Managing against disasters

Citation

Loughlin, C. (2010), "Managing against disasters", Assembly Automation, Vol. 30 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2010.03330caa.001

Managing against disasters

Article Type: Editorial From: Assembly Automation, Volume 30, Issue 3

Our theme for this issue is “Assembly of micro and nano-sized electronic devices” and for an example of the power of the very small we need look no further than the ash clouds emanating from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

Apparently, the volcanic dust is a danger to aircraft jet engines because of the risk both of abrasion and also the possibility that the dust particles, which are essentially glass, might melt in the intense heat and coat some engine components.

It is said that you never really appreciate something until you have to manage without it. The plans of holiday makers and conference attendees were thrown into chaos and shipments of industrial parts were left stranded while plans based on just-in-time delivery hit the buffers.

Whether the meteorologists overreacted to the dangers or not, we must remember that this was a relatively minor eruption in the whole scheme of things and that the Earth has seen eruptions much, much worse in the past and will no doubt see them again in the future.

This time it was air transport that was hit, and perhaps air is the most vulnerable form of transport given the sensitivity of the engines and the all-important safety considerations; however, it would be a brave production engineer that announced that the component delivery schedules they had put in place were immune from outside influences.

What then can we do to help ensure that our production lines are kept running? Clearly acts of nature, industrial unrest and terrorism can all take their toll and it is hard to imagine any system that involves people ever being 100 percent guaranteed.

We can decide to carry greater stocks of component parts but how many is enough? One day, a week, a month’s worth? A container ship traveling from Japan to Europe will take at least three weeks for the journey and often much longer. If we do have large stocks then this will tie up a company’s financial resources and add inertia to the development of new products.

Clearly, if a company is vulnerable to transport delays then one answer is to reduce dependence on long distance transportation and manufacture more products locally from good stocks of raw materials.

I do not agree with the trend in recent years for companies to outsource their manufacturing to overseas countries for reasons of lower manufacturing costs. Rather than companies thinking “where can I go to get this manufactured for the lowest cost?” I would encourage them to think “how can I make these in my own country at an internationally competitive price?”

The global economy has not had a good press in recent years and we are all still recovering from the fallout. It is essential that we learn significant lessons from the mistakes of the past and make changes that minimise the risk of future disasters.

If we can all learn to become more independent and less reliant on short-term temporal advantages, then the world will become a much more stable place that is better protected from man-made and natural disasters.

Clive Loughlin