Trade Talk: The old Chestnut, UK TV Reliability vs Japanese Reliability

I guess the Japanese were leaders in the world of technology, look at a Sony KV1320 for instance and compare it to any other set made at the time elsewhere. It ran cool, components didn't operate at their maximum ratings, a brilliant CRT design, properly designed and well made EHT stages, all resulting in a set that could operate for decades without attention. Quality was their watch-word, in design, components and manufacture. One tall order for anyone else at the time.

But, the key factor has always been price. People want the biggest picture at the lowest cost. They still do.

The first Japanese CTV's were small screen 20 inch and below and very reliable, most UK sets were 20inch and above and not as reliable. It's interesting to note that when the Japanese manufacturers started to produce the larger screens the reliability went down. This was in the 70's, no trade experience of later sets.

The larger screen sets were made from Japanese components and design but built in the U.K. Perhaps they had more experience with small screens, I was reading in a trade mag that screens over 17inch were heavily taxed in Japan, this was I think in the 60's, not sure if it carried over to the 70's.

There were speeches in Parliament about the possibility of dumping by the Japanese makers with sets into UK, I don't think it was proved but if true would not have helped the UK manufacturers. 

UK manufacturers had suffered and was in decline long before the Japanese sets entered the market, evidence by all the take overs during the late 50's and early 60's. The trade was used by the government of the day to regulate spending by the use of Purchase Tax, this did control inflation but it didn't help the industry not being able to plan one budget to the next the probably sales numbers.

UK components if specified correctly were good, unfortunately set makers wanted cheap, buy cheap pay twice, but it kept the prices down to ones that the public could pay.

The Japanese sets were also sold in the USA, to the detriment of the home manufacturers, nearly all those USA big name have gone, perhaps them all.

I don't think there was any one item that made the downfall of the industry, just many eating away at it.

Mind you, if all equipment was reliable and nothing ever failed or malfunctioned, there would have been no work for engineers. TV trade and in others too. 

This site would be pretty empty too if everything ever made still worked.  We would just have a catalogue of this set and that set.

It is however a sad thing that little manufacturing is left here now and most consumer goods come from the far east. Whether this state of affairs will change, who know's.

Chris said

Considering the UK had been doing this a long time, an industry producing TV's as far back as 1936, it was felt we should have learned the lessons and been up there with the best of them. The debate centered around was it just that UK designs were now bad, poor assembly methods or was it the components used. They agreed that it was not the design of the sets as they were not fundamentally all that different. It was noted one area in particular was looking to be the root cause, components!

Before the war, EMI, GEC and Ferranti were fully vertically integrated and in no way could it be said that their products were the most reliable: such comments were noted in Wireless World and the like.

By contrast, Bush and Murphy were noted for their reliability and bought many of their components in (usually British Insulated for Bush, NSF (Nuremburg Screw Factory) for Murphy): but the difference was Bush tested every component prior to use.

It is management who are responsible for the running of any large company, and it is therefore they who must take responsibility for both success and failure in equal measure.  British manufacturing industry failed essentially because its management was not of a calibre that was up to dealing with the challenges posed by the competition.  The fact that, in domestic electronics, the competition was Japanese just allowed British management to give full rein to their xenophobia.  It says a lot that the British response to the threat of Japanese imports of better quality, more reliable goods was not "we must raise our game" but "they're cheating".  In fact, whatever the DTI was then called held two enquiries into allegations of "dumping" by Japanese electronics manufacturers: one into finished goods and one specifically into colour television cathode-ray tubes, and could find no evidence in substantiation in either case.  Since "dumping" is generally taken to mean selling into a market at less than the fully-factored cost of production, it says much for the attitude and openness of the Japanese that they must have released sufficient information to allow the true cost of manufacture to be calculated:  British companies, by contrast, regarded this data as something akin to a state secret.

The axe finally fell for many manufacturing companies in the early 1980s when their managements went to the Government, as they were used to doing, looking for financial support to tide them over the economic recession, which they could have seen coming had they chosen to look.  They were astonished to be told that the Thatcher Government no longer regarded industry as part of the in-work benefits system, and that no taxpayers' money would be forthcoming.  The managers promptly fell off their leather-upholstered chairs in amazement and shock.  The fact that Thatcher had been telling anyone who would listen since she became Conservative Leader in 1975 that this was exactly what she was proposing to do meant that it can have come as a surprise only to those who chose not to heed unwelcome messages.

