative perception!

A couple of points:

German manufacturing is no better than ours, its the "perception" that products manufactured in Germany are better than everyone elses. A lot of German companies are exploiting this.

British manufacturing can be great again, but only if the mentality of people in this country change. Service, IT and paper shuffling industries only grow from the need to service companies that make things!

I have personally closed our small factory in China, and returned all manufactuing back to the UK. for the lower volume items we can manufacture here for the same price, with far better control and quality.

I am attending a trade show in China this year with plans to sell our products into China. There are huge opportunities to make money from their growth.

Get your heads out of the sand and back into your workshops!

[Digga]

EINSIGN said:

German manufacturing is no better than ours, its the "perception" that products manufactured in Germany are better than everyone elses. A lot of German companies are exploiting this.

British manufacturing can be great again, but only if the mentality of people in this country change.

Totally agree and would say that already, in many industries, the UK is still considered a world leader. Everywhere, that is, except in the mdeia at home.

[EINSIGN]

Digga said:

Siomple parts but very (almost infinitely) variable specifications.

There are at least 20 mainstream manufacturers selling excavators into the UK market alone and very few of them uise common attachment fittings. As we make custom as well as 'standard' bucket widths (which the cheap 'n' cheerful guys shipping from the Far East or Eastern Europe can't possibly offer) in order to cater for the increasing variations required by architects and plannin regs, we have a huge variety of jobs.

All I know is that, at present, our engineering manager (whose previous firm bought robots and found them to be useless) is constantly reviewing what's out there but does not see any cost benefit over using good, skilled welder fabricating staff. He's by no means averse to technology and automation and has added two new CNC machine tools in the last 12 months: http://www.digbits.co.uk/Engineering_Plant_List.ht...

I know in the past edge/seam detection has been an issue, although it appears to be better now. I also know that of our UK competitors who have tried to use robots for this task, most have failled. If anyone can prove to us otherwise...

As for SME specific industrial and manufaturing investment in general, the UK does seem to lag other markets. I could never figure out how Italian firms financed all their kit (perhaps we're now finding out with Unicredit!) and wodnered what incentives or tax breaks were offered. I think the UK hasn't helped itself by constantly shifting incentives and also with over-prescriptive government grant schemes. Major investments are often a mutli-year project, requiring short to medium term cost benefit analysis, prior to any investment decision. Governments chop and change their approach too fast for there to be stability and grant schemes are largely unfair (pandering to the same names) and inefficient.

Interesting comments but to make something clear, any robot or automated machine is only as good as the human who set it up in the first place. A robot (a machine) cannot possibly be at fault in your example, only the implementation plan and strategies for how to deal with variable components, or the wrong kit considered for the task.

[DonkeyApple]

EINSIGN said:

Exactly, and it takes a few positive people to start changing this negative perception!

A couple of points:

German manufacturing is no better than ours, its the "perception" that products manufactured in Germany are better than everyone elses. A lot of German companies are exploiting this.

British manufacturing can be great again, but only if the mentality of people in this country change. Service, IT and paper shuffling industries only grow from the need to service companies that make things!

I have personally closed our small factory in China, and returned all manufactuing back to the UK. for the lower volume items we can manufacture here for the same price, with far better control and quality.

I am attending a trade show in China this year with plans to sell our products into China. There are huge opportunities to make money from their growth.

Get your heads out of the sand and back into your workshops!

Germany's key an also the key to the manufacturers building over a million cars a year in the UK is that they have cut out the lazy, entitled and incompetant British workman.

And the same with all our own manufacturing. We did it by going specialised, going small or outsourcing so as to avoid the unions and the worthless little sts who have a tendency to cause trouble and ruin it for everyone else.

The problem is that it was easier to shut these businesses down altogether than mechanise them and deal with the political and financial fallout.

But enough time has passed and we do need to look at what other markets want and if we can tool up a factory to go and take that order we should but it will need government to underwrite the financing as no private market will lend otherwise.

[Cyder]

DonkeyApple said:

Germany's key an also the key to the manufacturers building over a million cars a year in the UK is that they have cut out the lazy, entitled and incompetant British workman.

And the same with all our own manufacturing. We did it by going specialised, going small or outsourcing so as to avoid the unions and the worthless little sts who have a tendency to cause trouble and ruin it for everyone else.

Are you saying that the car manufacturing plants in the UK have got rid of the lazy British workforce? If so, with respect you are talking total bks.

