329

Presidential Address

Engineering success using teamwork

F Christopher Price, BSc, DMS, FEng, FIMechE
Director, Product and Process Development, USM Texon Limited, Leicester
The incoming President reviews his career which has primarily been in the development of shoemaking machinery and materials with
British United Shoe Machinery Limited, subsequently U S M Texon Limited, and also in the automobile components industry with
Rearsby Automotive Limited. He focuses on the process of using teamwork in achieving successes in these businesses and describes two
recent successes in highly sophisticated shoemaking machinery-a family of computer-controlled machines used in the process of
bonding soles to shoes and an automatic stitching machine using an integrated vision system to identify and locate workpieces. He
reflects on his involvement in the Institution running almost continuouslyfrom student membership to his election as the youngest
President for 100 years and recommends active involvement as a good contributor to personal and professional development, especially
for younger engineers.
At a time when the new relationship within the engineering profession is being crystallized, Mr Price discusses the opportunities and
challenges for the profession in the light of the ongoing need for strengthening of engineering and manufacturing in the United
Kingdom. He concludes that progress has to be achieved by effective teamworking, both within the Institution, with other engineering
institutions, with government and with other key organizations in the wider community.
K e y words: teamwork, engineering success, shoemaking machines, automation, safety critical components
1 INTRODUCTION

As is traditional in a Presidential Address to the Institution, I will tell you something of my background-from
the beginnings of my move towards engineering,
through education and training and into the main part
of my career as an engineer in the very specialized field
of machinery and materials for shoemaking. This covers
over 25 years, punctuated by a brief, but rewarding,
period making automobile components.
I will tell you about my long involvement with the
Institution which started in the days of my graduate
apprenticeship and the way that this involvement has
been constructive. This is an opportunity for young
engineers and I hope I will encourage them to take it.
I will tell you a little about the fascinating field of
engineering for the manufacture of shoes, of my experience in the automobile sector and of my involvement
with other engineering bodies. I will close with my
views about the present state of engineering in the
United Kingdom, the profession and the agenda for the
next year.
Throughout, I will be referring to working with other
people in teams. My definition of a team is not the first
one in my dictionary from my school days, which was
two or more beasts of burden harnessed together, but
rather a group of people with a mix of skills who are
organized to work together towards an objective that
they share. I have long held the same view as Alexander
Graham Bell, born the year that our Institution was
founded and inventor of the telephone, that Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the
cooperation of many minds.
2 EARLY YEARS

My family tree does not show a long line of engineers

preceding me although there is a vague reference to a
bridge builder several generations back on my mothers
The Address was presented at an Ordinary Meeting of the Institution held in
London on 24 May 1995. The MS was received on 25 April 1995.

BO5395 Q IMechE 1995

side and, more recently, a cousin on my fathers side

was a civil engineer. I suspect that my maternal grandmother could have been a professional engineer if she
had had the opportunities that young people have
today. I remember her as a very practical person
around the home and with the cars that she loved to
drive. My father worked in the field of patents and
licensing in the Lancashire textile industry and I have
no doubt that my interest in developing new products
was influenced by the new products and textile finishes
which he talked about and showed me samples of.
However, it was long before I could understand such
concepts that my parents were convinced that their son,
born in Manchester in 1946, was going to be an engineer. They tell me that when I was reaching the stage of
taking my first steps, I spent the early mornings
working out how my cots latches and threaded bars
contrived to keep me captive and how to disassemble
them in order to escape. Later, my pre-school play, at
home, included squeezing more performance out of
clockwork trains by stripping off the bodywork and
applying small quantities of my mothers sewing
machine oil. I pressed my tricycle into service to fetch
nails from the local hardware store where the very kind
shopkeeper was prepared to sell me a pennyworth of
mixed nails for my model boats. Meccano was a firm
favourite, especially linked to a small static steam
engine, firstly to make cranes and later to give it some
ungainly wheels and a crude transmission to allow me
to make it propel itself up a ramp with an extra meths
burner under the cylinder-something I discovered
improved its performance.
The family home was in Wilmslow in north Cheshire
and about mid-way between Ringway, the commercial
airport for Manchester, and Woodford, the factory and
airfield of Avro. These were both within easy cycling
distance and, with a friend, I often spent days in the
school holidays looking at and later taking photographs of whatever was taking off and landing. We were
more often at Ringway, partly because there was more
to see and partly because Woodford was further off and
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330

beyond the railway, where we were inclined to stop and

often got no further. Also, Avros short test flight route
came close to our house so we had excellent views of
the Shackletons and thundering Vulcans without breaking away from whatever else we were up to.
I was born something of an engineer and had the
right environment to encourage my interest. The only
thing against me was my fathers protective attitude to
his best tools, which he kept hidden in his writing desk.
It was only years later that I discovered the joys of
properly tempered and ground screwdrivers and sharpened and set saws that cut straight without any steering
effort !
3 EDUCATION AND THE FORMING OF MY
CAREER CHOICE

My secondary schooling, at Uppingham, not only gave

me a good grounding in maths and science but it also
encouraged me towards my engineering career, and not
just through its Motor Club, which had a collection of
old cars that could be taken apart, re-assembled and
occasionally persuaded to run. An excellent feature of
two of the terms of each school year was a day of expeditions. The whole school set out, by the bus-load, to
visit a wide variety of places where we would learn
something rather than just being entertained. There
were always a number of industrial visits on the list and
these were invariably my choice. I clearly remember
that I saw cars being built at Standard Triumph, tyres
made at Pirelli, steel tubes at Stewarts and Lloyds, fire
pumps and the first of the 1.5 litre V-8 Formula 1
racing engines at Coventry Climax, as well as the disillusioning processes, at least to schoolboys eyes, that go
into the making of biscuits and sweets. This was an
excellent programme allowing experiences that were far
beyond the scope of the classroom and much more to
do with real life. I had another visit, along similar lines,
but organized in the holidays by a friend of my father,
to some of the aircraft factories in the Manchester area
that are now part of British Aerospace. I was fascinated
and I think it achieved my fathers objective too: to
turn my interest in aircraft towards manufacturing
rather than flying, a sensitive subject in our family as
my uncle had lost his life in the RAF in the late stages
of the 1939-45 war. By the time I was moving on from
Uppingham, I had read through the engineering institution literature in the careers library and had secured
myself an industrial scholarship and a place to read
Mechanical Engineering at Nottingham University. I
had been unclear about the relative attractiveness of
Mechanical Engineering and Production Engineering
until I was interviewed by both departments at Nottingham on the same day and chose Mechanical,
although, as you will see, my interests are mostly where
these two branches of the profession grow together.
4 UNIVERSITY

The 1960s were a great time to be young. Universities

were expanding and there were lots of jobs around.
Uppinghams careers master had made a speciality of
listing out industrial scholarships and bursaries and
helped with first contacts. It did not take long to get
Part 8 : Journal of Engineering Manufacture

more than one offer. Of the companies I approached,

the one that took most interest in the candidates and
took greatest care to explain its business to them was
the one from which I finally accepted a generous
scholarship, British United Shoe Machinery Company
Limited in Leicester. I enjoyed much of the engineering
learning at Nottingham, especially after the vast
common first year lectures were over and we got into
the smaller Mech Eng group. Lectures on thermodynamics and design from the then head of department, Professor Geoffrey Smith, were particularly memorable
because he was such an enthusiast that he brought in
his Flanders and Swann record of the Laws of Thermodynamics and positively eulogized about the Electrolux refrigeration cycle and steam turbines. He
captivated us with a story of a steam turbine powered
motorcycle which he and a friend had built. He claimed
that it ran well but was very dangerous with the rider
hidden from view in a cloud of condensing steam before
he got going and whenever his speed dropped back
below walking pace. I was less enthusiastic about the
purer approaches to stress analysis of pressure vessels, a
subject that my tutor, Dr Peter Stanley (subsequently a
Professor at Manchester University and a prolific
author of papers on this subject in the Proceedings of
the Institution), persuaded me to research for my final
year project. I remember, however, getting plenty of
satisfaction as we achieved a good understanding of
increased stress levels in pressure vessel end caps in the
presence of some kinds of defects.
5 BRITISH UNITED SHOE MACHINERY COMPANY
LIMITED

