Peat Marwick McLintock has launched a Manufacturing Consultancy Centre in Birmingham, to operate nationally, which aims to combine business, financial, engineering, industrial, computer and management skills. The UK manufacturing industry projects growth rates of 3.3% between now and 1995, 27% greater than the economy, is 10 years behind German productivity levels and 20 years behind Japan. The main aim of the Consultancy is to increase the productivity of the manufacturing sector by offering advice on management techniques and systems and their effective application, but co-operation from the managing director-down is essential for this. It will offer information technology consultancy, aiming to understand the dynamic business needs of the industry – markets, products and processes – and how to best to implement systems for requirements such as purchasing, distribution, engineering, design and quality control and accounting to produce the most economic manufacturing solution. Integrating or interfacing information systems such as MRPII, computer-aided design, physical automation and external communication systems on a common common database may be part of the solution. Peat Marwick also revealed the result of an independant survey exploring manufacturers’ attitudes towards investment. When asked how current high interest rates affected investment, 86% of the 195 manufacturers polled believed they would be detrimental to investment by UK manufacturing industry in general, 56% when asked specifically about their own industry sector; 36% of respondents said that high interest rates were causing their companies to cut investment, though 50% are allocating more money to information technology with 68% spending more to improve quality of products or services. Other popular areas were product development, education and training, least popular being market analysis.