"The Government didn't help because they kept changing the tax" - yes, in a free market economy, about the only way any Government has of regulating economic activity based on personal consumption is to regulate personal disposable income, and about the only effective way the Government has of doing this is through taxation.  This is Macroeconomics 101.  Furthermore, the Government was open about the fact that this is what they were doing, and everyone knew that this is what they were doing and why.  The alternative, which would have been uncontrolled inflation, would have been, and was when it happened, a very good deal worse.  One might be forgiven for innocently thinking that managers of companies who relied on selling manufactured products into a market dependant on the availability of disposable income, might think it a wizard wheeze to keep tabs on what the Government was up to in this direction, and use the intelligence for planning purposes.  The managements themselves don't appear to have agreed.

With very few honourable exceptions, British managements' attitude towards their labour force since time immemorial might be summarised as "the workers' station in life is to make the product: managements' station in life is to drive round in new cars and live in nice houses".  It ought to come as no surprise that the workers are apt to be none too happy with this arrangement and might, perhaps, want to do something about it.  The Japanese were sensible enough to realise that, if you rely on people to make the product that you sell for profit, keeping those people on-side might not be such a grim idea.  In part, this reflected the Japanese cultural notion of employment as a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership between employer and employee, rather than the feudal, master-and-servant basis which bedevilled British employment practices, and continues to do so.  As long ago as the mid-thirties, Frank Murphy had become concerned by what he saw as the social effects on his production workforce of employment in what was then regarded as a seasonal occupation.  His subsequent attempts to put his theories of social responsibility in commerce into practice led to a boardroom coup against him by his fellow directors and, ultimately, his ejection from Murphy Radio, Ltd.  Things didn't get a lot better in the next forty years.

In the early 70s, the brother of a schoolfriend contrived to fail his O-levels, and consequently needed a job in a bit of a hurry.  Somewhat to our surprise, since he wasn't regarded as terribly mechanically-gifted, he managed to land himself an apprenticeship at British Leyland in Longbridge.  The staple products of the company at the time were the Mini, the 1100/1300 and the various permutations of the Land-Crab (designed, you'll note, up to about 15 years previously: good old British industry - always at the forefront of innovation).  There was a scheme in the factory whereby an employee who came up with an improvement suggestion which had the effect of saving money was paid a percentage of the saving.  I'd point out, in passing, that suggestions which had the effect of improving the quality of the product were dismissed out-of-hand.

One of the foremen on the 11/1300 line came up with a suggestion which lowered the cost of production by some, even then, relatively trivial amount, which I have always understood to be in the region of 10p per vehicle.  At time, the combined annual production of these cars was several hundred thousand examples.  There was huge fuss at the end of the financial year when it was discovered that the foreman, as a result of his suggestion, had actually taken home more than the Managing Director, and, indeed, was employing a stockbroker to keep track of his money.  The idea that some horny-handed Brummie might have genuinely made a greater contribution to the company than the MD was regarded as so unacceptable that the suggestion scheme was withdrawn forthwith.  When people complain about labour problems at BL, Red Robbo and so forth, it's as well to be aware that this was the other side of the coin.  I've no reason to believe that BL were in any way uniquely backward-looking in this respect.

Japanese electronics was more reliable that British because the Japanese had learned through their motor-car manufacturing industry that it is a huge mistake to take a piecemeal view of the manufacturing process.  If you are interested, take a look at the work of Taiichi Ohno at Toyota.  At one time, it took Toyota less manufacturing time to make one Lexus car "right first time" than the luxury German makers were expending on re-work and fault correction at the end of the line.  The Japanese answer to the issue of component reliability was vertical integration.  At the same time, the relationship between British setmakers and their component suppliers was of the former trying to shave fractions of a penny off the price and the latter desperately trying to make a profit.  This may be a better way of ensuring reliability, but I'm not convinced.  The Japanese invested early in printed-circuits and flow-soldering: both measures which massively reduce production errors and hence the amount of rework needed.  We were still hand-soldering TVs in the late sixties.  Finally, the Japanese had worked out that, since you're still likely to have random early failures, you're better off making sure these happen in the factory, where they can be put right with least cost and fuss. Consequently they got their test and QA measures spot-on.  The British answer to the same issue was that "after-work is the retail trade's problem".