I joined British United Shoe Machinery Company

Limited (British United or BU for short) before going
to Nottingham. I visited the parent company, United
Shoe Machinery Corporation in the United States,
working in its vast Central Research Division there
during one of my summer vacations, so when I graduated in 1968, I was well into the two-year graduate
training programme. This was well organized and characteristic of the organization which was thorough
throughout, being in a very strong position in its
market. Indeed, the United shoe machinery companies,
almost entirely American owned, had dominated their
very specialized branch of engineering since early in the
century.
However, cracks were beginning to appear. The
American operations were fighting a monopoly antitrust action and were also discovering that the new
ventures they had purchased with the proceeds of the
profitable shoe machinery business to broaden their
industrial base were proving to be very expensive errors.
This in no way affected my training and early career
path in product development in the British part of the
company, but it was an indication of harder times to
come. Decades of strength concealed some areas of
growing weakness, a phenomenon known to far too
many British companies, many of which did not survive
to tell the tale. Shoe production had started its move
away from the countries where the shoes would be used
to factories in lower labour cost countries. Shoe
machinery manufacturers in Italy realized that they
could undercut the giant United companies and in the
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1970s their growing strength meant that the giant was

forced to slim down and get fitter.
Somewhat surprisingly, I decided, more than once, to
stay with British United. I have to say that, despite the
slimming down that more than halved the size of the
machinery research and development area where I was
working, I was being given opportunities to grow and
develop and was rising quite quickly through the
shrinking structure.
During this period, I had been transformed. I had
been narrow in my outlook and very happy to dig into
a design or machine performance problem and work on
it relatively quietly, perhaps with another engineer or
technician. My first project management role must have
been something of a gamble, especially as it involved me
in co-ordinating and guiding the efforts of professionals
from different disciplines in different sections of the
department in a programme to devise ways of automating the process of making shoe uppers. The role
worked for me even if a lot of the results of our work
were too restricted in their applicability to have been
real successes. I learnt some of the skills of steering a
multi-disciplinary team. Perhaps the catalyst was a
course I attended about a structured approach to
problem solving. This taught me the value of making a
clear distinction between the process of managing a
team solving a problem and the subject of the problem
itself. It taught me more about teams and it encouraged
me to do some things that I was reasonably comfortable about, to think laterally and to hold a problem and
examine it thoroughly from many angles rather than
rushing to a solution. I had also relieved the relative
boredom of graduate apprenticeship and the first year
of career development by taking the postgraduate
Diploma in Management Studies by evening study at
Leicester Polytechnic. This and other good courses
aroused my curiosity about other aspects of business
and how people work, rather than how machines work.
Today, the Diploma in Engineering Management does
much the same for young graduate engineers.
By 1981, there had been many changes in British
United and a top management team had been formed.
By this, I mean a proper team made up of individuals
who had been selected not only because of their skills
within their own areas but also because they were
capable of working well with each other. Previously,
restrictions had existed between the different functions
of the business, because the people running them did
not make a good team, even though they were good as
individuals. Despite good work being done in the individual functional areas of the business, they were not
pulling in the same direction. We broke these
restrictions down and turned round the performance of
the business. In product development, I concentrated a
good deal of my efforts on ensuring effective teamwork
using, more than once, the illustration of the way the
crew of a rowing eight have to ensure that they work
together in perfect harmony whereas the crew of an aircraft carrier are much less interdependent and poor performance on the part of the vast majority of the crew
has absolutely no influence on the progress of the ships
voyage. There had been too much of the aircraft carrier
culture and we now needed to change to a much closer
teamwork. We changed the emphasis of our R&D
work, reducing the expectation that we could make revQ IMechE 1995

33 1

olutionary changes in the ways shoes are made and

concentrating more on ambitious evolutionary development, but not exclusively so.
1985 started well. We had three innovative major new
products that were really selling well and some other
new introductions that were performing competently.
Unfortunately, this was not true for our sister companies in other countries and the group management in
the United States seemed to have lost sight of the
potential of the business for steady growth with the rise
in world shoe production. It was more inclined to trim
back to percentage performance targets than to make
the most of the opportunities. Worst of all, for me, was
the fact that they were not prepared to acknowledge the
success of my team, turning a promised halting of the
cut-backs into another round of expense reductions. As
leader of the whole R&D team, I had had enough. After
doing what I could to ensure that the team could continue in reasonable shape, I left.
6 UNITED MACHINERY GROUP LIMITED AND
USM TEXON LIMITED

Two years after leaving British United, after a period

which I will describe later, I was back. My departure, as
much as anything else, had encouraged the rest of the
British United top management team to attempt a
buy-out and, after much hard work and great uncertainty, they had succeeded early in 1987, forcing out the
old American group management and inviting me back
to re-join the team in the new company, United
Machinery Group Limited.
The buy-out concentrated on the shoe machinery
business in which we had all been involved. There was a
parallel business making structural materials for shoes,
mainly fibre and synthetic rubber composite materials,
but also metallic parts, all for parts of the shoe that are
not seen, that is the insole that with a steel shank form
the backbone of the shoe, toe and heel stiffeners and
linings. This business stayed with our former parent
company in 1987 but was for sale in 1990 and we
bought it, adding its key brand name, Texon, to our
strong machinery brand name, USM, and renaming the
Company USM Texon Limited.
USM and Texon are today the brand names that represent technical and market leadership around the
world in shoemaking. The buy-out and the subsequent
acquisition of the materials business meant that the
Company was dedicated to its core products, rather
than being an unfashionable and largely remote division
of a foreign mini-conglomerate. It felt much more like a
team with the whole workforce responding well to the
clear commitment of the leaders to the business.
Against a background of poor world economic conditions in recent years and particularly the demise of the
economy of the former communist block, which had
been a key market for the Company, we have had the
support of our investors to continue a reasonable level
of investment in the development of new products and
processes to maintain our leadership position. While the
level of investment in development and new plant has
not been unrestricted, we have been more fortunate
than some companies that have been held back by
excessive short-termism in the investment community.
Very recently, a change of ownership of USM Texon
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has brought in additional funding to allow us to

increase investment in development and production
facilities, taking advantage of the growing market
demand for our products.
During the whole of this period, my role has been an
international one, controlling product and process
development policy and ensuring the success of our
developments in our machinery and materials plants
around the world.
7 SHOEMAKING

I have told you something of my background and of the

main industrial sector that I have worked in without, so
far, opening up the fascinating field of engineering that
lies behind the very wide variety of the different types,
styles and sizes of shoes we wear. It is a vast subject.
The group that has recently classified shoemaking
machines for the new European Union (EU) machinery
regulations listed about 500 different types of machines
currently in use in shoemaking. Many of these are for
specialist processes that are only used on particular
kinds of shoes, but even if I restricted myself to the
more common types of machines and the main types of
engineered materials that go into shoes, there would be
far, far too much to cover in this paper. If you, like
many first-time visitors to our Leicester factory, start
with the impression that shoemaking machinery is a
collection of pieces of relatively simple equipment, like
those you see in a modem shoe repairers shop, I can
assure you that, like those visitors, you would have such
an impression swiftly corrected and would be amazed at
the level of technology in use in todays shoe factories.
There have been a few papers about shoemaking
machinery published by the Institution in the past, but
these do not give any impression of todays computercontrolled machines. Two very comprehensive papers
appear in the Proceedings; one by Cooper was
published in 1937 (1) and another by Kestell in 1964 (2)
and both authors were employed by British United.
These papers cover the main types of shoemaking
machinery commonly used in the first two thirds of this
century, with some continuing in service today. I have
seen earlier published references to the fact that shoemaking machinery was developed by Mark Isambard
Brunel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 40
years before the Institution was formed. He had seen
the need for this machinery when he saw that the soldiers returning victorious from Corunna were in a very
poor state, largely as a result of having very badly made
boots that had broken up after just a few days wear.
Unfortunately, a lire later destroyed the factory and the
machines and records of them were lost.
The papers of Cooper and Kestell reveal the peak of
the mechanical art, with the pinnacle being the so-called
BU No. 10 sole stitching machine (Fig. 1). Kestell had
produced this version of the machine and given it the
capability to stitch leather almost an inch thick at a
speed of 10oO stitches per minute, using a curved awl to
punch the stitch holes and a curved hook to pull the
thread through the leather (as a threaded needle would
jam in the hole). It always placed the lock of the stitch,
formed by separate waxed upper and lower threads
two-thirds of the distance through the assembly of the
welt and the sole, so that the sole could wear down,
Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Fig. 1 BU No. 10 sole stitching machine

