MANUFACTURING AND BUSINESS CHANGE ……. A REVOLUTION
Change and revolution
in manufacturing, engineering and business education are words that Australian business people, governments and academics have had trouble with understanding and applying. However, our competitive situation is dire.Traditional techniques will not work well enough any longer if we are to equip our managers and engineers of today and our managers and engineers of the future (our students of today) with the tools to enable Australia to become competitive in the local and overseas market place.
Small changes are not good enough; we need to adopt more radical approaches in both management philosophy and techniques. We need a "revolution" in our thinking, we need to be flexible, we need to be willing to change and above all we need to listen and communicate with all levels of our educational institutions, manufacturing enterprises and governments. In other words we need a team approach in educating our leaders of industry and business now and for the future.
Australia needs a manufacturing sector but what are our governments (Federal, State and Local) doing about it? Not very much at the moment! Money is being allocated for other areas and away from Health and Education. Education budgets are being cut to a point where student numbers are in decline. In fact education budgets are lower in most cases than they were five years ago. Trained manufacturing and engineering educators are being asked to take redundancies so who will train our manufacturing workers and engineers of the future?
Our governments’ need to act now before manufacturing enterprises in this country go into virtual extinction. We need to replace negative thinking and an aging workforce of managers, engineers and trades people, etc. Without continuous technical education we will run out of qualified, experienced and correctly trained manufacturing people.
The following is adapted from Donald Horne’s book "The Lucky Country" (1964):
"Australia mainly lives on other people’s ideas and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. A nation more concerned with styles of life than with achievement has managed to achieve what may be the most evenly prosperous society in the world. It has done this in a social climate largely hostile to originality and the desire for excellence (except in sport) and in which there is less and less acclamation of hard work."
Strong words, maybe but the "she will be right mate" attitude has been a great part of our problem. We do not encourage innovation and Australian inventions. Unfortunately, in the main, our inventors have had to go overseas to develop and produce their unique designs.
Let’s take a look at the following list:
Yes they are all Australian inventions. However, many of them are now in overseas companies’ hands due to the fact that Governments and private industry would not sponsor the development of them in Australia. This apathy is appalling, we have the talent and skills to produce any item (well at the moment) we like but for some reason we seem not to want to work towards excellence in manufacturing and business operations.
For all our innovations, most of out inventions have not stayed in Australian hands or fuelled wealth-producing industries. We have been stymied by lack of confidence and a belief that things from overseas are better.
Contrast this state of affairs with Sweden, a country smaller than Australia but processing the self-assurance to challenge the Japanese, West German and American dominance of industry and technology and commercialise their ideas themselves. Investment in their youth and training is matched by their investment in space age technology and quality management techniques and philosophy.
Sweden is not just home to Volvo and IKEA furniture, but to jet fighters that can take off from roadways, locomotives which are bought by the Queensland government and new and more flexible robots. ASEA Brown Boveri is now the second largest manufacturer of robots in the world.
Yet even as long ago as 1980 in Australia the Myers Report suggested we could not hope to influence the use of new technologies on the world scene. Dependence on primary products now means we have to sell twice as much mining and agricultural produce to receive the same relative income as we had in 1954.
We should be cringing at the way we have arrogantly regarded Asian nations. Today, instead of supplying technology to Asian markets we are supplying labour to make Japanese and Korean cars; is this a sign of a third world country in the making? This is a sobering thought. If we don’t get our act together and lose our complacent attitudes we could end up as the "poor white people of Asia" unless we change and change now!
Although yesterday’s methods were quite successful, they are now very outdated. The main requirements for successful use of the so called newer techniques are willingness to changed entrenched attitudes, coupled with patience, time and above all, a commitment from top management to make them work.
Total Quality Management (TQM) challenges educators to review their traditional approach to training and educating and to embrace a new set of values involving a progressive reduction in the production costs and improvement in the quality of industrial and business education. These changes, however, cannot be made overnight.
TQM challenges manufacturing and business enterprises too. Some customers in Australia are being turned off, especially in the service industries, and turned off, not by price but by apathy, carelessness, and downright discourtesy. Our customers are turning to foreign products because our managers and statisticians are willing to accept errors as random necessities, something to be lived with. We have, in the past, made excuses rather than progress. We have thrived on chaos for far too long. An attitude of good enough is not good enough today, and if we do not change, the gravestones marking our industrial plants will read "We thought we were good enough".
If we don’t reverse this apathy towards manufacturing and manufacturing education and training in the very near future then in as little as 5 years time we will be hiring educators and trained engineers from overseas as we did in the 1960’s and 1970’s to fill the demand. We must look to the future by planning now. The days of fire fighting problems, short-term thinking and "she will be right mate" are long gone.
Success in manufacturing and business today requires that Australian managers match overseas standards and become internationally competitive in terms of cost, quality and delivery. If we don’t educate we die and that I’m afraid is what will happen to our manufacturing sector if we just do nothing. I don’t know how long it will take but eventually if we keep making excuses and continuing, as we are then our manufacturing industry will die.
I am optimistic about the future of Australian manufacturing and business if we can change but we must change and change now; not just keep putting it in "the too hard basket". We have the tools, the people; the techniques so let us thrive on excellence rather than chaos. It is no good starting a new millennium if we do not change our attitudes, philosophy and techniques and that means governments investing money for the future of our manufacturing industry. We cannot wait any longer; if we do then our manufacturing industry just won’t be around in ten years time.
Richard Baker
TO MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING COURSEWORK