I'm also minded of the early 70's, three day working week, industrial disputes, and in some industries a labour force who didn't give toss, or even worse, were hell bent on bringing British industries to their knees.

It was degree of militancy on an unprecedented scale across just about every industry in the land...... "We've got the power to the working hour, and every other day of the year....."

British industry has never really dared to look forward ever since, and hardly surprising that British goods suffered in quality and workmanship, and a rapidly declining reputation world wide.

Katie_Bush said
I'm also minded of the early 70's, three day working week, industrial disputes, and in some industries a labour force who didn't give toss, or even worse, were hell bent on bringing British industries to their knees.

It was degree of militancy on an unprecedented scale across just about every industry in the land...... "We've got the power to the working hour, and every other day of the year....."

The question that has to be asked is : why did the workforce behave like this?  Most employees, and certainly anyone who has ever been unemployed for any length of time, are very aware of the link between work, wages, and the basics of life such as food on the table and a roof over your head.  However, in a culture where the management regard the production workforce as no more than a necessary evil of life, and believe that letting them know of that view at every opportunity is somehow a motivational force, it ought not to be so surprising if a certain loss of patience occurs after a while.

Most remotely thoughtful Trades Union activists realise that, in most enterprises, the workers have at least as much to lose as the management - often more so, because managers often have something in reserve and can afford to pick themselves up and start again, whereas a very large fraction of the workforce thinks it is lucky if it is slightly less overdrawn than last time come next payday.  Leaving aside Peter Sellers and Reg Varney as Shop Steward role models, I would agree that the movement was slower than it should have been to recognise this essential truth, but then, if you and the people you are elected to represent have been taught by successive managements to regard employed life as something akin to trench warfare, it takes quite a lot to think outside that particular box.

The Germans and the Japanese had, and have, a very different approach to industrial life, the Germans as a result of their efforts to turn over a new leaf after the war, and the Japanese because it comes as part of their culture of collective, collaborative effort.  The Germans have had workforce representatives at Board level in their large companies since the early fifties - I note that we have just, once again, shied away from the same idea over here, although I think it says a lot about even contemporary British industry that it seems to be going to need the force of legislation to make it happen.  When the Japanese brought over the idea of paying the workers to tell the management how to make improvements to the way the product was made (quality circles and workers' councils), you would have thought from the popular press that a communist uprising was only hours away.  It is true that both countries had been forced to start again more-or-less from scratch at the end of the war, and both had aspects of their pre-war and wartime cultures that they were very anxious to distance themselves from.  But by 1980, British management had had 35 years since VE day to invest, modernise and change their ways, and had signally failed to do so to anything like the necessary extent to ensure survival.

I will finish with another anecdote.  Not long after I started my industrial life, the BBC was haemorrhaging operational and engineering staff to the ITV companies, mainly because salaries over there were about three times BBC rates on a like-for-like basis (I would point out that BBC salaries for engineering staff were so low that a basic grade Engineer, married with two children, qualified for means-tested in-work benefits).  I was invited out to a dinner party, at which also present was a manager of a company making, if I recall correctly, bathroom fittings.  We were discussing the difficulties of recruiting staff.  "Oh, " he said, " we have no problems.  We can get as many as we need at (a rate which, allowing for subsequent inflation, would now correspond to less than the National Minimum Wage). The trouble is, the blighters keep going on strike for more money."  He didn't actually use the word "blighters", but I will spare your blushes.  Try as I might, I could not get him to understand that there might, even possibly, be a causal link between those two statements.  I thought "You're too stupid to be running any company I would want to go anywhere near, or buy anything from", but even I was too polite to say so.  What is deeply worrying is that he was regarded at the time as an example of a successful businessman.

occiput said

The Germans and the Japanese had, and have, a very different approach to industrial life, the Germans as a result of their efforts to turn over a new leaf after the war, and the Japanese because it comes as part of their culture of collective, collaborative effort.  The Germans have had workforce representatives at Board level in their large companies since the early fifties - I note that we have just, once again, shied away from the same idea over here, although I think it says a lot about even contemporary British industry that it seems to be going to need the force of legislation to make it happen.  When the Japanese brought over the idea of paying the workers to tell the management how to make improvements to the way the product was made (quality circles and workers' councils), you would have thought from the popular press that a communist uprising was only hours away.  It is true that both countries had been forced to start again more-or-less from scratch at the end of the war, and both had aspects of their pre-war and wartime cultures that they were very anxious to distance themselves from.  But by 1980, British management had had 35 years since VE day to invest, modernise and change their ways, and had signally failed to do so to anything like the necessary extent to ensure survival.

