- LEO III/32 at Colvilles Ltd, Ravenscraig Works (Later part of BSC Strip Mills Division)Date 1965 – 1974 Principal Uses
• Production Tracking and Control • Payroll
Background
In 1963, a decision was taken by ColvillesLtd, the Scottish steel manufacturer, to
acquire a LEO III computer and the machine was installed in a custom-built facility at their Ravenscraig works in 1965. The first two projects were to be computerisation ofproduction planning and control and the works payroll system.
Staff to man the facility were recruited from within the company, their suitability for a new career in computing being assessed using the LEO ‘Aptitude test’. The newly formed team was sent off to Hartree House in early 1965 for training in CLEO programming. On their return two groups were formed – one for the Production Control project, the other for the Payroll project. The two development teams numbered around a dozen personnel in total.
Production Tracking and Control System
In the nineteen fifties / sixties, Colvilles Ltd., iron and steel manufacturers in the West of Scotland, had built a fully integrated steel strip mill on a green-field site in Motherwell. The product was coils of steel or cut sheet which were of many grades, sizes and weights.
Iron ore and coal was fed into blast furnaces which produced iron. This was passed in bulk form to a steel-making plant where the steel output was transformed into ingots of varying sizesand steel qualities These were then processed in a slab mill which reduced the ingots to long slabs which were then sub-divided. From this point, where many slabs were produced from each ingot, product tracking became complex.
Each slab was allocated a unique identity together with its dimensions, weight,steel grade and whether it had been allocated to a customer order or to stock. Slabs were then scheduled for the next process where they were reheated and processed through the strip mill,the output being coils of steel.
Further processing wasthen carried out, as necessary, to meet customer requirements. This could involve processes such as pickling, tandem rolling, annealing, slitting and cutting coils into individual bundles of sheets. Cold finishing processes were carried out at Gartcosh Works some 15 miles away from Ravenscraig.
Tracking of individual pieces of material was vital. Most orders were comprised of many coils or bundles of sheet. For scheduling reasons it was not possible to keep the material for any one order together through all the processes. In the early sixties production had beenmonitored by Hollerith card systems and wall-mounted adjustable displays of customer orders givingdetails of their progress through the plant. Periodic stock-checks of material ahead of each process disclosed significant discrepancies and it was decided that a better production management system was required.
Given the complex movement of material and orders through the many processes along with constant transfers into and out of inter-process stocks it was vital that the production controllers had up-to-date information to keep abreast of a rapidly moving and ever-changing situation. Thus it was a prime target for the LEO system to deliver to the Production Control Department information which was as current as possible. This was defined as having the production status as at 6amavailable to the production control staff when they arrived to start work at 8.30am.
We were confronted with a major problem. We had just over 2 hours to collect the production information from the shop floor operatives, prepare it for input to the computer and produce the reports. Data preparation at that time was considered to be a task for women and the personnel rules dictated that females could not work outside dayshift hours. In any case the time required to prepare the data for input to the LEO using conventional data prep. methods was too long to meet our targets. So we turned our attention to Lector and optical mark sensing.
A body of opinion held that filling forms with marks was too complex for shop-floor operatives. However, the Ravenscraig development team felt that this was unjustified, and so it proved. With the elimination of data preparation delays we were able to meet our system performance targets. Clerks could now start their work at 8.30am and have on their desks the complete production details as at 6am that same morning. This allowed them to achievemuch tighter control. Inter-process stockswere reduced and delivery performance improved.
Appendix 1 gives some further information on how and why Lector OMR documents were used
Payroll System
In 1965 Ravenscraig and Gartcosh steel works employed around 5,500 personnel, a number which eventually rose to around 7,500. The pay structure was complex with around 900 differing pay rates and many local adjustments. Employees could be engaged in several different activities in any week, each attracting different pay rates. The majority of the employees were paid weekly, in cash.
It was considered that to be of real value the computer system should undertake not just the gross to net pay calculation but the considerably more complex calculation of gross pay from the pay rates and time worked for each individual. The main time-sheet information was input weekly using Lector. Again it was considered that getting the pay clerks used to completing Lector documents would be a ‘hard sell’ but with training it was successfully achieved.
