I had to attend a lot of these meetings whilst in the motor industry and they achieved nothing. They were an opportunity for management to lay down the latest reason/method devised to cut bonus (read pay) and try to introduce longer working days, ie extending Saturday morning from 1o/clock finish to 2o/clock, without extra pay. They always stressed how vital it was for full attendance, although we were not payed to be there as it was after 6pm, but if a customer arrived after hours with a problem I would be despatched to sort it out.These films would always be shown whilst attending factory training courses and our favourites were always those where John Cleese performed, irreplaceable!
@Arthur No Sheds Jackson Yeah, I guess you must've been. But why anyone would consider a princess back in the day, is beyond me. The SD1 was a cracking looking car, and still is today. Just a shame they weren't under BMW ownership back then, cos the SD1 could've been a world beater, especially if the fuel crisis never happened.
BL had some great designs which paved the way for the cars we have today, front-wheel drive, transverse engines et al. My parents had BMC/BL cars from the 1950's to the 1980's and never had a breakdown. There were rust issues with the Mark two Land crab they had in 1974, but in those days rust problems on Fords and Vauxhalls were much worse. Ford and Vauxhall also had many strikes and industrial disputes in the 1970's, but BL seem to have become the whipping boy of that particular era of industrial unrest, which is unfair. Personally, I would love it if I could go out tomorrow and buy a car badged Austin, Morris, Wolseley, Riley or Triumph; designed and built in Britain with some style and design flair like they used to have. Modern cars are much of a muchness these days, boring. Today everyone is obsessed with the 'badge', BMW, Mercedes, Audi et cetera. In fact many of these products are sub-standard and not built to last, great when they go, but hugely expensive to repair and maintain. Buy a Kia. Love and peace.
That Taffy chap was one of the itinerant teachers in 'Please Sir' with John Alderton. And the Jack the Lad one, Robin Nedwell, starred in Doctor in the House as Duncan Waring. Plus all the other Doctor spin-offs. Sadly he died in 1999 aged only 52 from at heart attack which happened in his own doctor's surgery. Bad luck mate, you made us all smile.
Lizzy Sladen drove the Tardis FFS,defeated the Daleks,fought off cybermen, and the kraken. Fixing the SD1 engine was a the final straw and beyond the wit of man.
Quality management is both a craft and a science. Its definition moves from one stage to another. The migration of quality applications and definitions across the value chain or supply chain is the most dynamic. Quality at the raw material ordering stage, next moving to inventory receiving and storage, to material flow management, to actual production in modular stages to packages, to shipment of the consignment to merchandising advice and shelf space management at shops to after-sales services and recall standards, etc. Quality is everywhere! That is the quantitative part. The qualitative aspect of the quality is the consumer behaviour or the perception of the buyer which determines its perceptual value based on the differentiated experience offered by the marketing and sales team in partnership with the vendors on the store shelf itself. This is what determines the cost-value relationship which becomes the listed price of the product in the market competition.
19:10 -> So, to be clear, in this example, BL doesn't actually fix the problem, they just modify another part of the manufacturing process to hide the crankshaft problem, which still exists....and the gentleman who thought it up deserves a medal.....indeed
The problem was the engine seizing, which they resolved, and the cause in the older design was the lip on the crankshaft. They updated the tolerances of the crankshaft to be in line with their machining capabilities, and changed the nominal chamfer of the connecting rod so there wouldn't be any binding regardless of the build condition. A manufacturing process will never be perfect, and it looks like due to age of the machinery, the design assumed tighter tolerances than were possible. The guy deserved a medal because he proposed increasing the chamfer (likely at zero-cost solution), instead of asking for hundreds of thousands of pounds for a new industrial machine.
If you have ever seen blueprints or engineering drawings then you will know that they won't just give the dimensions of the part, they will also specify the tolerances. So it might say this part needs to be 50 cm in diameter plus or minus 0.01 mm. A good engineer will carefully consider the tolerances. This is because as the tolerances get smaller, the cost to manufacture the part goes up and up. The problem with the crankshaft is they either didn't put the correct tolerance on the drawing or they didn't give the workers the right tools to meet that tolerance. The two solutions they considered were to either give the workers the tools they need to meet the required tolerance or redesign a part that interfaces this one so they don't need as tight of a tolerance on that specification. Modifying your design to loosen the tolerances that are difficult to meet is a perfectly valid way to overcome this problem. If you can modify your design so it will still work even with looser tolerances then not only will it be cheaper to manufacture, but your design might become more reliable as changes in temperature or normal wear and tear will not pull the dimensions of the parts out of spec.
While on paper they were the fourth or fifth largest carmaker in the world they were from the start a slipshod affair with more than a dozen marques, most of them badge ups, that more or less fought each other for the same market share. Quality aside it was pretty much designed to fail. They only just enough but not quite engineering philosophy archaic facilities and indifferent piecework sped along the inevitable.
21:50 Good old British Leyand solution. Instead of working on the actual faulty part, they make the tolerances between crankshaft and conrod so big that the fault is 'solved'. No wonder Range Rovers and SD1 were so unreliable. Cheers
It's like it is always. There must be the will to do one's work how it should be done. Why didn't they look how the Germans or French did it? On the other hand, 10 0r 20 years before Britain was able to build perfectly good cars.
Makes me wonder, who was the intended audience for these films that probably took a sizeable chunk of company money to begin with. If only they used the money to actually fix the problems sooner, innovate something and not make day time TV-drama about them.
These films were made only to be viewed by BL employees to encourage them to improve quality standards instead of treating the management like enemies.
In fact this is an excellent intro to continuous quality improvement used by all auto manufacturers including Toyota where its called Kaizan. Its roots are in the USA dating back pre WW2.
BL,British Leyland.The biggest joke that ended the car industry in Britain because they bought up the few remain British car firms and when BL ended,they took them down with them.They nearly destroyed Jaguar,who they owned aswell.The strikes were the main reason for the damage.
The strikes were a symptom, not a cause. Not saying that the stated reasons for the strikes were fair: I am saying that in an atmosphere of tension, miscommunication and distrust _any_ reason, even an oblique or contrived one, will be used to cause disruption. The problems at BL started at BMC in 1952 and were endemic to the entire organisation - by the time Leyland came into the picture it was too late. So little investment in plant, systems, R&D and marketing strategy had been made that the factories were Dickensian hulks where hope and morale were almost non-existent...ingrained social stratification bred resentment and passive aggression, social changes on a broad scale were breaking up traditional values and whole communities had been clinically herded into Brutalist housing. Global Depression from 1973. $0.02c
