Biographical Note

November 1987. I joined Jointine Products in Lincoln, an operating unit of Wiggins Teape Carbonless Papers Division. This was an enterprise with a long history of innovation and development and investment and take-overs and forced redundancies, a typical midlands manufacturing concern. I had been appointed as Commercial Systems Manager with the brief to implement a DEC-Based manufacturing system to replace the ad-hoc applications developed on stand-alone PCs scattered through the organisation. I started off by gathering and documenting the requirements so we could embark on a supplier/system selection exercise.

Jointine's MRP requirements were almost unfathomable. A mix of exotic chemicals were prepared in a mix plant, then applied to plain paper in coating/impregnating machines. Sometimes the coating was a two-stage process. The coated/impregnated paper was then trimmed to size and sold as gasket paper, battery lining paper and thermally-sensitive paper for fax machines.

Unfathomable? Yes. I never found out what drove the production planning process. Did we produce materials for stock or to order? The answer was "Yes and No, it depends". Quite often it depended on what the night shift had decided to do which was often at odds with what the production planners had set down for them. The quantities going
into a mix were highly variable since some of the ingredients were organic, natural products and had to be titrated to get the right balance for the product. The production plan for the coating machines had to be structured for wider papers to be coated first, then narrower. Doing it the other way around would contaminate the back of the paper with the residue from the previous run. Finally the quality control was hit and miss since a product which failed one set of criteria could be relabelled and sold as a different product.

My own management refused to acknowledge these complexities which was a symptom of the contempt they had for the people who worked for them. After two years maniacal effort we had a product selected, a computer installed and software loaded. Then my immediate boss was sacked, then I was asked to leave. I had been contaminated by my association with him.

I learned some new terms at this time, workplace harassment, stress-related disorders and constructive dismissal. I still have nightmares about that place. After this experience I moved into the support and maintenance of financial applications, including retail banking and branch systems. I'd had enough on manufacturing industry.

Jointine Products was closed down and production switched to the Carbonless Papers hub in Cardiff. Subsequently it too shut down. Some of the former Jointine employees bid for the obsolete equipment and now are back in business making gasket papers. As far as I know, they never implemented a computer-based MRP/ERP system.