wearing away part of the stitches without the sole detaching. For the student of mechanisms, I believe there
is nothing more ingenious than the combination of
cranks, cams and linkages in this machine. In 1980 we
thought there was going to be a revival in shoe constructions in which the sole is stitched to the shoe and
thought that it should be possible to use modem technology instead of the complex and expensive mechanisms of the No. 10 stitcher. To investigate this, we
sponsored a large group MSc project in machine design
at Cranfield. The new technology that proved to be
valuable was for computer aided design and dynamic
analysis of mechanisms, while attempts to find suitable
independent high-force actuators that could be cooordinated electronically to perform the stitching operation
failed. The result was a prototype for a substantially
simpler machine still featuring two crankshafts like the
original design. Unfortunately, it never reached production as the anticipated fashion trend towards more
stitched soles did not materialize.
More recent publications in the Institutions library
(3, 4) and papers presented at Institution conferences
record the introduction of the computer, both as a
design tool for shoes and as the heart of a system to
automate the assembly of the upper parts of the shoe,
something I will come on to shortly. Again, at least one
of the authors of each of these papers works for British
United or has done so.
Before looking at examples of current technology, I
must explain the key features of the pattern of shoemaking around the world. Production is approximately
10 billion pairs per year, roughly twice the world population. In the West, we consume an average of 5 pairs
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per head per year, while others clearly do not get as

many as one new pair annually. High-volume production is based around the Pacific, with the Peoples
Republic of China making 30 per cent of the worlds
production, including close to half the shoes bought in
the largest consumer nation in the world, the United
States. However, the production of many of these shoes
is controlled by Taiwanese and Koreans who have
recently scaled back production in their own countries,
due to rapidly rising labour costs, but retain detailed
design and manufacturing control over enormous
volumes of shoes. This part of the shoe market is driven
by very low labour costs for the inevitably complex
tasks of making inherently awkwardly shaped products
like shoes from wide varieties of flexible and nonNewtonian materials. High-volume, relatively stable
styles and low labour costs go together. There is a relatively low degree of mechanization in this part of shoemaking, although there is much more here than there is
with the smallest producers in the Third World, where
shoemakers are typically one man businesses with just a
few lasts and some hand tools. At the other end of the
spectrum, manufacturers who are close to sophisticated
consumer markets aim to satisfy these markets with the
latest fashions and colours with minimum lead times.
They work with very small batches and introduce new
styles very quickly, earning relatively high margins that
accommodate their much higher labour costs and the
cost of the much more sophisticated machinery they
use.
To give you a firmer idea, shoe production, analysed
by geographic area, is shown in Fig 2. It shows where
the production is today and how the moves in production that I mentioned earlier have changed the
picture over the last 30 years.

Sources: SATRA 1980-1990

Others, USM Texon estimates

Fig. 2 World-wide shoe production trends

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What makes engineering for shoemaking so interesting is that it involves many very different kinds of
operations as well as enormous variety of types of shoe,
styles and sizes as well as a great variety of materials
used in their construction. Fashions change increasingly
frequently so machinery must have a very wide capability and be quickly adaptable to new styles. Styles that
run to a million or more pairs are rare and becoming
rarer. Fashion styles often run for less than loo00 pairs
and some do not reach 1o00, and remember that even
those are spread over at least nine sizes and sometimes
half sizes and different width fittings. Because of this
great variety, batches of shoes progress from the cutting
of the pieces through to the boxing of the shoes before
they leave the factory by way of a series of operations
where the partly made shoes are processed by very different machines. These range from simple ones that rely
on operators to guide the workpieces through to much
more complex ones that perform several operations at
once and only require the operator to load the partly
made shoe and check that the machine is set for the
correct style. Automatic transfer from one operation to
the next is featured in some cases, although attempts to
use robots for this have, except in a few special circumstances, proved to be significantly slower and more
expensive than using human skills which instantly
adapt to the style and size changes that can occur as
frequently as every two or three minutes of the production day. There have been several attempts to integrate shoemaking lines with automatic transfer systems
linking all the operations but, to date, none has reached
a high enough degree of flexibility or a low enough cost
to be successful.
I do not want to leave the impression that there is no
place for sophisticated machinery in the countries where
the high-volume production has migrated to take
advantage of low labour costs. While it is generally true
that simple machines are used in these areas, there are
some sophisticated machines for key parts of the shoe
production process that are popular in these low labour
cost countries where the traditional justification for
investment in expensive machinery to reduce labour
requirements is not a significant factor with labour costs
of US $2 per day. Here, as well as elsewhere, these particular machines are used because they have a major
impact on the ability of the manufacturer to put new
styles into production quickly, or to minimize material
costs through high-yield cutting, or to ensure consistently high quality on key features of shoe quality such
as stitched seam integrity and sole attachment bonds.
In this paper, I will describe in detail some sophisticated machines that are most popular in the highvariety, high-quality, close-to-market shoe factories.
Firstly, I will describe two machines that are used to
prepare for adhesively bonding soles onto shoes. British
United received a Queens Award for Technological
Achievement for these machines in 1989 and has
enjoyed great commercial success with successive
models of this family of machines for the past ten years.
7.1 Automatic, computercontrolled roughing and
cementing machines

These machines are for preparing the lasted part of shoe

uppers, roughmg, and for applying adhesive to shoe
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quently, adhesive (typically solvent-borne polyurethane,

but now including water-borne and hot-melt types) is
applied to the prepared surface of the upper and to the
sole before attaching the sole to the shoe under pressure
after heating.
The roughing machine, the BU No. 4 automatic
upper roughing machine, and the cementing machines,
the BU No. 1 and No. 2 automatic bottom cementing
machines, introduced new levels of quality and increases
of productivity to these critical shoemaking operations.
Failure of sole attachment, which can be caused by
poor roughing or cementing, has historically been the
largest cause of shoes being returned to manufacturers
by dissatisfied customers. The previous manual roughing and cementing operations were difficult to learn,
unpleasant to perform and the results were subject to
the inconsistent performance of the operators. Relatively inflexible roughing machines using older control
technologies were superseded by these flexible and accurate computer-controlled machines. Machine-controlled
cementing of shoe bottoms was introduced to the
market for the first time by these models. These roughing and cementing machines (Fig. 4) are essentially the
same machine fitted with different operating heads (Figs
5 and 6).
7.1.1 Development history

Note. The adhesive layers are not shown to scale.

They are typically only 0.1-0.2 mrn thick.

Fig. 3 Cross-section of a shoe made by the flat lasted

process

bottoms, cementing. These are operations performed

during the manufacture of most types of shoes.
Firstly, I must explain the basic process. The majority
of shoes are manufactured by the so-called flat lasted
process (see Fig. 3). In this, the upper (the normally
visible part of the shoe) is formed over a last and
attached to the underside of the insole (which the
wearers foot presses onto). The sole is bonded to the
part of the upper which has been attached under the
insole and consequently faces the ground when the shoe
is worn. To be satisfactory for use in an upper, a
material needs to be supple and have a fine finish. These
are not ideal properties for the structural integrity of the
finished shoe and the critical bonding of the sole, which
must form a strong but flexible joint. To overcome this,
the surface of the part of the upper which will be
bonded to the sole is roughed with abrasives and/or
sharpened wire brushes to remove the surface layer and
finishes and reveal the stronger fibres which are present
deeper in many upper materials, notably leather. SubsePart B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

