Meetingtheneedsofthecustomerproductionandfactoring.docVIP

Meeting the Needs of the Customer: Production and Factoring in the British Machine Tool Industry in the 1950s and 1960s Roger Lloyd-Jones MJ Lewis (Sheffield Hallam University) The paper focuses on the theme of production and services within firms, with particular emphasis on the co-existence and co-evolution of both types of activities. The industry selected is machine tools which from its early development was characterised by firms who combined making with a range of factoring activities. The generic term for merchant and service activity in the industry was factoring, and this encompassed activities such as marketing, sales, technical servicing of machine tools, and the provision of agency services both for domestic and foreign producers in the UK, and those in Empire/Commonwealth, North American, and Western European markets. The Machine Tool Review, the trade paper of Britain’s largest machine tool maker, Alfred Herbert of Coventry, described the industry ‘as a supplier of services rather than (of) products’ and reported that marketing in the industry was ‘done on a peculiar personal basis between buyer and seller’. To reflect on these characteristics, an analysis will be provided of the capabilities of the machine tool industry’s production and factoring, and this will be reinforced by a case study of Alfred Herbert, a company which claimed in the 1950s to be the largest machine tool organisation in the world. Mirroring the industry in general the firm combined the manufacture of a wide range of general-purpose machine tools with substantial factoring activities, which included acting as the principal UK agent of leading American and German machine tool firms. Consequently, Herbert’s both internalised and externalised its services but this began to create tensions in the post second world war period as the firm, and the industry in general, faced increased foreign competition, accelerating technological change, and the need to more fully exploit its organisa