June 2021

12 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk June 2021 PWE 40th Anniversary T o be self-indulgent for a moment, I joined my first publishing company 41 years ago in 1980. I worked on Design Engineering magazine (of which I later became editor) and it was published by Morgan Grampian. Both were market leaders of their time - and yet neither exist today. At that time, the magazine production process was very different to the electronic one of today. Copy was produced in triplicate on mechanical typewriters, where we used carbon paper to generate three copies on white, blue and pink paper for filing purposes. Covered with vast amounts of Tippex, the copy was sent on motorcycles to the other end of the country for typesetting; back came a galley proof, which was sub-edited, and then returned with a layout for a final page proof to be generated. Final corrections were done by phone and if necessary approved by fax. The whole process took many more people and several days to complete, compared to the computer-based systems used today, where editors write directly into a layout template. Many manufacturing processes have similarly been revolutionised over four decades! But the demise of the magazine and its publishing company, and the move from manual to automatic processes, closely parallel what has happened in the manufacturing and process industries. The publishing company was the subject of a management buyout, before being broken up and sold to other, larger publishing organisations and ultimately losing its identity altogether. How many times have we seen that in manufacturing industry, and the suppliers that feed it? A cursory glance at an archived copy of PWE in 1981 will show editorial and advertising from many companies which have since disappeared, as buyouts and consolidation have occurred. Design Engineering, despite once being the dominant player in its market, proved unable to sustain the changes of ownership and economic pressures. Internet and smartphones From a pure technology point of view, how things have changed! Fig 1 shows people listening to a concert in 2019, where everyone is holding up a mobile device to get a poor quality recording of the event, whilst missing the ambience of the event itself that listeners in 1981 would have enjoyed. Perhaps a stark reminder that not everything about modernisation is necessarily good. In 1981, there was no internet and there were no mobile devices. The internet has revolutionised our domestic lives and in manufacturing plants, on-going processes are still developing through the emergence of Internet 4.0 technologies. Automation Perhaps the most impactful change on the shop floor has been the transition to automation. While automation has been around since the 1950s, the widespread implementation of robotics has only gained momentum over the past decade or so. It still takes highly skilled, well-trained workers to oversee the operation of robotics, and automation has increased the average worker output value in many manufacturing-related industries. Even so, as in publishing, the headcount has dramatically reduced to the point where an entire manufacturing plant can be managed by, at most, a handful of people (cue the standing joke about a modern plant being managed by a man and a dog; the dog being there to prevent the man from interfering with the plant, and the man is there to feed the dog). Automation, together with the ease-of- programming of machines, has resulted in hitherto unimaginable flexibility in batch production. Batch sizes of one are possible in certain cases, such as in the pharmaceutical industry, where individual medicine packages can now be produced for individual patients. Occupational safety In the automotive sector, humans have slowly been replaced by robots to help with hard labour. At SEAT’s Martorell factory near Barcelona, workers are helped out with heavy lifting by state-of-the-art robots. In contrast, in earlier times, workers had to endure temperatures of more than 40C - with no air- conditioning. Reflecting the increasing emphasis on occupational safety which has been evident over the past 40 years, cameras and sensors capture the movements of factory workers to create a 3D avatar, using analysis software similar to that used to create characters in video games. Then, virtual reality technology is used to simulate different positions on the assembly 40 years on, the new world meets the old world In celebration of PWE’s 40th Anniversary, consultant editor Andy Pye reflects on some of the key changes to have influenced the Plant and Works Engineering arena over the 40 years of its existence. Fig 1: Raised outstretched hands with smartphones photographing the stage during a concert