948 Fort Duquesne Boulevard
Mecon Wean United HSM
I was assigned an office with G.W. ‘Bill’ Clarke. He was mostly away somewhere, so I had the space to myself and the peace and quiet to do what I had to do. It seemed that my involvement in that Indian project, while I was in Canada, had somehow qualified me to be the Salesman, Legal Negotiator, approver of Letters of Credit, sometime technical person and overall project interface for an enormous project in India at Government owned Bokaro Steel Plant. We had two licensees in India—one for rolling mills and one for strip processing lines. One was located in Ranchi, Jharkhand--formerly Bihar State, on the Indian Airlines hopping flight route from New Delhi to Calcutta and the other was headquartered in the center of New Delhi. The customer was located on the Calcutta side in the eponymous town, not too far from Ranchi, but unfortunately quite difficult to get to.
One route was to take the flight from Calcutta to Ranchi and drive over unimaginable roads to Bokaro. The alternative was to take a train from Howrah Station to Dhanbad and drive over unimaginable roads to Bokaro including having to cross the unimaginable Damodar River Bridge–the likes of which could not have existed anywhere else on earth. Having arrived in Bokaro one was somewhat ungrateful towards the Soviet Russians who had built Bokaro Steel Plant and the town. The guest house, which was the only place to stay in 1977 had all the charm of a sub-standard barracks one imagined to be typical of the gulag. The food was commensurate with the accommodation. My heart went out to those of our engineers and service technicians who would be obliged to stay there for weeks and months on end during installation and commissioning of the equipment. I was never required to stay for more than a few days, but it was truly a very grim place.
One route was to take the flight from Calcutta to Ranchi and drive over unimaginable roads to Bokaro. The alternative was to take a train from Howrah Station to Dhanbad and drive over unimaginable roads to Bokaro including having to cross the unimaginable Damodar River Bridge–the likes of which could not have existed anywhere else on earth. Having arrived in Bokaro one was somewhat ungrateful towards the Soviet Russians who had built Bokaro Steel Plant and the town. The guest house, which was the only place to stay in 1977 had all the charm of a sub-standard barracks one imagined to be typical of the gulag. The food was commensurate with the accommodation. My heart went out to those of our engineers and service technicians who would be obliged to stay there for weeks and months on end during installation and commissioning of the equipment. I was never required to stay for more than a few days, but it was truly a very grim place.
Bokaro Steel Plant, Jharkhand
Our contract was for many tens of millions of dollars (in today's dollars it would run into the hundreds of millions) of engineering, equipment and technical assistance from the USA, while our licensees would send dozens of their engineers, respectively to Warren, OH and Pittsburgh for many months during the engineering phase. A large part of the engineering for the Indian supply was to be done by our licensees in Ranchi and Calcutta. Whereas the licensee in Ranchi was highly accomplished and well trained, alas, the same could not be said of the other and so the Ranchi licensee was obliged to set up an engineering office in Calcutta to assist them.
All I had to do was coordinate all this and the timely export and import clearance of thousands of tons of US made equipment. Having dealt with Indian companies and bureaucracies before I was well prepared for the techniques used to try to reduce our price, increase our scope and minimize the chances of our receiving timely payments. My Indian friends decided that I was highly intransigent in these matters, which I took as a great compliment. It took some ingenuity to overcome the generous nature my dear employer manifested by discounts given during his encounters with senior representatives from our customer and licensees in Pittsburgh or his own visits to India and to maintain a positive financial result at the end of the contract.
One of the techniques used to subdue foreign suppliers was the ‘monthly’ meeting at the customer’s site. I was usually the only representative of my company present for these meetings. The customer and licensees were able to put together a small team of 50 or 60 people on their side, sometimes starring Bokaro’s Managing Director, one Mr. S. Samarapungavan and/or his charming Manager of Purchasing, a Mr. Ramaratnam. I am happy to recall that I was not deterred by the turnout and invariably was able to depart with a satisfactory result. But, enough!
We obtained many more large and small contracts from Indian customers, but the result was that I needed to travel to India once or more per month. My shortest visit was 23 hours for a meeting in Bombay and my longest visit was just over 6 weeks in 1981 when I was offered the chance to take my long suffering spouse with me for a combination of ‘meetings’ across India and a large dose of touring and sightseeing.
The Indian projects were perhaps among the largest awarded to Wean United, but in the company's declining years, we exported our equipment almost all over the world. The decline had started many years preciously although it was quite invisible at the time.
After the war and the rebuilding of Europe with US money and technology, the three major rolling mill and heavy equipment suppliers, all based in Pittsburgh were the source for all new steel plants and those new facilities being planned in the USA. The late 40’s and 50’s were great years. Business worth hundreds of millions of dollars was conducted, without formal contracts, by the word of a steel company chief to the head of one of the big equipment suppliers. Unimaginable today but it worked well. Wean Engineering prospered and formed subsidiary companies in several overseas locations, as did its competitors. My first employer, Head Wrightson Machine Company was a licensee of the Aetna Standard Engineering Company from Elwood City, PA.
At some point, in the early 1950’s, for reasons which were never made clear to me, I was told that United Engineering, which became the United in Wean United, was obliged to sign a consent decree, the terms of which required it to license its technology to overseas companies and, amazingly, to allow those licensees to establish their own facilities in the USA and/or compete against their licensor. Over the years, as more and more high quality steel was produced overseas, it became more of a perceived threat to the indigenous USA producers. The critical export financing, which had helped the US engineering companies compete on an even keel and flourish was lobbied against by both the US steel companies and the worker's unions. Less investment was being made to modernize the US producers, but when a modernization project was undertaken, the latest technology had been supplied by licensees and former licensees of the US engineering companies. No longer having the latest technology to offer or being in a position to offer favorable financial conditions placed the US companies at a further disadvantage.
