Lessons Learned...a life in Engineering (part 11...at long last)

Good god, it’s been well over two years since I wrote part ten of this series, but back by popular demand (well, one person has asked for it...), here is the next thrilling episode in my working life. If you recall, we left off at the back-end of 2010 just as I took on a new role, and would be spending half my life travelling backwards and forwards to China primarily, but it would include other countries too. This was probably the most productive time of my life where air miles were concerned, but in every other respect it was extremely hard going.

Basically, the brief was to trawl around Chinese iron and steel companies with a guy from a fan manufacturing company in Scotland (who shall remain nameless...to protect the innocent) and to talk them into buying millions of dollars worth of Sinter Fans, complete with the necessary electrical motors and associated starting converters. The fact that we did this together, mechanical and electrical suppliers in partnership, was our strength, our USP. Traditionally, mechanical companies struggle to convince customers about the electrical side of the installation, so working together bred some great successes (I’m sure teamwork has already featured once or twice in the lessons learned side of things so I won’t push it again, but you all know it does and I’m sure you won’t forget !).

Early on in the process I started to broach the subject of energy efficiency with these customers and, contrary to all of the up-front information we had that no-one in China would be interested in running fans at reduced speed to save energy, some of them started to bite. The first one was in Ningbo, where instead of offering four motors and two starting converters for a total of around $2m we embarked upon a month of negotiations for four motors and four Variable Speed Drives, each rated about 6MW at 10kV (the standard voltage for big motors in China) for a total of around $7m. Every day for nigh on a month, one of the local Siemens employees from our office in Ningbo would pick us up from the hotel in a big silver minibus and drive us about forty minutes to the steelworks where he’d leave us, wait in the car until we were done, then take us all back again. This was monotonous...every day the same. After about a week I downloaded the Sonny and Cher song “I Got You Babe” onto my phone and played it as we drove in through the gates...reminiscent of the film Groundhog Day where the main character lives out the same day over and over again. It caused much merriment amongst the British contingent in the van, but unfortunately our local chaps didn’t have a clue. Sadly, the guy I did all of this with died a couple of years ago, and during the service at his funeral they played that song and it brought such a smile to my face as the memories of that trip came flooding back. I’m guessing that perhaps it was a song that both he and his wife had some sort of affinity with, and that he hadn’t specified the song to remind me on purpose, but I’ll never be sure as he did some very unpredictable things in the three years I worked with him...

Anyhow, I’ve gone off at a tangent again, back to the story. We’re probably a week into the negotiation and we have agreed the scope of supply, and agreed the commercial terms and conditions, only the final price to sort out...”we should have this knocked off in the morning” was the consensus in the minibus on the way back to the hotel. If I remember rightly, this was the night of the “Boom-Boom Chicken” incident (refer to Lessons Learned...part 3) where I narrowly avoided shitting myself but subsequently managed to block the hotel room toilet afterwards (Chinese plumbing is really not very good, in my experience). Our Commercial Manager, Matt, spookily managed the same thing and spent half the night poking the blockage with a coat hanger to get his motion on its way to the seaside. I just got my hand in amongst it and forced it all around the U-bend. This clearly highlights the different approaches taken by Engineers and Bean-Counters to the same problem ! Lesson number 56...there is always more than one way to crack a nut...if at first you don’t succeed, don’t give up, but always be prepared to change your direction of attack !

Again, I digress...and you wonder why they call me Tangent-Man...the point of this story is that we are on the point of sealing one of our biggest ever orders for this kind of project, full variable speed in an application that is typically fixed speed with shared starting converters, I get back to the hotel and crank up my laptop and download my e-mails only to find that the product we are about to sell has been discontinued with immediate effect. Even worse, this is the only product that we sold at that time which was capable of operating with an output voltage of 10kV which is the norm for big motors in China...well and truly stuffed...what did I just say about cracking nuts ?

Well, I was up most of the night re-working the scope of supply, liaising with our factories (good job China is virtually a full day ahead of Europe) and pricing it all up at 6kV instead of 10kV. Mind you, everyone I spoke to told me that the Chinese wouldn’t accept anything other than 10kV, and that was certainly the case with Ningbo. We tried and tried for another three weeks to get them to go for a 6kV variant but they were having none of it. They did buy our motors (at 10kV) and the fans as well, however decided to buy the drives locally and we never heard another thing from them once the machines were delivered...now that could mean one of two things...1) the locally built equipment worked a treat and everyone lived happily ever after, or 2) they were a huge failure, everyone involved got sacked, and in order to save face, everything was hushed up. I’ve no idea what happened, but if anybody does know, feel free to enlighten me.

