Indian Moments

You want to know about the challenges that will face India in its attempt to live up to the India Rules the World headlines of those oafs at the Times of India group? Here are two Indian Moments that took place last week.

We have spend tonnes of money and effort trying to get two local machine makers to design and make machines for us that will give European levels of speed and productivity while being 35% the price. We think we will succeed but we have a long way to go.

Machine number one was designed to be accurate to within +/-.1mm, the same as market leading machines in Europe. We spent buckets getting the transport right using parts from all over the world, and in fact even buying the critical components already machined from Europe. In theory this should have given us a machine that was dead easy to set up and run. In reality the damn thing often took two days to get to real productivity. A lot of troubleshooting later the cause was found to be that while the transport and all the components were dead accurate the louche louts making the machine had a different level of accuracy programmed in their brains and hands so they had set up the machine with +/- 2mm tolerances.

Machine number two was shown to me yesterday and the proud maker claimed that it was running at a two second cycle time (design criteria was three seconds). Me, I counted one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, and thousand and four and said it was four seconds. Whereupon machine wallah and all his minions peered at their computer screen and said 'no it is two seconds - actually 1.8'. I went through the 'one thousand and one' bit again several times before they consented to actually measure against reality rather than look at their screen.

When I sent the video to my office in Paris the first thing that the CEO there did was to count off the seconds though I had said nothing to him.

I do not know if this disconnect is because we Indians for the most part do not as children tinker with things when we are young, or because at school we learn but do not question. If it is the former then God help the progress of the world as no tinkering takes place anywhere now, except in the virual world.

Still, all's well that ends well though the timing of the end has cost us a great deal of loot. Machine number one is indeed accurate and simple to set up; machine number two runs within its design cycle time.