He was very good at his job, and I dare say no one I’ve ever known had better mechanical proficiency than him. Many of his apprentices have a high opinion of his skills to this day.
In the 1940s, he decided to build his own business, and he bought some machines and tools that he installed in the backyard of his house in Barcelona. From the beginning he was successful and because of his knowledge in producing high quality, accurate parts and fixtures, he received orders from many loyal customers.
Not long after, about 1955, he moved to a new industrial building located in Sant Just Desvern, near Barcelona, where he hired more than 30 employees. He became the master for all of them and some became, in time, owners of their own enterprises. Some were very successful.
I remember my father was quite, patient and took it easy, but passionate when explaining something. After explanations apprentices needed to gain experience by themselves to learn, repeating as many times as necessary. Knowledge comes after a long time trying to pass from the explained theory to real experience.
The name of his company, UTILIN, means industrial tools and fixtures. His seriousness, precision for parts, and design capability for fixtures were well known for quality. I remember they were permanent suppliers for some important customers: a Dutch producer of precision balances “Berkel”, produced counters for the still important Catalan textile industry, and later supplied “SEAT” in the automobile industry, and many others
In time my father wanted to have a product of his own, beyond producing parts, fixtures, or even a small simple product like the counters.
With his team, including a hired industrial engineer, they designed and produced an electrical sewing machine. I was in my teens, but remember the excitement in my home. The machine was presented in the 1960 International Exhibition in Barcelona and was properly patented. It was an exciting and interesting achievement. During the exhibition they were there finishing the assembly of the second unit, which took longer than expected. Several potential customers came and were amazed by the high sewing speed and the amount of different functionalities that the machine could perform.
But this was not a success. Something went wrong. No need to say that UTILIN invested a lot of money and time in the development of the product. So to keep the business going on, they had to refocus on the traditional business to keep having incomes and pay the expenses. Things perhaps could have gone better if there were more money to keep doing and investing, but my father was mainly a technician that enjoyed his work, not a businessman.
Some customers ordered machines, and when they produced one it worked very well but something was going wrong. They learned that mass production was nearly impossible. Orders came that they could not produce in time. Customers were enthusiastically happy, and demanding more, but continuous delays and difficulties to make the product in quantity became a main issue.
Imagine a complex machine with several dozen parts that must match precisely because they are continuously moving in an interconnected manner and must match and connect with high speed. No space for error. The more they tried to get all parts with tighter precision and accuracy, the worse the results. Automatic machines have a limit; don’t they? Does this ring any bells? Isn’t it similar to what happened in AT&T in the 1920,s? I would say exactly the same, except that AT&T had the best possible resource to solve it: Dr. W. Shewhart and a laboratory.
Additionally it was impossible to add better tolerances in the drawing as the amount of experiments necessary to check all possible dimensional limits would be 2n, (n quantity of parts) which means that only 10 parts-dimensions would need 1024 experiments. Therefore it was impossible, or very expensive, to produce all parts automatically with higher accuracy.
Longer time and financial resources would be needed to produce mass production. More experimentation was necessary. He couldn’t achieve it, so he had to give up and follow with his traditional business.
Long after this time, my father taught me something that surprised me and I didn’t understand why until I knew and understood Shewhart’s achievements: “Never try to get the centre line of a dimensional specification with an automatic machine further than a certain point, you will not improve it, there is a limit, so try to reduce re-settings”. Isn’t this the great discovery of Walter Shewhart? But my father in the 1960s had no means to understand why, except that his long and well applied experience had taught him. His theory was “there is a maximum precision with an automatic machine and you will not be able to improve it by resetting”. This is what he taught me, when I wanted to help, playing in the shop-floor to produce gears with an automatic Swiss made machine, in my teens and I wanted to improve the accuracy of diameters by continual readjusting. Clearly wrong but not intuitive.
Needless to say at this time, in the 1960s, to my knowledge Shewhart’s ideas were not yet taught in the Barcelona University.
I am sure this helped me to a better understanding of Shewhart’s discovery and the concept of tampering as explained by Deming, that we must avoid in many areas of our life. When one has lived the facts of tampering in real processes, the understanding of Shewhart and Deming’s findings become as clear as water.