I will finish with another anecdote. I was invited out to a dinner party, at which also present was a manager of a company making, if I recall correctly, bathroom fittings.  We were discussing the difficulties of recruiting staff.  "Oh, " he said, " we have no problems.  We can get as many as we need at (a rate which, allowing for subsequent inflation, would now correspond to less than the National Minimum Wage). The trouble is, the blighters keep going on strike for more money."  He didn't actually use the word "blighters", but I will spare your blushes.  Try as I might, I could not get him to understand that there might, even possibly, be a causal link between those two statements.  I thought "You're too stupid to be running any company I would want to go anywhere near, or buy anything from", but even I was too polite to say so.  What is deeply worrying is that he was regarded at the time as an example of a successful businessman.  

Thankyou! This is what I have been saying for years, and particularly in connection with, ahem, "recent events" (which I promise not to mention again).

Hi Occiput,

Your employment life seems to have been very different to mine, certainly no trench warfare, even in the larger companies I worked for, although non were that huge. We had a job, got on with it and got paid well in most cases. Only job not paying well I left and that employer was decent, there was just not the money coming in to pay more, even he was not taking that much home, and I did know how much money was coming in.

So for whatever reason, the TV companies were failing in the late 50's and 60's and were not in any shape to bounce back in the 70's. Has pointed out before, look at the take overs, that occurred at that time. 

After saying that we had nearly full employment in the 50's and 60's, even into the start of the 70's, by the middle 70's everything fell to pieces. Luckily I didn't go on a three day week due to the power shortages, the boss kept us employed and on full wages working around the power cuts.

Frank

nuvistor said
Hi Occiput,

Your employment life seems to have been very different to mine, certainly no trench warfare, even in the larger companies I worked for, although non were that huge. We had a job, got on with it and got paid well in most cases. Only job not paying well I left and that employer was decent, there was just not the money coming in to pay more, even he was not taking that much home, and I did know how much money was coming in.

I regard myself as generally fortunate in that the worst examples I quote are things I've seen done to other people, rather than have had done directly to me.  Nonetheless, the examples are all true, as the lawyers say "to the best of my knowledge and belief" although some of the circumstances have been anonymised for what must be obvious reasons.

As someone who has worked for fairly large organisations throughout his life, it does seem that the number and density of inane management decisions is smaller in smaller concerns - although perhaps smaller companies may be better at covering them up.  This gives rise to the question of whether there is an optimum size beyond which it is unwise to allow a company to grow, but this doesn't explain why, for example, BL and Ford GB were notorious for problematic labour relations at a time when VW and Mercedes-Benz, or Nissan and Toyota, don't seem to have had the same problems to anything like the same extent.  There must therefore be significant other factors at work beyond sheer size, and it seems reasonable to look at the effects of the different employment and national cultures that are in play.

One thing which does strike me is that the organisational "distance" between senior management and the workforce may have an important bearing, and in this context it's interesting that Japanese companies and small British companies both tend to have very "flat" management structures - there are not many layers of intermediaries between the top level and the shop floor.  The German system achieves much the same effect in a slightly different way in that, as I understand it, the workers' representatives at Board level often turn up in overalls but are always regarded as equals, and senior managers don't regard it as unusual to go onto the shop floor to talk to the workers about problems, if this makes solving them easier (as it usually does).

Another anecdote, I'm afraid, but this one drawn from personal experience, and going back to the time when the CMOS CD4000 series of integrated circuits was relatively new technology.  The importance of control of electrostatic discharges was beginning to be realised, if equipment containing these things was to reach the customer still alive.  The number of companies specialising in this aspect of life was so small you didn't even need one hand to count them, and I was an undergraduate doing industrial experience in one of them.  We were asked to step along to advise a medium-sized manufacturing concern which had started to produce a design using CMOS devices, and found that their production test pass rates were going the wrong way alarmingly quickly.  An Engineer and a Technician were despatched, and I was sent for the ride and as the bagman.

