Friday, February 29, 2008

What the rubber mat said

I sat in my clients' office yesterday afternoon, waiting for them to arrive. The office had lovely new desks; as it turned out, not new, but taken from another business that has recently closed.

The reason for the delay - at least for one of the directors - was a last-moment requirement for tico rubber, needed next morning for anti-vibration matting under a five-ton machine that was being re-sited. The usual supplier, a major international concern, has recently shut down the closest depot to Birmingham. Rationalisation. Outsourcing. Globalization.

So while waiting, I tried to help my client find the material somewhere else. Googling away, we found it in the far north of England, or Cornwall; too far. Maybe just possibly in Market Harborough or Leicester? On calling the nearer companies, specifications and stock levels were doubtful.

My clients' business is contrarian: they move machines, and although originally that meant from one UK site to another, more often now it involves sending them abroad. As the decline of British manufacturing industry has accelerated, they've been very busy recently. For obvious reasons, the bonanza will end sometime.

But back to the matting. Once, suppliers of components you needed would be close at hand. Now we could be looking at journeys to the ends of the country - meaning cost, delay and maybe, sometimes, a lost contract.

The Pearl River in China is now home to myriads of small manufacturers, and the synergy improves everyone's productive capacity. Like it used to in Birmingham, "city of a thousand trades". But now in the UK, we could be dropping below the threshold of economic viability for manufacturing industry.

That's what the mat said to me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I suspect that you didn't order engineering kit in the 70s. "Delivery? That'll be 12 weeks."

Sackerson said...

And we've just had ten years of throwing away the benefits of the supply-side reforms of the 80s.

Media ignorance and bias haven't helped, either: how long did it take for us to be told that Boys From The Blackstuff was written about the failure of the Labour years leading up to the Callaghan-era Winter of Discontent, not the alleged hard-heartedness of Thatcherism? It's taken me a long time to realise that your friends aren't necessarily the ones who say they are.