Penetrating international markets

My ambition is to see young engineers emerging from our universities and colleges better equipped to serve manufacturing industry than their 20th century predecessor

In October Soundbites Tim Kings reference to Japan is absolutely appropriate. After losing the military Second World War they won the post-war peace by penetrating international markets with high quality products at competitive prices. With American advice and assistance they developed a unique industrial strategy embracing practical skills in quality management and statistical engineering. This was accomplished by JUSE, the Japanese Union of Science and Engineering. The whole of science and technology under one hat!

In contrast British industry suffered (and still does) the handicap of depending on a multitude of professional institutions with little national coordination. In 1957 the Royal Statistical Society published an article showing that conventional engineering formulae used by engineers designing new products could be converted into statistical formulae predicting variability of performance and identifying dominant sources of variability. In this way quality problems could be anticipated and resolved before launching into full scale production. But this was ignored b y the twentieth century UK engineering profession. And in the meantime UK industry suffered heavy losses to Japanese competition.

Then in 1995 the 1957 article was identified by a Scandinavian engineer at an American research establishment as important and much neglected, anticipating Japanese developments by more than a decade. This led to statistical engineering methods being demonstrated at the Royal Academy of Engineering in the 1999 Engineering Manufacturing Lecture on the theme of “Engineering for Corporate Success in the New Millennium”.

At the age of ninety-four my ambition now is to live long enough to see new generations of young engineers emerging from our universities and colleges better equipped to serve manufacturing industry than their twentieth century predecessors. But will the academic establishment pay attention to my argument?

S J Morrison, Kirkella, East Yorks

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