In the 1970s British United had a strong position in the

market for automatic roughing machines; in its first
automatic roughing machines the brush paths were controlled by templates. At the same time, it was clear to
the management that the time would come when it
would become economical to employ computer control
in shoemaking machines. Roughing was selected as a
prime application in view of the inherent flexibility of
this type of control system and the need for flexibility in
the roughing process inasmuch as the roughing brushes
need to follow different paths on different sizes and
styles of shoes which are processed through the same
equipment in small batches. British United therefore
undertook some research work in its own R&D department to explore the feasibility of using computer
control for the roughing operation. By 1980, the
research phase had established the feasibility of this
approach and projected control system costs were
reaching an acceptable level, the processing capability
we needed no longer coming in the wardrobe-sized
cabinet it had when we started or in the drawer-sized
box but on a single printed circuit board.
There were signs that the market for the templatecontrolled machines was reaching saturation, given
their limited flexibility with different templates to be
made for each size of each style, effectively restricting
their use to less fashionable types of shoes made in large
batches. They also needed trained support for template
making, which also restricted their market growth. The
results of the research were fed into a development
project and, after some specification changes to avoid
excessive cost and delay in attempting to meet an overstated market specification, this was successfully concluded. The first production machines were sold in
1985, The first model was suitable for low-heel shoes
and development of a version with a modified roughing
head also capable of processing high-heel shoes fol@ IMechE 1995

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS USING TEAMWORK

Fig. 4 The BU No. 4 automatic upper roughing machine and the BU automatic bottom cementing machine

lowed immediately; this was introduced to the market

in 1986. Development effort was then moved on to the
cementing operation (using over 85 per cent of the
machine hardware and control software of the roughing
machine) and a low-heel cementing machine (the No. 1)
was introduced at the end of 1987 with the full range
version (No. 2) following at the end of 1988. Other

machines for edge roughing for work boots with deep

soles and for cementing soles were developed subsequently, as were new versions of the roughing and
cementing machines, which added new control features
and made it easier for one operator to work both a
roughing machine and a cementing machine at the same
time.

Fig. 5 The roughing brush mechanism

Fig. 6 The cementing brush mechanism

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7.1.2 Process and product background

I have mentioned the previous template-controlled

roughmg machines and the manually controlled operation. In this traditional method, a skilled worker
manipulates the shoes in contact with an abrasive tool
on a simple powered spindle machine. This method of
roughing, which is still widely used and particularly so
in lower labour cost countries, requires considerable
operator skill and concentration, as anybody who has
experienced the large and variable forces as a sharp wire
brush bites into a soft material like leather will appreciate. It is easy to rough excessively and weaken the
material so that the upper may break in wear where it
joins the sole. Equally, it is easy to rough insufficiently
so that the adhesive that attaches the sole is inadequately keyed to the upper material, resulting in the
sole separating from the shoe in wear.
As the template-controlled machines approached
market saturation, British Uniteds competitors introduced a machine with servo control, giving it the
advantage of needing no templates but suffering some
inaccuracy as a result of the difficulty of the servo
sensor following the edge of the shoe whose profile
changes significantly around its periphery. Despite
being relatively slow, complex and costly, these
machines achieved some success in the market until the
BU No. 4 machine was introduced. Another competitor
introduced a machine with a form of digital control, but
this did not give accurate control of the brush path and
its sales were restricted to a few makers of military and
work boots.
Cementing of the shoe bottom after roughing had
been done with either dipped or pressure-fed brushes or
with a simple applying machine, but in each case it has
been entirely up to the skill of the operator to apply the
adhesive right up to the edge of the area to be covered
by the sole and not over that edge. Inconsistency of this
manual operation was widespread and still is where it
continues to be used. Operators often work in a solventladen environment. Cleaning off incorrectly applied
adhesive was accepted as one of the finishing operations
in shoe manufacture, effectively increasing the cost of
the manual cementing operation.
7.1.3 Innovations in the British United roughing and

cementing machines
In the low-heel version of the roughing machine, the
relative movement of the shoe to the roughing brush is
controlled by a three-axis computer numerical control
system developed by BU and incorporating a 16-bit
microprocessor and stepping motor drives. The cost of
this system is substantially less than equivalent machine
tool and robot controllers, which would have made the
machines unacceptably expensive, and yet it is robust
and reliable enough to transmit the considerable and
unbalanced forces required for the roughing operation.
While the control of the movements along and across
the shoe bottom is driven directly, the heightwise movement incorporates numerical control and a short pneumatic suspension to allow for small variations from
shoe to shoe. Consistently good roughing results are
achieved and there are none of the inaccuracies that
were found with the servo-controlled machines.
Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Entering data for a new style can be done on the

machine and is within the capability of relatively
unskilled machine operators. Most of the information is
entered in a teach mode, with the operator positioning
the brush correctly to the edge of the shoe at successive
points along the shoe. Only one size of each style needs
to be taught and typically only 26 points are needed,
which are automatically spaced by the control system.
In use, the operator only has to key in the appropriate
style number and the machine finds the correct data,
recalculates the data points according to the size of the
shoe with which it has been loaded and interpolates the
path through the points, steering the brush accordingly.
It adjusts automatically for left and right shoes, which it
detects in its shoe holder, which very cleverly takes the
awkwardly shaped shoes and locates them very consistently, without any kind of location plate and in a way
that allows the machine to match the required brush
path for each size to the data it has learnt from the
taught size and modified to suit the actual size of shoe
with it which has been loaded. The machine is capable
of high productivity with a big work mix and very small
batches, which are becoming more and more popular
with the moves towards just-in-time manufacturing.
Outputs in the range 1400-1800 pairs per 8 hour day
are regularly achieved on these machines, but some
shoemakers with factories making only a few hundred
pairs per day are prepared to buy these machines for
their quality and other benefits. Where both roughing
and cementing machines are under the control of a
single operator, outputs regularly exceed loo0 pairs of
shoes per day.
The control system allows the machine to calibrate
itself and automatically compensate for wear and sharpening of the roughing brushes. An additional motorized
axis is incorporated to operate these functions and this
is locked during normal operation of the machine. Style
data can be extracted for archive purposes and for
transfer to other machines that may be required to
process the same styles. Data for nearly 200 styles can
be held in the machine with 20 styles available immediately and a system that automatically selects the most
recently used 20 styles when the machine is powered-up
at the beginning of the working day. The system is very
friendly and the machine has been readily accepted in
shoe factories world-wide. Training of shoe factory
workers to load and operate the machine has proved to
be quick and easy and, compared with the manual
method, sub-standard shoes are not produced during
the training period. Several languages are available on
the machine display and control panel. Diagnostic features built into the software identify faults and assist in
their solution.
The cementing machines feature a rotating brush, fed
from its centre with the adhesive. The action of scrubbing the adhesive into the surface has been found to
increase the average level of sole bond strength compared with shoes manually cemented. Less adhesive is
used than with traditional methods, operator training is
much faster and there is much less need to clean excessive adhesive from the shoes after the soles are attached.
Solvent loss from the adhesive is substantially reduced
by the use of a closed system up to the brush and the
machine is provided with air extraction pipes to remove
any solvent-laden air from the working environment.
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Successive versions of the machine have included

additional control axes, either with pre-set increments
of movement or full numerical control, for example to
allow the roughing or cementing brush to stay perpendicular to the shoe bottom as it progresses around the
shoe, notably on high-heeled shoes.
7.1.4 Conclusion

I have described the factors that account for the success

of these machines. Essentially, the basic design of the
shoe holder and the mechanisms was conceived in a
way that would allow the control task to be simplified.
The control system was very carefully specified to
achieve a lot of performance for a reasonable cost,
mainly by using the system to do many calculations
every time it processes a shoe rather than to use relatively expensive memory to store a large amount of
data, as is needed for all the style/size combinations.
In the decade since the first machines were sold, costs
of the logic elements of control systems have reduced
dramatically, enabling the latest versions of these
machines to have new transputer-based control systems
with many additional features for the users and with the
potential for recognition systems and process control
features to be added in the future. The in-house research
team put the basic technology in place, keeping the
machine concept as simple as possible. The development team took over and followed the theme with a
simple and robust machine design. We paid enormous
attention to proving the reliability of this, our first
computer-controlled machine, by running prototypes
round the clock at elevated temperature for months on
end.
Sales of this family of machines have exceeded 2500,
making it one of the highest selling machines to the
industry over the last ten years. Several competitors
have tried to get a share of this market and a number,
with designs that were more complex than necessary,
have failed to get beyond the prototype stage. The
others have a long way to go to catch up with our
present sales volumes for these machines.
7.2 The Autoscan stitcher

