Wealth Generation—Our Essential Task

Wealth generation is the responsibility of those who design and make our engineered products. Others can do nothing more than create a sympathetic environment. Improving our manufacturing effectiveness, in its broadest business sense, is essential and an absolutely practical proposition. If most of our engineering businesses and factories were as good as our best our share of world trade would quickly improve.

Five actions are suggested as the ingredients of a revival programme. We need to: (i) accept that too many of our factories are obsolete; many of them, if designed anew for today's purpose, would not remotely resemble existing operations; (ii) stop being tolerant of the 15–30 per cent excess cost in our products; (iii) become more commercially aggressive in applying new technology such as CAD/CAM and FMS; (iv) substantially improve our national skills and capacity to plan and implement more competitive operations; (v) encourage every engineering business unit, that does not have at least one major radical improvement programme under way, to start one now.

While most revival programmes will require investment, the imperative ingredient is people, especially the creative engineer. Wealth generation is our essential task.