How the author learned about tampering in his youth.
More Effects of over Adjustment
In the 1940s, he decided to build his own business, and he bought some machines and tools that he installed in the backyard of his house in Barcelona. From the beginning he was successful and because of his knowledge in producing high quality, accurate parts and fixtures, he received orders from many loyal customers.
Not long after, about 1955, he moved to a new industrial building located in Sant Just Desvern, near Barcelona, where he hired more than 30 employees. He became the master for all of them and some became, in time, owners of their own enterprises. Some were very successful.
I remember my father was quite, patient and took it easy, but passionate when explaining something. After explanations apprentices needed to gain experience by themselves to learn, repeating as many times as necessary. Knowledge comes after a long time trying to pass from the explained theory to real experience.
The name of his company, UTILIN, means industrial tools and fixtures. His seriousness, precision for parts, and design capability for fixtures were well known for quality. I remember they were permanent suppliers for some important customers: a Dutch producer of precision balances “Berkel”, produced counters for the still important Catalan textile industry, and later supplied “SEAT” in the automobile industry, and many others
In time my father wanted to have a product of his own, beyond producing parts, fixtures, or even a small simple product like the counters.
With his team, including a hired industrial engineer, they designed and produced an electrical sewing machine. I was in my teens, but remember the excitement in my home. The machine was presented in the 1960 International Exhibition in Barcelona and was properly patented. It was an exciting and interesting achievement. During the exhibition they were there finishing the assembly of the second unit, which took longer than expected. Several potential customers came and were amazed by the high sewing speed and the amount of different functionalities that the machine could perform.
But this was not a success. Something went wrong. No need to say that UTILIN invested a lot of money and time in the development of the product. So to keep the business going on, they had to refocus on the traditional business to keep having incomes and pay the expenses. Things perhaps could have gone better if there were more money to keep doing and investing, but my father was mainly a technician that enjoyed his work, not a businessman.
Some customers ordered machines, and when they produced one it worked very well but something was going wrong. They learned that mass production was nearly impossible. Orders came that they could not produce in time. Customers were enthusiastically happy, and demanding more, but continuous delays and difficulties to make the product in quantity became a main issue.
Imagine a complex machine with several dozen parts that must match precisely because they are continuously moving in an interconnected manner and must match and connect with high speed. No space for error. The more they tried to get all parts with tighter precision and accuracy, the worse the results. Automatic machines have a limit; don’t they? Does this ring any bells? Isn’t it similar to what happened in AT&T in the 1920,s? I would say exactly the same, except that AT&T had the best possible resource to solve it: Dr. W. Shewhart and a laboratory.
Additionally it was impossible to add better tolerances in the drawing as the amount of experiments necessary to check all possible dimensional limits would be 2n, (n quantity of parts) which means that only 10 parts-dimensions would need 1024 experiments. Therefore it was impossible, or very expensive, to produce all parts automatically with higher accuracy.
Longer time and financial resources would be needed to produce mass production. More experimentation was necessary. He couldn’t achieve it, so he had to give up and follow with his traditional business.
Long after this time, my father taught me something that surprised me and I didn’t understand why until I knew and understood Shewhart’s achievements: “Never try to get the centre line of a dimensional specification with an automatic machine further than a certain point, you will not improve it, there is a limit, so try to reduce re-settings”. Isn’t this the great discovery of Walter Shewhart? But my father in the 1960s had no means to understand why, except that his long and well applied experience had taught him. His theory was “there is a maximum precision with an automatic machine and you will not be able to improve it by resetting”. This is what he taught me, when I wanted to help, playing in the shop-floor to produce gears with an automatic Swiss made machine, in my teens and I wanted to improve the accuracy of diameters by continual readjusting. Clearly wrong but not intuitive.
Needless to say at this time, in the 1960s, to my knowledge Shewhart’s ideas were not yet taught in the Barcelona University.
I am sure this helped me to a better understanding of Shewhart’s discovery and the concept of tampering as explained by Deming, that we must avoid in many areas of our life. When one has lived the facts of tampering in real processes, the understanding of Shewhart and Deming’s findings become as clear as water.
How the author learned about tampering in his youth.