My second example is a vision-controlled machine for

an earlier part of the shoemaking process, the stitching
of parts of the shoe upper. This is at the beginning of its
commercial life and is causing a great deal of interest in
the shoemaking industry. We had the pleasure of
showing the prototype two years ago at a soirke at the
Royal Society, emphasizing the origins of the technology for this machine in research at universities and
its subsequent development in our Company. This is
another element of teamwork which we have managed
to make work successfully, in this case using a dedicated
project manager staying in close contact with the different parts of the team and ensuring, unlike less well controlled university research, that the project stayed on
line with the target and the intellectual property of the
process established as a result of the research was adequately protected, a subject not without difficulty in
view of academics need to publish.
Automation of the assembly of shoe uppers has long
been a goal. As the worlds largest supplier of shoe(D IMechE 1995

331

making machinery and materials, the USM group has

always led in this technology. Early attempts were
based on the provision of jigs designed to locate the
various components in their relative positions, but the
flexibility required in this fashion-driven industry made
this approach impractical.
Some practical automation of the assembly of shoe
uppers was achieved, starting nearly 20 years ago, when
the advent of relatively small, relatively inexpensive
computers enabled the introduction of automatic stitching machinery. Although very expensive compared with
conventional sewing machines used by an operator
manipulating the workpiece, these were justified in the
incredibly labour-intensive decorative stitching of
cowboy boots. Complex designs took over an hour per
piece whereas the machine took just a few minutes and
held the rows of stitches exactly parallel. In these first
applications, the workpiece was held in a simple outline
frame pallet and manipulated by computer numerical
control under a sewing head. Development of the
pallets soon led to multi-leaf designs capable of holding
several upper pieces to be stitched together by the
machine. Today, complex athletic shoes, some with in
excess of thirty different pieces of material per upper,
are assembled on these machines. They are remarkable
in many ways, achieving, as they do, small and accurate
movements of their pallets, with a mass of around 2 kg,
between adjacent stitch positions during the very short
periods while the sewing needle is out of the workpiece
when stitching at up to 2500 stitches per minute. The
servo drive achieves very high pallet accelerations, in
the range of 5-79.
However, as in the case of the template-controlled
roughing machines referred to earlier, the market for
these machines is limited to the longer-running styles
due to the cost of pallets and the time taken to make
them (despite simple procedures available for use in
shoe factories for making pallets and defining stitch
paths, either on the machine or from a computer aided
shoe design system). British United recognized these
limitations of its automatic stitching machinery and the
lack of other automated processes in shoe upper
assembly and started a search for methodologies that
might enable automated assembly to be more widely
applicable.
I was involved in the first stages of this in my first
project management role in the early 1970s, when our
thinking was turning away from the fully tooled
approach to upper making. I classified the many different operations in upper making, distinguishing them by
such factors as whether the operation required access to
one or both sides of the piece and whether the operation was best done by progressive or one-shot
methods. How to locate the many differently shaped
components became the key issue. We could design programmable location systems relatively easily but they
had restrictions. The best solution was going to be one
in which the machine could work out for itself exactly
where the component was. As I was promoted to a
position in a completely different part of the R&D
department and left this investigation, a colleague
started to move it forward. He had been trying to simulate the different work flows caused by several different
styles being produced simultaneously through a traditional upper-making room in order to be able to control
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F CHRISTOPHER PRICE

the work flow better. As that was extremely complex, he

added the requirement for the automated assembly
system to identify what the components were as well, so
that workpieces could flow through the making area in
whatever order they happened to be, eliminating many
of the scheduling problems. The then embryonic technology of machine vision came to the top of the list of
technologies we thought we would need.
The Company decided to take an approach involving
collaboration with experts, rather than commit itself to
recruiting or training existing staff in machine vision
and other specialist technologies. After some false starts,
this approach led to the series of partnerships which
eventually put in place the technologies for the Autoscan stitcher and, potentially, for further automation of
upper making.
A number of exploratory projects were started in
various universities and we finally gave a detailed specification of our objectives to Len Norton-Wayne, who
was then in the Department of Systems Science at The
City University. The specification was a tough one-to
be able to recognize a part uniquely from a population
of up to ten thousand different ones, many almost identical, and to establish its position and orientation to
within 0.1 mm. The target rate for this was four parts
per second and the system had to make no special
demands for features to be added to enable identification. Within three years, we had a system that would do
what we had asked except that, even on a computer
that was much too expensive to build into a shoemaking machine, the process took 20 minutes, roughly
5000 times longer than our target!
The project had to be shelved but was not forgotten.
About 5 years later, in the mid 1980s, we could configure a control system with an acceptable cost to apply
the recognition technology and achieve a result over
1000 times faster than the first demonstration and close
to our target. The moment had arrived to address the
next set of problems-handling and manipulation. We
knew that we would have to adapt process methodologies to accept the constraints of automation. To help
us with this we decided we needed further collaborators
and were pleased to find that, through its ACME Directorate, the Science and Engineering Research Council
was anxious to support academic research in manufacturing processes. We were able to form a team with key
researchers at the University of Hull and at the University of Durham to tackle the problems associated
with manipulating workpieces for stitching and for
other operations in upper making. We made a technology demonstrator for marking shoe upper pieces,
and after considering the input from customers that we
invited to see it, we decided to press ahead with the
vision-controlled automatic stitching machine using this
technology.
The team at Hull was tasked to provide a demonstration of the necessary handling techniques to integrate
machine vision with the stitching of shoe upper components. This was achieved and the machine has since
been developed by the in-house development team at
British United directly from this research. The demonstration machine (Fig. 7) and the current commercial
machine (Fig. 8) are essentially very similar apart from
the better looks and more robust design of the commercial machine. Most significantly, the workpiece
Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Fig. 7 Autoscan demonstration machine assembled at the

University of Hull

transport system has been developed to achieve more

precise control by using belts coated with grit rather
than the earlier multiple rollers, and the software has
been enhanced to meet the needs of some parts that are
very difficult to recognize. We have also reached the
target recognition time.

Fig. 8 BU MPCS Autoscan automatic stitching machine

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339

Fig. 9 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the scanning position

7.2.1 The machine

Any component for which the machine has been

'trained' can be loaded into the machine by the operator
in any orientation. As the belts feed it, the component is
scanned by a high-resolution camera and its outline
shape is passed to a transputer. This calculates the
value of a limited number of features which uniquely
identify the part and its orientation. As soon as the
component is recognized, the numerical data file of the
appropriate stitch pattern is retrieved from the computer disk and recalculated by the transputer to match
the actual orientation of the workpiece. Finally the
modified pattern data are passed to a conventional
16-bit microprocessor which controls the motion of the
component under the stitching head.
The key elements of the machine are shown in Figs 9,
10 and 11. The workpiece manipulator is a carriage,
driven in one axis, with pairs of upper and lower drive
belts that grip and drive the workpiece in the other axis.
There is a narrow gap between the sets of belts that first
provides a window through which the vision system
operates (Fig. 9) and then gives the stitching head access
to the workpiece while keeping control of its position
and manipulating it to stitch the required pattern (Figs
10 and 11). A batch loading system with a matching
workpiece removal system is also provided.
The essence of the system is in the highly condensed
set of identification and orientation data which is
extracted from the mass of data that the camera generates. The feature set was designed specifically to avoid
problems with the small size variations that inevitably
occur between nominally identical pieces cut from shoemaking materials, as well as with component edges that
are not entirely cleanly cut. Equally, it can distinguish
between the small differences between pieces for adjacent half shoe sizes and near-symmetrical parts for left
and right shoes. The condensed data, comprising features such as area, position of the centre of area, lengths
of radii from it and second moments of area, keep file
sizes small and allow very rapid searching.
Initially, the machine was intended to produce decorative stitching on single pieces, but applications where
two or three pieces are stitched together are being
Q IMechE 1995

developed by the first users. Simple methods are being

used to locate and temporarily hold the pieces together
until the stitching starts, and the recognition system has
the advantage that it rejects incorrectly pre-assembled
pieces as it does not recognize them.
This project has involved several sub-teams and, in
this case, the benefits of participating have been wider

Fig. 10 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the

sewing position
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F CHRISTOPHER PRICE

are many other development projects where I have

played a more direct part and I have had my name on
over 20 patents, but the details of these are mostly too
intricate to explain here. Equally, the technology of
some of our processes to make composite materials for
shoes is fascinating, but, again, an exposition of these
would take me far beyond my limit for this paper.
8 REARSBY AUTOMOTIVE LIMITED 1985-87

Fig. 11 The Autoscan machine with the carriage in the

sewing position (end view)

than just the achievement of the target machine. Much

has been gained by the universities working together
and with British United under the close guidance of its
Research Manager, David Reedman.

