Posted to News on 2nd Feb 2008, 00:00
Balancing real analysis with the urge to tinker...
If there is one thing more frightening than an industry that appears to have no idea what it's doing, then it's an industry that appears have no idea what it's doing but where no one gets paid unless they actually do something. I'm talking, of course, about dentistry, and if you detect a touch of bitterness here then it's because I'm giving you all this from recent first hand experience. Certainly there is nothing funny about dentistry, which makes you wonder how the BBC 'comedy' series My Family has run for so many years, because the only thing that could be deemed even vaguely amusing in that is the dentistry.
>If I'm honest, then the root cause of my recent root work is the chocolate peanut addiction I had when I was in my early teens - a habit which I promptly kicked when it led to two major fillings in one visit to the dentist. I thought that was the end of the problem, but it came back to haunt me after Christmas - some 30 years after the event. It turns out that the two fillings had spent the intervening decades subtly expanding and contracting, and generally stressing the two host teeth until they cracked and broke, one causing a little inconvenience, the other absolute agony. And so I found myself on several occasions over the last few weeks staring up my dentist's nostrils while he poked, prodded, tore, drilled, filed and subjected me to many other barbaric processes too horrible to talk about - ultimately it seems to no real worthwhile effect.
>Having not been to the dentist for a while, what I found particularly interesting during my infrequent lucid moments was how much more sophisticated dentistry equipment seems to have become all of a sudden. In particular, the monitoring and analysis equipment is startlingly hi-tech. But I reckon this is a double edged sword, because as your equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, it becomes increasingly difficult to resist the urge to tinker. And that seems to be a big problem in modern dentistry.
>Now what's ironic is that, in many areas of manufacture, I see the exact opposite on an almost daily basis - a wealth of experience and capability on the shop floor to tweak and refine manufacturing processes, but often very little evidence of the analysis and monitoring equipment that would enable the work to be done. It has never been easier with modern diagnostics software to hook into the control equipment on a manufacturing line and to drill deeper and deeper into the system to find the root cause of any problem, and yet I still see an unfathomable reliance on a clip board and a biro as the backbone of the maintenance effort. I feel that it really is the time to embrace these diagnostics technologies, because UK manufacturing needs every competitive advantage it can get. And with much of this equipment readily scalable, it only needs a small investment before you really start to see the benefits. Surely that's got to be worth it.
Mark Simms, 2 February 2008