4500 are employed at Nissan in Sunderland and in the time I've spent up there I'd say at least 90% are locals of a British origin. In fact of the guys I've spoken to on the line I'm not sure I've ever spoken to a foreign person.

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeon's further it is Europe's most efficient passenger vehicle production line.

Again, I don't know the demographic of the other production lines in the UK, but I shouldn't imagine they're much different.

[randlemarcus]

Cyder said:

DonkeyApple said:

Germany's key an also the key to the manufacturers building over a million cars a year in the UK is that they have cut out the lazy, entitled and incompetant British workman.

And the same with all our own manufacturing. We did it by going specialised, going small or outsourcing so as to avoid the unions and the worthless little sts who have a tendency to cause trouble and ruin it for everyone else.

Are you saying that the car manufacturing plants in the UK have got rid of the lazy British workforce? If so, with respect you are talking total bks.

4500 are employed at Nissan in Sunderland and in the time I've spent up there I'd say at least 90% are locals of a British origin. In fact of the guys I've spoken to on the line I'm not sure I've ever spoken to a foreign person.

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeon's further it is Europe's most efficient passenger vehicle production line.

Again, I don't know the demographic of the other production lines in the UK, but I shouldn't imagine they're much different.

Just a guess, but when you are at Nissan, how many of the workers there were working? If "most of them", then I'd say DonkeyApple has it about right? My read on his post was that Nissan now is not remotely resembling BL or Vauxhall in the Seventies, where dubious union activity really did no favours for the longevity prospects of the plant/company.

[Cyder]

randlemarcus said:

Cyder said:

DonkeyApple said:

Germany's key an also the key to the manufacturers building over a million cars a year in the UK is that they have cut out the lazy, entitled and incompetant British workman.

And the same with all our own manufacturing. We did it by going specialised, going small or outsourcing so as to avoid the unions and the worthless little sts who have a tendency to cause trouble and ruin it for everyone else.

Are you saying that the car manufacturing plants in the UK have got rid of the lazy British workforce? If so, with respect you are talking total bks.

4500 are employed at Nissan in Sunderland and in the time I've spent up there I'd say at least 90% are locals of a British origin. In fact of the guys I've spoken to on the line I'm not sure I've ever spoken to a foreign person.

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeon's further it is Europe's most efficient passenger vehicle production line.

Again, I don't know the demographic of the other production lines in the UK, but I shouldn't imagine they're much different.

Just a guess, but when you are at Nissan, how many of the workers there were working? If "most of them", then I'd say DonkeyApple has it about right? My read on his post was that Nissan now is not remotely resembling BL or Vauxhall in the Seventies, where dubious union activity really did no favours for the longevity prospects of the plant/company.

Yeah the work rate is high, I think I read somewhere that despite the plant having a union there has never been any time lost to industrial action.

I guess it comes down to a completely different way of managing things compared to BL/Vauxhall in the olden days.

If I read Donkeyapples post wrong I apologise, it's a Monday morning thing!

[Digga]

EINSIGN said:

Digga said:

Stuff.

Interesting comments but to make something clear, any robot or automated machine is only as good as the human who set it up in the first place. A robot (a machine) cannot possibly be at fault in your example, only the implementation plan and strategies for how to deal with variable components, or the wrong kit considered for the task.

Possibly so. But with a very variable demand fopr such products, we've always felt that the 'right' kit would be simply too expensive to justify.

[DonkeyApple]

Cyder said:

DonkeyApple said:

Germany's key an also the key to the manufacturers building over a million cars a year in the UK is that they have cut out the lazy, entitled and incompetant British workman.

And the same with all our own manufacturing. We did it by going specialised, going small or outsourcing so as to avoid the unions and the worthless little sts who have a tendency to cause trouble and ruin it for everyone else.

Are you saying that the car manufacturing plants in the UK have got rid of the lazy British workforce? If so, with respect you are talking total bks.

4500 are employed at Nissan in Sunderland and in the time I've spent up there I'd say at least 90% are locals of a British origin. In fact of the guys I've spoken to on the line I'm not sure I've ever spoken to a foreign person.

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeon's further it is Europe's most efficient passenger vehicle production line.

Again, I don't know the demographic of the other production lines in the UK, but I shouldn't imagine they're much different.

What I am saying is that they have found a workable solution to handle them. So firstly they have used automation to remove as many of them as possible and secondly they have used the threat of loss of earnings sufficiently in order to handle any remainders and thirdly they run to a competant and efficient schedule/program.