7.3 Conclusion
I have picked two of the best examples of today's shoemaking technology but there are other impressive
machines and systems. I have enjoyed playing my part
in the process that has enabled the teams working on
these machines to achieve success. The Autoscan
stitcher is one of the answers to the automation of
upper making, which was the subject of my first project
management role, early in my career, so it is particularly satisfying to see it working so well today. There

I have described my two-part career in shoemaking

machinery and materials for 20 years up to 1985 and
since 1987. What of those intervening two years?
In 1985 I set out for a permanent career change, but
the unexpected happened and the permanent change
was soon reversed. These two years were not merely an
interlude, but a new venture that I entered into wholeheartedly with a view to a long-term involvement.
I was fortunate to secure the position of Engineering
Director at Rearsby Automotive Limited shortly after
leaving British United. I had moved from an environment that I found very oppressive, for reasons I have
explained and because the next higher level of management was trying to apply detailed control of the
business in the United Kingdom from 3000 miles away
and was not doing it well. Rearsby, by contrast, was a
single-site operation with the small team of owner directors who were all closely involved in running the
business. Frrme years earlier they had bought out their
business from the British Leyland organization which
did not consider Rearsby to be one of its core activities
and therefore was unwilling to support the management
in its requests for capital expenditure to improve the
business. Being part of British Leyland had not suited
Rearsby for other reasons too, mainly because the
bureaucracy and poor industrial relations of the parent,
at that time, infected the subsidiary.
The buy-out team was led by Ivor Vaughan who had
been climbing up the British Leyland ladder following a
distinguished early career at Austin and had reached the
stage of being a managing director of a remote subsidiary, Rearsby. He is charismatic and has been an excellent leader for Rearsby. Arriving at Rearsby I felt
instantly refreshed by the degree of control that Rearsby
had over its own development.
Rearsby Automotive was then, and still is today, a
leading supplier of what can be described as mechanisms that provide the physical driver interfaces to
motor vehicles. These are instantly recognizable as gearchange mechanisms, pedal assemblies, steering columns
and parking brake levers (Fig. 12). These and other

Fig. 12 Typical products in the Rearsby Automotive range

Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

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ENGINEERING SUCCESS USING TEAMWORK

parts, including suspension sub-assemblies, made by the

company are safety critical components.
Rearsbys specialization in these had been built up
over the previous 30 years from its first move to diversify from the light aircraft business for which it had
been formed in the late 1930s to build the famous
Auster. This specialization was one of Rearsbys
strengths and it had moved from the simple role of
making components to vehicle manufacturers designs
to one where it was starting to design the components
to fit in with the vehicle designs as well as designing the
complete manufacturing tooling. Whereas the average
vehicle designer would only design a parking brake
lever once or twice in a career, Rearsby was dealing
with several new designs each year, supplying all the
significant British vehicle builders. At this time, vehicle
designers were becoming receptive to offers of specialists
to design the components for them and, very importantly, to apply their experience to the vital steps of
design proving and endurance testing. My design and
development experience, albeit in a different part of
mechanical engineering, was the new element that I
brought to the position of Engineering Director, which
had previously been more exclusively a production
engineering role.
I must say that at Rearsby I learnt a lot about the art
of forming metal to give great functionality for little
cost. Rearsby had a good team of production engineers
and technicians with a small sub-group working on
design. It was good to work with them to solve the dificult problems of design; to use new materials and processes; to put novel components into manufacture, even
a very reliable and cost effective electrical switch for the
parking brake warning light; to find new ways to save
fractions of a penny in the manufacturing cost of a component to win the business; to purchase and install new
equipment ; to introduce statistical process control and
build quality systems, including BS 5750; and to
redesign the manufacturing systems. Rather than going
into these in detail, I will just pick up on three points
that are very significant to me. They address different
aspects of change that were occurring at the time.
Firstly, team working between the vehicle builders
and their suppliers, like Rearsby, was beginning to be
established. There were big contrasts between the
vehicle builders who were still using the old adversarial
methods and those who were building team spirit in
preparation for working together for each others
benefit. With some of the vehicle builders we were still
playing the game of he who quotes lowest gets the
work-and well shout at each other to solve the problems when the assembly line is running. It would be
unfair to quote examples of the horrific problems that
arose out of this approach, because the perpetrators
have realized the errors of their ways, or most of them,
and are no longer threatening their own businesses in
this way. In the middle ground, there were the efforts on
the part of some vehicle manufacturers to build more
constructive relationships through comprehensive, if
somewhat mechanistic, quality systems in the supplier
companies and by providing training as well as making
examinations. The new breed, just establishing themselves in the North East, imported their much simpler
techniques. Initially they gave us a very tough examination and saw how well we could do working by our@ IMechE 1995

341

selves, although they made it clear that if we qualified to

supply them, they would form teams of their people and
ours to achieve better results. They were clearly thinking far ahead, insisting on having trial parts made on
production tools a full 12 months before they started
using them for production vehicle build. Methods and
tooling had to be made mistake proof, ensuring that
even the most ingenious workers could not make errors,
and there had to be written contingency plans for even
the most unlikely of potential problems. By contrast,
the shout brigade were introducing instant changes
which could not be thoroughly checked and proved
before they were fitted to production vehicles. I was
only involved in the first stages of the constructive
teamworking approach, but I have since heard that a
real spirit of co-operation has been built up-designs
and methods have been improved by the efforts of the
joint teams. What is even more remarkable is that there
is no attempt to restrict the suppliers improvements to
the products made for their customer partner in the
improvement team. However, with the suppliers
involved in teams with several of their customers, there
must be plenty of chances for compound improvements.
Secondly, I found that there was a need for change
within Rearsby which reflected its relationships with its
customers. On the surface, there were signs of far too
much fire-fighting despite many longer term ideas to
improve and expand the business. There was something
missing in the mid-term. While the target was manufacture and supply just in time, we were too often getting
there only just in time. As a newcomer, I had an
advantage and could see some difficulties in the
relationships between directors and managers and could
see where decisions were being left for others to take
when they should have been taken at lower levels. We
discussed this around the boardroom table and then,
with characteristic swiftness, we formed a small team to
devise a solution. We had to make the team smaller,
inviting the people who could only rush to apply their
preconceived solutions to come back later. This enabled
us to take the essential step of understanding and simplifying the problem first, something I specialize in. We
sorted out the real objective for the future of Rearsby.
Soon we started a programme to help people throughout the business to feel and act more as members of the
business team, not just as individuals or as members of
their department or section teams. Different parts of the
programme covered the business systems and the management responsibilities. A major part of these would
today be described as a total quality approach of
which there are countless examples, some very successful examples having been related in recent lectures
at Ordinary Meetings of the Institution. As in these,
and in a similar programme we are spreading through
USM Texon and British United today, the experience
at Rearsby was rewarding for the participants and I was
pleased to see more effective teamworking established
although I had to leave when the programme still had a
way to go.
Thirdly, in my section about Rearsby, I must record a
patent application on a nove! parking brake lever. I had
been struck by the contrast between the parking brake
levers that we supplied to some vehicle manufacturers
for less than 1.50 (all complete and ready to fix into the
car with a couple of bolts, have the cable pinned in and
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F CHRISTOPHER PRICE