Well that was Ningbo, and the first taste of success in China for me, even though there was that bitterness about the discontinued product and the lost drive order. It clearly left a challenge, in that we no longer had a variable speed option which was compliant with the market requirement in China (water-cooled, 10kV output) and that was going to potentially cause us some serious issues if we wanted to maximise our revenue out there.

The final memory from Ningbo, and I can’t leave you without this, was the breakfast buns in the hotel restaurant. They were black and looked more like a turd than any turd I have ever seen in my life...yes, that was definitely a shit job...but someone had to do it !

These ones from a very nice restaurant in Beijing (Temple Restaurant) are much more pleasing to the eye, and were much nicer...

Now, I’m a lover of Chinese food and as I’ve already stated in this series of stories, I’ll have a crack at just about anything as long as it’s been cooked properly. The only issue I’ve got at this juncture is that my travelling companion is a very unadventurous eater, to say the least, to the point that he would avoid anything “foreign” like the plague. Most trips we did either centred around Beijing or Shanghai and he had is own favourite places to go in both of those cities. In Shanghai, there was O’Malley’s, apparently the first Irish bar in China. It’s closed now, I believe, but there they did the most amazing Guinness and Beef Pie, with a lovely crispy pastry crust and just the right amount of chilli and spice to give it a decent kick. Apparently, I had forty seven of these pies during my time over there, and I never actually ate anything else in Shanghai other than when we dined with customers, when we did eat the local cuisine. The owner of O’Malley’s (Richard, I think his name was) promised me a free night when I got to fifty but I moved on to a different job just before I got there...mind you, I was a very cheap night...a Guinness and a Beef Pie, chips and a pot of tea which got free refills all night anyway, so I didn’t miss out on much. 

We got wind of a potential project in a steel works in Baotou which is in Inner Mongolia, so we decided that we should go to see the end user and start to build up a relationship with their people, which has always been a big thing for me. Lesson number 57...don’t expect anyone to put their hand in their pocket to the tune of around $10m without meeting you, multiple times, and...especially in China...getting to know you well enough to be able to trust you.

So, up to Baotou we flew. When we left Shanghai it was 37degC, and I travelled in shorts and a t-shirt. It was 7degC when we landed, a bit of a shock to the system, I can tell you. A very strange feel to the town too, the buildings and the architecture just didn’t seem to fit into how I perceived China was. It turned out that the city had been flattened by an earthquake in 1996, and had since been rebuilt, hence the much more modern / new look to everything. Anyhow, off to the steelworks we go and these guys bring up the subject of energy saving and variable speed operation...”do you have a 10kV output VFD” ?

Well then...time for an Engineering argument, and I love those ! I don’t know if it was because we brought it up from the outset or whether the Baotou guys were more technically astute than those at Ningbo, or whether I just put the point across better this time, given that it wasn’t dropped on us at the very last minute, but the 10kV / 6kV thing went away quite quickly once I explained that it actually doesn’t matter to any real extent what voltage you choose for the converter output. Anyhow, they bought the argument and that relationship started to build...

The next time we went to Baotou we went with the UK Government Envoy for China, Brian I think he was called, and a delegation of senior management from both of the UK companies. We’d all met up for a pre-meeting in the Langham Hotel in Shanghai, which for those who don’t know, is one of the world’s top hotel chains. Somewhere, I’ve got a photograph of the toilet in my room, I can't find it so won't be able to post it in this story. This toilet had its own control panel on the wall where you could set the seat temperature, the temperature and pressure of the water that washes your clacker-valve when you’ve finished, the temperature and strength of the airstream that dries your crevice once the washing cycle is complete, and a host of other parameters that you would never, ever, deem necessary in the real world. It is the only toilet in the world that I have ever seen fitted with an emergency-stop button...now that is Chinese Health & Safety at its best !