You can see when you look at say JLR that the product is still not as well built as the Japanese or Germans manage but a lot of that can be pinned nowadays on the fact that companies like JLR have a fraction of the budget to design and fully test the product so many of the product issues are more to do with that than actual assembly. But the product JLR produces today is a million miles away from what Leyland were churning out and the difference lies mostly in the handling of the work force, shrinking it down so each head count is easier to track, installing a management structure that is competant enough to manage and automating as much as possible so there is less reliance on human variances in production.

Nissan as far as I am aware is mostly an assembly line with bulk parts shipped in and then stuck together on the line with each line have extremely stringent quality control? A million lightyears away from the old days of massive head count and lax management leading to lots of farting about by line workers and a general mallaise that resulted in high variances in the quality of the end product.

One of the most important changes that has been brought to the car manufacturing industry in the UK is the understanding of group dynamics and efficiencies. The fact that a team of 100 can work more efficiently than a team of 1000 as the smaller number leads to more networking and social connections and inter personel responsibilities whereas the larger number is too large for these social connections per se and results in the ability of pockets of incompetance to form, fester and grow.

50 years ago companies like Gore Tex realised this and put it into action, subdividing the firm each time the workforce reach something like 250. And in recent years there have been enormous studies due to things like Facebook as to how many social connections a human can typically manage etc. Interestingly, the military worked this out hundreds of years ago.

If you look at the lines of most modern car manufacturers you can see this subtly in action.

It took foreign ownership, foreign practices to bring this change about in the UK car industry but the whole point of my view is that there is no reason why, seeing as we do this for the high end production that we cannot bring this to home grown, low end production just as Germany and many other countries have/do.

Again, we could look at the lightbulb industry. A basic product which has total and continuous global demand. In the UK the manufacturers are mainly smallish firms who make bespoke and specialist bulbs. In Germany you have firms like Osram who build millions and millions of bog standard bulbs and ship all over the planet. They can only do this because they invested in the machines with production tollerances infinitely finer than any human and thus not only churn out vast numbers more quickly but have a far high quality. Any one of our own firms could have at any point over the decades tooled up to do the same but either couldn't raise the funding or just didn't have the mentality and just opted to downsize as it lost mass market share to overseas and end up in the dead end cul de sac of 'specialist' production.

Britain just hasn't adapted to our change of status from the trade of Empire to going out there and forging trade in mass produced items. Manufacturing in the West has for decades been about dropping head count and increasing automation for better quality, decreased production times and increased production levels but we didn't do this in many of our traditional industries we just chose to shrink, retract and end up as specialists or kapput.

[F i F]

EINSIGN said:

thinfourth2 said:

GeraldSmith said:

the point is that we have a very successful motor industry in the country but that's good news, so not something that people seem to want to hear.

What they want to hear is that the UK is a st country that can't make anything and we have the highest unemployment in the world and our workers are the worst at everything and we export less then any other country in the world.

Its frankly fking pathetic

Exactly, and it takes a few positive people to start changing this negative perception!

A couple of points:

German manufacturing is no better than ours, its the "perception" that products manufactured in Germany are better than everyone elses. A lot of German companies are exploiting this.

British manufacturing can be great again, but only if the mentality of people in this country change. Service, IT and paper shuffling industries only grow from the need to service companies that make things!

I have personally closed our small factory in China, and returned all manufactuing back to the UK. for the lower volume items we can manufacture here for the same price, with far better control and quality.

I am attending a trade show in China this year with plans to sell our products into China. There are huge opportunities to make money from their growth.

Get your heads out of the sand and back into your workshops!

Well said gents!!! Completely agree.

The only thing I would add to thinfourth2's mini rant is that this attitude and wanting to hear this message is a manifestation of the wanting to justify things as "It's all somebody else's fault!" and to support the cry "It's so unfair!"

As said, utterly pathetic and frustrating to those with drive.

[Digga]

DonkeyApple said:

Any one of our own firms could have at any point over the decades tooled up to do the same but either couldn't raise the funding or just didn't have the mentality and just opted to downsize...

Short termsism; wioth finance, with government initiatives, with the managment of many plcs.

Government initiative mania, chopping and chaging delivery methods (DTI, Business Link) and trying to pick and choose winners and regions has been a huge waste of resource. Whenever I've read the regional business rags, it's all the same fat faces at the same merry-go-round of sham meetings and dinners. This was, of course, largely a product of the prescribed delivery methods of the EU grant system. Say no more.

Best option would have been to keep a consistent tax write-down on investments.