stay with the vehicle with no noticeable attention for

the next 20 years) and others that were well over 5
each. Added to this, some vehicles had elaborate
separate self-adjusting systems to take the slack out of
the parking brake cable, some with disc brakes all
round had additional drum brakes specifically for the
parking brake function, while others had manual adjusters built into the lever. There were variable rate designs
at the time, but these were costly and unsightly and had
to be concealed under bulky trim. These initially pulled
at a high ratio, taking up the slack in the cable. Further
up, the ratio reduced, making it easy for the driver to
apply a high force, as required especially for cars with
all-round disc brakes. As much to stimulate discussion
and to show what we had to offer, I designed an inexpensive variable-rate mechanism that was hidden inside
the lever. This design was followed by others, helping
Rearsby to establish its design credentials and win
business with both relatively simple conventional
designs and its own innovative designs.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I had an opportunity
to return to the world of shoemaking machinery and
this was too good to miss. I therefore had to pull away
from Rearsby, reluctantly. The company has enjoyed
increasing success since 1987. It supplies all the longestablished British vehicle builders and all the newcomers from the East, with the rare distinction of even
exporting some of its components for vehicle building in
Japan.
There is one other enduring and instructive memory
from Rearsby that I will mention at this stage. There
was a lot of good humour in our work at Rearsby and
many good stories, especially from Ivor Vaughans wide
experience.
I shall introduce this one in the form of a maths question for GCSE:
n+n+n=?
So as not to make it too challenging, I will make it a
multiple choice question where it is only necessary to
select the answer (a), (b) or (c), where
(b) = 3n,
(c) = n.
(a) = n3,
I have to tell you that the answer is not as straightforward as you might think from conventional mathematics. Let me explain.
Just before I joined Rearsby, Ivor Vaughan had been
visiting Japan to learn something of the ways that they
were achieving greater success. After visiting an impressive manufacturing operation, he asked about the staffing.
How many research engineers and technicians do
you have? he asked.
600 was the answer.
How many development engineers ...?
600.
How many manufacturing engineers ...?
600.
At this stage, the visitor, who like me had had some
experience of communications across this cultural
barrier, decided to ask a check question because the
communication might not have been exactly what it
appeared to be on the surface. So how big is your total
engineering staff?
600.
Part 8 : Journal of Engineering Manufacture

A few more questions revealed answers what would

have made this comprehensive response : We have a
team of 600 engineers and technicians covering
research, development and manufacturing engineering
and while we have specialists in different aspects of
engineering, we keep moving most of the team through
different parts of the process and dont give individuals
titles that keep them in boxes. This develops our people
and makes them more effective for our Company.
This is something we need to remember and constantly work towards. At British United, we achieved
benefits of this kind of approach when we moved from a
company-wide functional organization to separate
product businesses incorporating their own product
development teams. You can see the difficulty with
finding the best answer to my little equation. Perhaps
the best answer would be N-indicating the same
number with greater stature.
9 THE INSTITUTION

I have had a lot of involvement with the Institution and

I know that it has played a very significant part in my
personal and professional development.
I joined, as a student member, while I was at University but, apart from attending a few evening lectures,
only became involved after graduating when I was persuaded to attend a meeting of the Leicester Graduate
and Student Members Panel. The opportunity to meet
people from other companies and to work with them to
organize meetings was useful, despite the commitment I
had to evening classes for the Diploma in Management
Studies at the time. Perhaps the venue for the meeting,
the New Road Inn in Leicester, had something to do
with it. The progression towards greater involvement
was steady and natural, with me representing the panel
in the East Midlands G&S Section Committee and at
the local senior members panel committee meetings. I
had the advantage that senior people in British Uniteds
R&D department were involved in the local panel and
in the branch committee too, giving them a chance to
encourage me and for me to show initiative beyond my
daily work. I was soon representing the East Midlands
G&S Section in the national young member committee
meeting at Birdcage Walk and from that allowed myself
to be the young member representative on a working
party on Institution activities, chaired by Diarmuid
Downs, helping Council recover from a vote which
rejected a subscription increase and putting in place a
mechanism to greatly reduce the chances of this happening again. By the time I achieved chartered membership in 1976, I was known on the branch committee,
having represented the young members section on it, so
I stayed involved, although not quite continuously, and
was chairman of the branch from 1986 to 1988. I was
first elected to Council in 1977 and many times since.
Through this involvement, I have had many
opportunities to learn, to discuss and to develop ideas
in fields that I would not have entered otherwise, as well
as to get to know people with different experiences. I
have had the chance to work with good teams of
members and staff, and, as in my career, I have seen
how achievements are much more likely if I get the
objective clear first, prepare some alternative strategies
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and then get a team to work from them towards a solution.

I have also observed that it is perfectly possible for
members to attend the kind of Institution meetings that
I have attended over the years only to sit on the sidelines. I have taken the opportunities to get involved and
I am sure that, without this experience, I would be
much less well rounded than I am today. I recommend
this kind of active involvement, especially to younger
engineers, as a very good route to personal development
and for continuing professional development (CPD).
I am conscious that this Institution is the Institution
of Mechanical Engineers-of
not for. The members
belong to the Institution to meet others, to improve
their knowledge and skills and, mostly, to qualify as
professionals. They also belong so that, together, they
can do things that they could not do as isolated individuals. The Institution provides the structure, but much of
the promotion of mechanical engineering, in the national interest, is in the hands of the members. Those of us
who take part not only help by making progress in this
but also benefit personally.
10 OTHER ENGINEERING ASSOCIATIONS

I have spent so many evenings, and a lot of days too,

with the Institution that you might not think I could
want to mention anything else along remotely similar
lines. There are, however two subjects to mention.
10.1 The 1984 Club and the 1994 Club

As a result of an initiative by members of the local

IMechE panel in Leicester and, in particular Phil
Davies and Rod England who worked at Pedigree Petfoods in Melton Mowbray at the time, a remarkably
simple and effective Club of professional engineers and
managers was formed at the beginning of 1984. It has
been my pleasure and to my benefit to have been a
member of the Club. The aim is simply to provide a
forum for key people in local businesses to exchange
information and views about manufacturing and other
matters of common interest. This seems to me to have a
lot in common with the objects of our larger national
professional engineering institutions, although perhaps
they lost the directness and freshness that the 1984 Club
has when they grew in membership numbers and in the
geographical areas they covered. The Club meets infrequently, just twice or three times each year, the meetings being held, in turn, at the members places of work.
To describe the meetings simply as visits to the factories
where the members work, with talks about the nature of
the business and a meal in a restaurant or pub after, is
reasonably accurate but gives too much impression of
pure industrial tourism. The fact that it is a club and
that many of the members know each other well means
that there are few inhibitions and discussions go to the
heart of matters affecting the businesses visited. We
started with nominated discussion topics for each
meeting but soon found that this was not necessary as
subjects such as various aspects of industrial relations,
regulations or customer/supplier relationships are
always plentiful as a result of the visit and talk about
the Company visited. The number of members is tiny
and hovers around 20, with a few who, like me, have
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343

been in since the first year. Over the years, there have
been many members who have joined, by invitation of
another member, and many who have moved out of the
area. Meetings have been held in a very wide range of
businesses ranging from coal mines to food and drink
can manufacture, from aircraft maintenance to factory
architecture.
The whole thing is very simple. There are no formalities, no subscriptions, only a fde of member names and
addresses that are passed to the next volunteer to host a
meeting. He organizes that next meeting, everybody
pays for their own meal and the file gets passed on
again. Why not try the same idea? It provides a local
focus that a national organization cannot.
The 1984 Club was my inspiration for a similar one
at British United and USM Texon. We have a total of
lo00 employees in Leicester, organized in a number of
product businesses with limited interaction between
them. Having organized a presidential visit for Dr Tony
Denton to the Company just over a year ago, it became
clear that the professional engineers in the Company
were not in touch with each other and were interested
to know a lot more about what was going on in other
business units within the Company. I therefore formed
the 1994 Club which meets after hours and allows
volunteers from the members who are largely drawn
from the members of engineering institutions, both
chartered and incorporated, and professional scientific
bodies working in our companies to present their work
to other members of the Club and for discussion afterwards over a beer and some sandwiches. I offer this to
you as an example of another opportunity that you may
like to take to enable you to start a self-sustaining professional activity that, if these two examples are anything to go by, will prove itself by the eagerness of the
members to conclude one meeting by agreeing to the
date for the next.
10.2 Universities