Anyhow, up to Baotou we fly again, and this time I am appropriately dressed. We are met at the airport and a fleet of limousines take our party to a governmental building in the heart of town...not to the steelworks...we are ushered into the building whilst being filmed by several camera crews, and into a huge meeting hall where we proceed to introduce ourselves, have a bit of chit-chat about how much we are looking forward to working with them, all the time being filmed, and then off to the banqueting hall for a slap-up Mongolian banquet. Apparently it was televised, I’m not sure if it was on live or if the locals only got to see the highlights late on the Saturday night...maybe the nightlife in Inner Mongolia is so shit that they rely on visiting foreigners being force-fed various animal appendages and bodily fluids for entertainment, a sort of Chinese “You’ve Been Framed”, if you like. Anyhow, after the food, it was back onto the plane and back to Shanghai, just in time for another O’Malley’s Guinness and Beef Pie...lovely !

So, over the next few weeks and months we eventually agree everything, shake hands (remember that ???), sign the contract, and head off for another banquet. Now the Chinese love a banquet, and they love to play drinking games with the guests, continuously toasting (Ganbei !) and getting everyone drunk. Now I’ve had the pleasure of playing these games many years ago when I used to be a drinker and one thing I would not be is beaten by someone who is two feet shorter than me. Anyhow, on this particular occasion I abstained and watched the proceedings with interest as it got messy, our agent getting so badly off his face that he ended up in hospital having his stomach pumped...must have had a bad kebab on the way back to the hotel. 

One day, I got the call from my customer to attend a meeting with a consultant in Ranchi, near Kolkata in India. I had to jump in the car, drive to Birmingham to sort a visa, jump on a plane to Dubai, on to Kolkata and was picked up by a driver to take me to Ranchi. I do remember the roads were mental (more mental than ANYWHERE I’d ever been before, and that’s saying something as China is generally horrific !) but what made it funny was the motorcyclists were all wearing cricket helmets...fantastic. I’d forgotten how popular that game was out there. I got to Ranchi at about 6pm and was told that the consultant was waiting for me at the office and I should go straight there, which I did, and was immediately given a specification for a medium voltage drive which was up for discussion. The document had clearly been written around the drives manufactured by one of our competitors and by the third line of the document we had effectively got to the point where our kit had been ruled out as it was non-compliant, so literally two minutes after walking into the place, I’m walking out again in an extremely bad mood. At least I got a decent curry that night, but it was an awful long way to go for it ! Never ever again did I get off my arse to meet with an EPC contractor / consultant without getting prior sight of what we were going to discuss...let that be lesson number 58...specifications are often written by someone who might not fully understand what they want, so they take advice from people who usually have a bias towards a particular company or technology. To be fair, we regularly help customers to draft specifications and we have probably caused many wasted journeys for our competitors over the years, but it is extremely frustrating when it happens to you and no amount of argument will change the mind of someone who is adamant that they will not deviate from the spec at all. 

Well, the two-and-a-half years I did this role turned out to be very interesting, very tiring, very frustrating and very funny in places. I traveled all over the eastern coast of China from Shenyang, Anshan and Yingkou in the north, down through Beijing, Rizhou, Nanjing, Wuxi, Shanghai, Ningbo, and across to the likes of Changsha and the currently infamous Wuhan...the less said about that place the better ! We also took in the trips to Inner Mongolia (Baotou), Taiwan, and various other steel cities around the parish, traveling by plane, train and automobile. Now the planes were fine (although we made a point of flying with reputable airlines only...expensive but safe), trains were stunningly excellent, but road travel was generally horrific...I genuinely expected to die every time I got in a car in China. One car had so many holes in the bodywork you could see the road through the gaps in the floor, they rarely had seatbelts, and one car (in which we spent three hours per day for three weeks) had the hardest seats I’ve ever sat on...did nothing for my bad back. One 3am trip from hotel to airport in Shanghai resulted in me clipping the taxi driver round the head continuously for thirty miles because he was so tired he couldn’t stay awake and was driving us off the road...scary is not the word ! 

The business was very good in terms of the number and values of successful projects won, and our project team delivered successfully as well, so altogether it made the sacrifice well worthwhile. A great team on the ground too, generally the two of us from the UK (sometimes with others) and our local agent who was a great source of information...and entertainment, especially when trying to pronounce the word Ferrari. It made Sunday evenings watching the Grand Prix in the hotel bar so much more interesting !

Oh, and I do love some of the registration plates of Chinese cars...who would relish the thought of driving round all day in a car with PENIS for a number-plate ?

So, we’re now up to early 2013, when I decided to stop traveling (I thought I had already done that in 1997...) and take another office job, this time as Head of Customer Service for our Large Drives group. I’m sure there will be plenty of lessons to be learned in that role...speak again very soon !