Our company's dress code was that whilst in the works you wore a white lab coat.  You could wear what you liked underneath as long as you were decent, clean and socially acceptable; but when sent "outside" a shirt, collar and tie (and trousers of some sort: denim jeans were just coming in as workwear but were regarded as OK) was the minimum acceptable under the coat.  So we rocked up at the client attired as accords.  As it happened, this made us indistinguishable at a distance from their production line workers.

I learned a lot on that trip, not all connected with applied electrostatics.  One of them was that production line work was boring: mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly destructively boring and repetitive, and I was determined from that moment on never to have anything to do with it, if I could possibly help it.

We'd worked on the shop floor for a couple of hours, and as lunch-time approached, naturally began to turn our thoughts to the idea of something to eat.  I collared a passing worker, and was told that the works canteen would be open when the bell rang, and I was welcome to join him and his colleagues.

Before that happened, however, our "minder" re-appeared from wherever he'd been hiding, and insisted that there was no question of us using the production workers' canteen: no, no, our place was in the junior managers' dining room, and he'd take us there was soon as we were ready.  We were ready, so off we set.  On the way, our minder excused himself to go in the Gents', but we were to carry on, the dining room was at the end of the corridor and there would be a table set ready for us.  

So carry on we did, into a very nice room with tables set with table cloths, and "proper" cutlery and crockery, and waitresses in black with white pinnies, and almost completely filled with men dressed, every one, in business suits.  There was a sharp intake of breath as we appeared through the doorway, still dressed in our white coats, and we were regarded with much the same distaste as something one might have accidentally trodden in on the way to work.  The junior manager nearest the door started to get to his feet, and I had the distinct impression that we were about to be told our place and scooted off back to join the lower orders.

Two things happened more or less simultaneously at this point: firstly, we took our lab coats off to reveal, of course, shirt and tie order underneath, and secondly our minder reappeared and sat down with us.  There was a visible relaxation and tangible thawing of the atmosphere, and the junior manager resumed his lunch.  The thing that struck me more than anything was that no-body else thought the attitude we'd just been shown was in any way exceptionable.

Some years later, I was sent on a training course to Sony at Basingstoke.  There was only one dining room, self-service, and everybody on site used it.  We were joined at lunch by an older Japanese gentleman, who brought his tray over, sat down next to us and chatted away in absolutely flawless English without any trace of a Japanese accent, until our course Leader suggested that perhaps we needed to be getting back to the classroom.  "Of course," said our new Japanese companion, "you're doing important work: please don't let me keep you.  How nice to have had the chance to meet you."

"Who was the gentleman who joined us at lunch?" I asked when we got back to the classroom.  "Vice-President Engineering, Sony Broadcast Europe" was the answer.

If you took at "Trader" sheet 688, there is a list on the back page of the various manufacturers of the Wartime Civilian Receiver, and I think it's probably fair to infer that, at that stage of the war, this is probably pretty much anybody who had any meaningful domestic electronics production capacity.  There are 40 "U" codes, but actually 42 firms, since the two halves of EMI and the two halves of Burndept are listed separately.  This is an unsustainably large number and some consolidation was inevitable.   The same thing happened in the motor industry - who now remembers, for example, Bean, Clyno or Arrol-Johnston? Indeed, this pattern is typical of any manufacturing industry: the obvious no-hopers fall by the wayside fairly quickly, followed by a period where the technology is new enough for there to be room in the market for everybody with even the vaguest notion of what they are doing (a sort of first stable phase), typically followed by a period of consolidation under market pressures to a second stable phase where there is a medium-term sustainable balance between competition (i.e. genuine consumer choice) and the ability to exploit economies of scale.  The industry dies when its technology is overtaken: there are, for example, very few manufacturers of gas mantles still in business.

Two things are striking about the mass-market British domestic electronics industry: the first stable phase was probably rather longer than it would have been had the war not happened.  There were signs in 1938/39 that the novelty was wearing off and the market was becoming more demanding, and conscious of price and quality.  After the war, demand for radio sets, and later for televisions, was so great that practically anyone who could use a soldering iron could set up a manufacturing business, and some real junk was palmed off on the customer during this period.  This arguably delayed the consolidation of the industry.  The second thing is that the second stable phase, as far as British-owned businesses are concerned, was relatively short: once the need to cater for 405 television ended in the years after 1969, British business, for the reasons we're discussing, completely failed the need the challenge of foreign competition, for whom the British market was now much easier than it had been hitherto, with the result that all our current "high-street" brands are owned abroad.