Saturday, June 21, 2008 Batuhan: Band-aid waiting for a cut By Allan S.B. Batuhan Foreign Exchange
I REMEMBER well the time.
I was then a young expatriate-manager-in training, spending my first few weeks with my new employer at their flagship factory in Paisley, Scotland.
To put it mildly, I was overwhelmed. The factory was huge and sprawling, housing over 10,000 people at one time in its history.
It had been there since the turn of the 20th century, and was at one time the centre of sewing thread production for the whole world.
Now while sewing thread as a product may look as ubiquitous as the everyday clothes that you and I wear, its manufacturing was a pretty cumbersome and complex process, it makes modern electronics assembly lines look like Lego stacking by comparison.
To get something from the raw cotton fiber to the finished product takes a lot of processing and transforming, it’s a wonder how turn-of-the-century manufacturing facilities were even able to cope with it.
And not only did they cope with the task, they managed to do it very well, indeed.
This particular factory in Paisley (yes, that’s where the print pattern’s name originates from) was reputed to be among the best in the world when it came to making the product.
Although I was training to become a finance manager, British (and most European) companies are quite keen on having absolutely everyone learn about the business from the ground up.
In fact in that company, the group managing director was always very proud to claim that as a young man, he, too, swept the floors of some of their factories around the world.
It was a tradition which ensured that everyone in the company knew how everything worked.
One of my first assignments was to assist the factory industrial engineers in implementing British Standard (BS) 5750, which at the time was quite popular among the manufacturing sector in the United Kingdom (UK).
Basically, it was a quality assurance seal, ensuring that the processes and outputs were consistent and repeatable.
Given the quality revolution at the time, spawned by the huge strides made by Japanese companies which were conquering the world with their goods, absolutely everyone was looking to latch on to something to stem the tide—and BS 5750 was one of the tools in their arsenal.
BS 5750, of course, is familiar to a lot us, except by a different name.
This BSI standard is the genesis of the ISO 9000+ series, which have become as commonplace today as Lego blocks in a child’s playroom.
The Swiss-based standards organization, not having the mass to undertake all the standards-creating work all on its own, relies on its member national organisations (such as the BSI in the UK, ANSI in the United States of Aermica and DIN in Germany) to come up with certain standards, which it would then adopt (some with minor modifications, some straight off the page) as ISOs. BS 5750 was one from among the latter category.
The factory was quite keen to undertake the project, very proud as it was of its manufacturing excellence—a reputation earned over years of tradition and history.
Scotland’s place in textile lore was almost sacrosanct, with the country having made famous such common apparel terms as the Paisley prints, the Argyll socks, the tartan patterns, and the Harris tweeds.
Such pride of place gave them the confidence to expect that whatever it was they were doing must be of the highest class and quality, compared to anywhere else in the world.
