A New Kind Of Product Quality Through Analysis In Britain

There was a time, not so long ago that the label Made in Britain was more of a warning sign than the badge of quality it has come to represent today

. Up until the 1980s, whole rafts of British products were considered poorly finished and unreliable. We are not talking Saville Row suits or Bentley limousines here but mass produced goods like saloon cars and domestic appliances. Products manufactured in the UK were all too often ruined by shoddy workmanship and very basic levels of quality control. Consumers were often resigned to their fate and tried to make light of it by jokingly referring to being landed with something made on a Friday afternoon or with a Dagenham Dustbin Ford car.

The two things which combined simultaneously to end this nightmare were

A step-change in the quality of management

Legislation reforming union imposed restrictive practices

After the dustmans strike of February 1979, the country realised that it really had reached rock bottom and was ready to embrace fundamental Thatcherite reform which revolutionised attitudes in the workplace and ushered in much more responsible and professional practices in all levels of industry.

Nowhere was this revolution more conspicuous than in the car manufacturing sector. The standard bearer was probably Nissan who in 1986 built a new plant in Sunderland which had always been a shipbuilding rather than a motor manufacturing centre. Today it is recognised as the most productive plant in Europe.

That proved to be just the start. In 2012, the British car industry is now building more cars than in the 1970s following the arrival of other firms like Toyota, BMW and Tata who have all contributed to the shake-up.

Of course, this remarkable turnaround is not just all about properly trained managers and curtailed union practices. The owners of todays car plants ensure that the right levels of investment are maintained so that state of the art automation is used to help workers on the shop floor and that finished cars are more reliable than they ever were in the recent past.

In order to optimise quality and reliability, the manufacturers have been closely involved with the UKs car component makers and have insisted on the introduction of much tighter tolerances and rigorous testing via such modern techniques as product failure analysis which aims to pinpoint the likelihood of faults before they occur.

If someone had said in the 1960s that, half a century later, overseas buyers would be queuing up to grab the output from Halewood and Cowley, he would doubtless have been frogmarched off by the men in white coats.

by: Brendan Wilde

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