I cannot let this opportunity pass without mentioning

my involvement, as an industrialist, with universities. I
will not go into any more detail about the benefits of
contacts through a well-managed research programme
as I referred to it when describing the Autoscan stitcher.
I was fortunate to be invited to join industrial/
academic steering panels for MSc courses at Cranfield,
in part of the university now called the School of Industrial and Manufacturing Science, and also at De Montfort University, where I have been honoured to receive
a senior industrial fellowship which makes me an honorary visiting professor in the School of Engineering
and Manufacture. Through occasional meetings in both
of these educational institutions, I have learnt a lot. I
understand that involvement of industrialists with universitia was out of fashion for a number of years but is
back in now, and in my opinion this will be to the
benefit of all involved.
11 AGENDA FOR THE PROFESSION

The early part of 1995 6nds the country facing many

contradictory indicators. The pound is weak. Unemployment is falling. The various surveys of industrial
and personal confidence indicate that some people and
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344

F CHRISTOPHER PRICE

businesses are more optimistic while others feel more

threatened.
Employment in manufacturing industry has risen in
recent months, albeit by a tiny amount and after
decades of decline. Compared with 15 years ago,
employment in the production and construction sector
has fallen from 7.9 to 5.3 million while the service sector
has grown from 13.2 to 15.5 million (5). The march of
new technology is reducing jobs in parts of the service
sector, and I am sure that the trend will continue. New
jobs are being announced in manufacturing while others
are still being lost. Many of the new jobs are with
foreign companies setting up plants in the United
Kingdom with the benefits of access to Europe, relatively low labour costs and an excellent infrastructure.
Our manufacturing base has been eroded, as is clear
from the trade figures for 1994 showing a continuing
large deficit in this sector, although the overall national
position is of almost achieving a balance of trade
against a background of the national economy growing
by 3.9 per cent in the year, the biggest rise for six years.
Manufacturing output is at a 20 year high in some
sectors but, overall, is just about holding steady year on
year. In the trade figures, earnings from overseas operations of British-owned businesses made a good contribution to the balance of trade, and there must be some
credit here for our professional engineers and managers
who have responsibilities for overseas operations of
British companies.
Can we be satisfied that we have a strong enough
manufacturing base to sustain our economy and create
the additional jobs we need? I think not.
Are we doing enough to strengthen our manufacturing base? Well, we are doing something. With the
publication of the recent white papers on realizing our
potential and competitiveness, the government has
clearly acknowledged the importance of manufacturing.
The conclusions of the first foresight exercises have just
been published. Science Week has, for a time at least,
enthused large numbers of our young people. The
broadcast media did something to support Science
Week, but, on average through the year, its technologybased output falls short of the same kind of material
broadcast in Japan. We really need a clear focus on the
importance, the challenge and the satisfaction of
working in science, engineering and manufacturing
every week, in the media and in government, if we are
to overcome the preferences that young people have to
study subjects further towards the arts end of the spectrum. Years ago, it may have made everybody feel good
to see a few able young people supported by wealthy
patrons to study and be creative in such subjects, but
today we cannot expect to extend national patronage to
all who would prefer to follow such courses. Equally, I
hope we have dispelled the view that innovation and
design are, like good art and music, things that we
should have simply as a matter of national pride. Innovation and design are essential for the long-term maintenance of our living standards. Should we take comfort
from the fact that national R&D expenditure is reported, by the Central Statistical Ofice, to have increased
from 10.9 billion in 1992 to 11.7 billion in 1993
(excluding military R&D of about 2.1 billion in both
years)? It is another move in the right direction but falls
short of our competitor nations where governments
Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

take a much more pro-active role in ensuring that their

manufacturing industries have the technology and
equipment to be fully world competitive. My visits to
newly industrializing nations have convinced me that,
although their economies have some way to go to catch
us up, they are gaining on us rapidly and they will not
slow their pace of improvement as they draw level with
us; therefore, relatively, we will decline.
Our education system is under fire. The Engineering
Council concludes that first year university engineering
students are weaker in maths that was the case ten
years ago. Companies testing potential apprentices have
found very low standards of maths. Another survey has
shown that it is more difficult to get good A level grades
in maths and science than in arts courses and some
have consequently proposed to reduce the standards in
maths and science. Meanwhile, bodies responsible for A
levels in Asian countries which use the British system,
but claim to have maintained standards over the last
decade, report that our present A levels rank at only 70
per cent of theirs. The introduction of a starred A grade
in GCSE is another sign of falling standards. Even the
standards of some of our degrees are being questioned.
We cannot let our standards slip and expect to stay
competitive. If education standards are taken more seriously in countries that we compete with internationally,
they will win in the long run.
At last, through the initiative of Sir John Fairclough
and the follow-on work of teams of members of the
Engineering Council and the Institutions, the engineering profession is set to form a new relationship and to
come together to present a united front to the nation
while maintaining the excellence of the different specialist areas represented by the individual institutions. We
must make this new relationship work well and visibly
so that we contribute to addressing all these issues and
increase the national emphasis on the importance of our
technology and manufacturing. We cannot hide from
the fact that the engineering institutions have some
responsibility for the present lack of national emphasis
on this, and if fragmentation of the profession has been
partly to blame, we now have the means to correct the
situation. Some good teamworking of groups of engineering institutions, both among themselves and with
other organizations and government, is what we must
put in place to make this a reality. This, as well as
ensuring that this Institution achieves greater recognition within its own part of the engineering spectrum,
will be a major theme of my presidential year. I will be
encouraging young members to play a larger and more
effective part in the Institution, keeping an emphasis on
the high standard of qualification and ensuring that the
Institutions Continuing Professional Development
activities are fully developed. I will also be adding
emphasis to the provision, by the Institution, of valuable services to other organizations and people outside
its qualified membership as well as those within it, both
at home and abroad. Working in teams and providing
or ensuring proper leadership will be the means.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have mentioned just a few names of people I have

worked with in my career and I extend my thanks to
them and to all my other fellow team members over the
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years at BU, USM Texon and Rearsby, where my particular thanks are to Ivor Vaughan for letting me use
Rearsby material in this paper.
I must also include Institution members and staff
who have encouraged me and worked with me in my
endeavours in several parts of the board and committee
structure, especially those who pushed me to take
bigger challenges and supported me in the early days
after I accepted them. You will be aware, from the
annual report for 1994, that our immediate past President, Brian Kent, has promoted some presidential teamwork and I am most grateful to him for keeping me
fully informed and directly involved so that I can take
up the position knowing a great deal about the current
issues and be ready to grasp the baton and run. The
second deputy has been involved too, although to a
lesser extent. I will follow Mr Kents example and
involve my deputies so that our team can be very effective.
As my year as President starts, I owe particular
thanks to my colleagues on the board of USM Texon
and my staff and colleagues in the Company for supporting me up to and through this very important year.

Q IMecbE 1995

345

I also thank my family for encouragement and tolerance of the time that my Institutional involvement has
taken. My greatest thanks are to my new wife, Sylvia,
who married me just two months ago knowing that,
while we can share some of the events of the year, I will
inevitably be away from home and from her more than
either of us would choose.

REFERENCES
1 Cooper, B. P. Shoe machinery. Proc. Instn Mech. Engrs, 1937, 136,

13.
2 Kestell, T. A. Evolution and design of machinery primarily used in

the manufacture of boots and shoes. Proc. lnstn Mech. Engrs, 19634,178(1), 625-660.
3 Lord, M., Fo~~lston,
J. and Smith,P. Technical evaluation of a CAD
system for orthopaedic shoe-upper design. Proc. Instn Mech. Engrs,
Part H,1991,2M(H2)109-115.
,
4 Tout, N. R., Reedmen, D. C., Preece, C. and Simmons, J. E. L.
Intelligent automated assembly of the upper parts of shoes. Proceedings of IMechE Conference on Mechatronics, Cambridge,
12-13 September 1990, paper C419/028, pp. 103-108 (Mechanical
Engineering Publications, London).
5 Employment Gazette, March 1995.

Roc Instn Mcch Engrs Vol209