Your correspondent has reached the age when he is faintly – very faintly – amused by the panic, however understandable, among younger souls. There will be an upturn. And when it comes some new thinking is needed about true customer focus. On that you can have no better source of peerless wisdom than your plumber.
Well mine, anyway. He told me that many boilermakers are reluctant to let independent gas fitters have access to spare parts for the boilers the fitters service. The manufacturers want their own people to do the field repairs, not just because it's another revenue stream but so that they can be sure they know exactly what went wrong with a boiler and they can incorporate that into upgrades or new designs.
So when a boiler fault results in an engineering change order, the boilermakers’ own service vans are stripped out of old parts overnight and restocked. But an independent fitter has stocks going back years and may even fit out of date parts to customers’ boilers. This problem is particularly acute for the electronic control and monitoring systems that rule today's heating equipment. Even minor boiler faults can be traced to a firmware or some other issue that entails replacing the entire controller instead, as happened in the old days, of tinkering with a valve or replacing a filter. This is great for the manufacturer and no help to the customer.
The car industry has a similar issue. If someone damaged your car door 30 years ago you went round a few scrap yards until you found a replacement. Do that today and the car’s electronic systems stop functioning. Manufacturers put tags on each part to check that it’s an authorised replacement. If a car won’t start, the only information the driver has is an error code that flashes up on the dashboard. The car company often won’t divulge what the error code means, so you may not know that all that’s needed is a new spark plug.
No user likes manufacturers dictating to him this way for reasons of their own. It would all be so much better if the user had a bigger say, wouldn’t it?
Up to a point, Lord Copper. As General Motors and the other two go cap in hand to Washington I’m reminded of the biggest ever initiative by a major customer to make its suppliers provide exactly what it wanted. In this case it was GM dictating to the suppliers of manufacturing IT systems.
GM grew sick of the proliferation of plant-control systems that wouldn’t talk to each other. Supervisors were faced with up to five sets of screens and keyboards from different robot, conveyor, machine tool and shop floor terminal suppliers to oversee a single part of the production process.
GM’s answer was to set out a manufacturing version of the ISO seven-layer communications model based on the IEEE 802.4 broadband standard. Controller suppliers like Allen-Bradley (AB), Honeywell, Cutler-Hammer, Square D, Texas Instruments, or time and attendance supplier IBM and others either conformed to this Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) or they didn't get GM’s business.
Inevitably the IT companies had to start sharing information. Visitors to the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry huge MAP demonstrator at Birmingham's NEC in 1985 were confronted with the dizzying, unthinkable sight of IBM and DEC on the same stand.
But GM’s arrogant and misplaced insistence on 802.4 broadband token-passing protocol for the factory floor instead of the cheaper 802.3 (ethernet) already widely used in office automation killed the project. Shopfloor ethernet is now standard even for passing control signals. But GM wouldn’t have it. MAP’s cost per node meant that the world’s factory owners refused to rally to the MAP flag, and by 1990 the game was over.
MAP was a worldwide collaboration involving the largest industrial IT suppliers on the planet, from Toyko to Berlin to Detroit, in expenditure of billions of dollars. GM was such a big customer for most of them that the diktat forced them to abandon existing product lines and R&D. An insider told me at the time that AB effectively dug a huge hole and threw $40m of products and research into it. By 1985 AB was so weakened by the exercise that rival Rockwell bought it. In 1985 there were over a hundred sizeable programmable controller manufacturers. Today there are half a dozen.
As far as I can discover, not a trace of all this effort still exists apart, that is, from the lingering effects of the IT companies’ realisation that, if they banded together, they could stitch up their users like kippers. A US lawyer told me a decade later that no anti-trust actions had resulted from anti-competitive practices in the IT trade because nobody in legal circles could understand all that stuff.
Neither users nor vendors have a monopoly of wisdom. That’s life.
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