At start up, employee payroll data, previously stored on a Hollerith Punch card system was input via a LEO installation in Birmingham which was equipped with a card reader. The system successfully went live in October 1965 – some 8 months after the implementation team had returned from their first programming course!
Some reflections
A principal feature of the Ravenscraig LEO III installation was the extensive use made of Lector. The somewhat contrived method of creating digits from a series of marks was easily mastered by plant and administrative personnel, contrary to general opinion. As noted above the benefit of directly inputting the collected data to the computer without the delays imposed by data preparation was key to the success of the system. We were greatly assisted by the printing industry in Edinburgh who had a reputation for high quality printing and rose to the challenge of producing Lector documents to the tight tolerances required. During the lifetime of the installation at least two dozen
different document formats were employed. Sadly no copies of these have been kept for the archives.
In hindsight, the speed with which the systems were implemented by an inexperienced team is astonishing. We were a young, enthusiastic and highly motivated team eager to prove ourselves in this new field of technology. Perhaps we were too naïve to appreciate the implications of trying to deliver large complex systems using somewhat experimental technologies in such a short timescale.
Finally a word of homage to CLEO. In the course of a long career in computing and exposure to many programming languages my admiration for the CLEO programming language has not diminished. Its blend of the best features of Cobol and Fortran rendered it a powerful, flexible and easy to master tool. I take my hat off to the pioneers who were responsible for creating such superb technology so far ahead of its time!.
Appendix 1 – Use of Lector OMR documents in the Production Planning & Control system (PPC)
The PPC system would require to be fed with all information as regards material movement and change of status from the slab mill output to despatch. Once updated, its output reports would provide schedulers with an accurate picture of what material was available for them to schedule to the next process. The system could only provide these reports once it had been run and it would be designed to present the updated information as at 6am – the end of the night shift. However, the data processing team was all female and females were not permitted to work outside the daytime working hours. When they started each morning, they would have to input at least half of the previous day’s back shift (2 to 10) and the night shift (10 to 6) before the computer system could be updated. For the remainder of their day, they would input that day’s day shift (6 to 2) and as much of that day’s back shift as possible. This meant that it was unlikely that the system could be updated and output records produced before 2pm – a full 8 hours beyond the system updating point of 6am. It was felt that this was an unacceptable position.
This was in the days before the advent of on-line terminals but effective OMR machines were now becoming available. LEO Computers had recently merged with the English Electric company and the combined firm was now offering an OMR reader called Lector. Adoption of this technique could solve the delays caused by data preparation.
Trial OMR documents were printed and tested out on shop-floor production recorders. Most of the data to be collected was numeric; items such as material identity, any changes to dimensions, weight, grade or anything else that could change at any specific production unit. The test documents had the particular processing unit identity pre-printed on them. As most of the date to be collected was numeric, each character of a particular parameter to be input was represented by four, what we called, soup-bowls labelled 1, 2, 3 and 6. Thus, by filling in no more than 2 of these soup-bowls by pencil, any digit from 0 to 9 could be represented. Thus recording a material identity of 5 numeric characters would be represented on the pre-printed form by 5 groups of these 4 soup-bowls. We were advised that shop-floor personnel would not understand this. We argued that anyone who knew how to fill in a pools coupon would soon master it. Trials showed that we were right.Subsequently, once the system was implemented, we only had one failure – a person who was dyslexic.
When first implemented, we only had one machine and it was installed in the computer room at Ravenscraig Works. However, the daily operational run was still held up because there was no similar OMR facility at Gartcosh Works. Its data had to be collected by car after 6am and transported to Ravenscraig to go through data preparation from 8.30am. Nevertheless, the system provided its output mid morning. A second Lector reader was acquired for GartcoshWorks and a paper-tape to paper-tape link provided between the two Works. The system now produced all the output reports as at 6am ready for the schedulers when they started at 8.30am.
Instead of the predicted 8 hour delay in providing up to date information, this had reduced to two and a half hours. Routine stock-checks confirmed that the new system was extremely accurate compared to the old manual one. Any corrective updates to the computer stock database were minimal compared to the old system. Additionally, stock checks were completed considerably faster as checkers were provided with lists of material to check against the material in the various stock areas.