It started with the Simutron Computer invented by Hugh Walton. Then there was English China Clays (ECL) which was in a mess. I spoke to a man who knew the Stock Exchange back then. He said that they had “Made an Announcement”. Virtually dead in the water.
This man, Hugh. Hugh was a brave man, they said. He did consultancy to sort it out. He supplied Analogue Computers to do the job. He was an Engineer and Mathematician and he was stubborn. I spoke to another man who knew English China Clays. He said Hugh was brave. He might not get paid if they went bust, he said. Hugh saved them.
The Managers were not bad men. Their company was out of control. It was the clay which was out of control and they were fighting it. Not working with it. Working it is the way you work clay. Ask a Potter. That is how our company was born. In the clay of Cornwall.
I Joined Hugh in 1979. This story is a short one. About the services, technology, and drive. And the mind of Hugh, and much later, me. He saved ECL from insolvency.
From their own press release:
"Making a Stock market company solvent again. Solving a labour dispute. Optimising their blending, hour by hour. Rather than weekly. Giving management back control of their company."
I will repeat that as they did: According to one of the company’s own PR blasts, the investment of £187,000 in two analogue computers and our services repaid the investment every 6 weeks. That’s £1.9 million today. Every 6 weeks. That is £16.47 Million a year in added profits.
Today
This is how thing have changed between then and now. Computer technology and IT has taken 44 years to catch up.
Running optimisation problems on modern PCs give a single answer to a single question. An experienced person, like one of our team, can tell you one hundred additional things from the result. And from the figures the program produces. They tell us whether it is profitable to include a product in your line up or not. But you are the CEO or a manager and you must decide. That is a hard decision – to ditch something you have made for 40 years because, in the balance, it was found wanting. Not profitable. That is the way of our maths. Hard choices. So, we make those choices easier.
We have patented a unique analogue interface, which you, the CEO or manager, can play with. You can get a feel for what your company does and can do if you are in control of things, rather than them being in control of you. If you want to drop a product, it will be you who decides that from what the model tells you.
It is so cutting edge, it does what the Simutron did, in 1974. It gives you feedback and control. You stop wrestling with clay and you work it. Just like that potter. It has taken this digital world 44 years to catch up. At least it has if you are a manager of a middle-sized company. All the big boys in the FTSE use it, so why don’t you?
Their costs of use would crush you, but ours are modest. A man said that we had paid for ourselves before we left the meeting room. In a bitchy-business world, that is a nice thing to say.
Nobel’s and Medals -How this all came about
In 1974, a Russian called Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize for Economics for discovering the maths we use. An American called Dantzig also was awarded medals and bursaries by Jerry Ford in America in the same year for the same thing. There is no Nobel for Maths. There is quite a bit of Nobel Prize Winning Maths buried in our Optimisation Engine.
Back to Clay
The past was the past. They had three then six pits. They had been able to guess and use a rule of thumb and experience to mix clays for the day. Most mixes were accepted by most customers. Most were profitable to make and to sell.
Then ECC, they added pit after pit to meet fancy demands from customers. They blended from all the pits. Suddenly they could make any clay that the market demanded. Suddenly, company profits plummeted.
Cost engineering, job losses and fewer hours solved nothing. The not very militant local trades unions, especially those working the pits gradually became very angry. Loyal customers complained and started to withhold payments. They were hanging on by a thread. They didn’t understand what had gone wrong. We did, and Hugh knew it from day one.
Pits, Pits, Pits and then More Pits
Clay blending from a few pits is quite easy. The men know the pits well. They know the blend that the bosses demand.
It gets difficult when you have many pits. And strict customer demands. ECL had gone from 3 pits to 15 by 1974. What they got wrong was that blending from 15 pits offered them a fool’s paradise. A seemingly infinite number of ways to match a customer’s needs. But no one knew how profitable that blending was. We solved that by optimsation and cost minimization.
No one knew how to blend up to 15 types of clay into 20 different products. And they needed it doing 4 times a day. With the results now, not next week.
So we started with the chemist's reports. Then we looked at the needs for the day. What did the customers demand? And then we looked at all 15 pits. And the solution was in Linear Programming. We had a computer which would do the blend-cost minimization in 10 minutes, so we demonstrated it. Whatever they threw at it, it came out with the lowest cost blend. The optimal profit.
Next came the model and what smart managers and smart clay pit workers could do with it.
That was when the directors placed their huge orders. That was when they told the Stock Exchange that they were out of danger and that was when they issued that historic press release. And it did so until 2004 when ECC invested tens of millions in new software and a full operations research unit to run the software. They still cannot play with knobs to interact with a model of their company, so we are under discussions.
