In 1921, a group of people who had worked in industry during the First World War, running manufactures, gathered together to form a Production Engineering professional society, realising from their experiences during that war that manufacturing was inefficient and needed professional development, recognition and support.
The Society’s journal, The Production Engineer, dealt with technical developments and applications, but its coverage of management and related aspects did not present production as a coherent body of knowledge. In about 1950, the Department of Production Engineering was founded in the Birmingham University, and was headed by Norman Dudley from 1955. His aim for the Department was to create studies of the whole field of production, requiring not only the technical/engineering part but the financial, organisational and people contributions to manufacture, all of which interacted to run as an integrated system.
Its teaching and research areas recognised this, but there was no publication that could cover this body of knowledge in the research fields. So, Norman approached the Institution of Production Engineers with the proposal to run a journal if they would publish it. He appointed me as assistant editor and I negotiated with the I.Prod.E. for this journal. The editor of The Production Engineer was the Institution’s negotiator (a very efficient woman who had been in the ATS during the Second World War), and we worked out all details, including the colour of the cover, a green, nearly the same colour as the tie that I was wearing at one of these sessions!
Although the first few issues were published by the I.Prod.E., the costs, when it had a low circulation, were too much for the Institution and Taylor & Francis were invited to take it over. They have been its publisher ever since, opening it to an international readership and a recognised position amongst scientific journals. When Professor Dudley retired in 1980, he passed the editorship to Professor Roy Sury, a previous colleague in our Department but by then head of Production Engineering at Loughborough University, who appointed one of his staff as assistant editor.
The existence of the journal encouraged us in Birmingham to introduce a series of international conferences, from which the major papers were published in the IJPR. It must be admitted that the first conference, launched soon after the first publication, was seen as an initial source of appropriate papers for the journal! The Department had an annual appointment of a visiting professor (funded by Joseph Lucas Ltd.), from the USA, all of whom were contributors to, and supporters of, the journal and conferences, and valuable contacts for like-minded people in the USA. All these interlinkings gave rise to exchanges of staff with the Department and the USA, to the benefit of the IJPR with its broadening recognition in industrial engineering departments in many USA universities over there.
The changes over the last 50 years are enormous. In the mid-twentieth century, the processes in manufacture were improved versions of the methods of many years’ manufacture. In the last half century, the invasion of IT, computers and electronics in many forms and other developments has changed the processes dramatically. For those responsible for production, their knowledge bases have changed to incorporate areas of science which were unknown at the start of the journal. Working conditions have also changed in many companies, large and small. The growth of ergonomics has affected not just the design of products but the working conditions of those who build them. And the growth of international companies appears to be increasing the rate of changes in the technologies and the manufacturing methods.
Those involved in manufacture, whether in industry or academia, will no doubt continue to develop and improve the technology of production. Whether the political scene allows this to continue is outside our understanding but, as of 2013, the prospect is not bright. The cooperation internationally between firms in manufacture is very different from the aggressive relationships between many countries, influenced by political and religious differences. For the younger production engineers, we can only hope that the cooperation between companies and nations in the manufacturing world influences the political world to understand that cooperation is better than much of the aggression and power play which is going on today.
Related Research Data