When the licensing agreements were first created, the various licensees gathered once a year or more at the licensor’s offices to hear the latest and greatest developments made, presented with justifiable pride. Since it was thought, very stupidly, that the licensees had no technology of value to the US licensor the exchange was a one way affair. As the years went by, it seemed never to occur to us, the licensor, that there was very valuable technology to be obtained on a royalty free basis from the technologically advancing licensees, so there never was a demand for that reverse licensing to be initiated. Soon the licensees began terminating the agreements, since they had nothing further to learn, and the opportunity to gain their technology was lost to the Americans. The downward spiral was beginning to have serious consequences.
One Indian customer, having been given the ‘royal’ tour of Wean United’s huge and well equipped manufacturing facilities, observed to me that if it was ever necessary to put an axle through the center of the earth, certainly Wean United would be the one able to provide it. And it seemed to be the case, but all those hundreds of thousands of square feet of manufacturing space and expensive machine tools needed to be fully utilized to recover their overheads; without major orders that could not be accomplished. Inevitably the slippery slope became more perilous until the end was in sight. It seemed to our senior management that this could never come to pass, but it did, despite many warnings from some of the heads of our overseas licensees, who had had to shut down major manufacturing facilities in expensive, union dominated locations and sourced offshore.
Very unfortunately, in early 1982, I was appointed to the position of Vice President of Sales for the whole corporation, over the heads of many very experienced and competent sales managers. There was little synergy between the various products lines that the company had acquired over the years and I thought it would be a good idea to try to develop some. I had not considered two factors. The first factor was that I seemed to be the only one who could see potential synergy and the fellow selling e.g. gloves couldn’t see any benefit in talking from time to time with the fellow who sold e.g. scarves. Secondly, my boss didn’t like the idea of any group sales meetings which were not held in Pittsburgh and I abandoned the idea of exposing my colleagues to the other fellow's facilities.
Being appointed to such a high position or responsibility is always a danger, but never more so than at the precise time when all the factors mentioned above started to erode our potential sales at an increasing rate. I raised warning flags with suggestions as to how we could try to escape the inevitable, but was admonished for ‘trying to confuse me with the facts’. After three years of predictably declining sales, it was decided that my services were no longer required and I started looking for a new career. Very kindly, I was allowed to remain as an employee with full benefits for almost a year, until the end of 1985. I needed every minute of it before being was taken on by Westinghouse in the closing days of that year as an unpaid consultant.
All I had to do was coordinate all this and the timely export and import clearance of thousands of tons of US made equipment. Having dealt with Indian companies and bureaucracies before I was well prepared for the techniques used to try to reduce our price, increase our scope and minimize the chances of our receiving timely payments. My Indian friends decided that I was highly intransigent in these matters, which I took as a great compliment. It took some ingenuity to overcome the generous nature my dear employer manifested by discounts given during his encounters with senior representatives from our customer and licensees in Pittsburgh or his own visits to India and to maintain a positive financial result at the end of the contract.
One of the techniques used to subdue foreign suppliers was the ‘monthly’ meeting at the customer’s site. I was usually the only representative of my company present for these meetings. The customer and licensees were able to put together a small team of 50 or 60 people on their side, sometimes starring Bokaro’s Managing Director, one Mr. S. Samarapungavan and/or his charming Manager of Purchasing, a Mr. Ramaratnam. I am happy to recall that I was not deterred by the turnout and invariably was able to depart with a satisfactory result. But, enough!
We obtained many more large and small contracts from Indian customers, but the result was that I needed to travel to India once or more per month. My shortest visit was 23 hours for a meeting in Bombay and my longest visit was just over 6 weeks in 1981 when I was offered the chance to take my long suffering spouse with me for a combination of ‘meetings’ across India and a large dose of touring and sightseeing.
The Indian projects were perhaps among the largest awarded to Wean United, but in the company's declining years, we exported our equipment almost all over the world. The decline had started many years preciously although it was quite invisible at the time.
After the war and the rebuilding of Europe with US money and technology, the three major rolling mill and heavy equipment suppliers, all based in Pittsburgh were the source for all new steel plants and those new facilities being planned in the USA. The late 40’s and 50’s were great years. Business worth hundreds of millions of dollars was conducted, without formal contracts, by the word of a steel company chief to the head of one of the big equipment suppliers. Unimaginable today but it worked well. Wean Engineering prospered and formed subsidiary companies in several overseas locations, as did its competitors. My first employer, Head Wrightson Machine Company was a licensee of the Aetna Standard Engineering Company from Elwood City, PA.
At some point, in the early 1950’s, for reasons which were never made clear to me, I was told that United Engineering, which became the United in Wean United, was obliged to sign a consent decree, the terms of which required it to license its technology to overseas companies and, amazingly, to allow those licensees to establish their own facilities in the USA and/or compete against their licensor. Over the years, as more and more high quality steel was produced overseas, it became more of a perceived threat to the indigenous USA producers. The critical export financing, which had helped the US engineering companies compete on an even keel and flourish was lobbied against by both the US steel companies and the worker's unions. Less investment was being made to modernize the US producers, but when a modernization project was undertaken, the latest technology had been supplied by licensees and former licensees of the US engineering companies. No longer having the latest technology to offer or being in a position to offer favorable financial conditions placed the US companies at a further disadvantage.
When the licensing agreements were first created, the various licensees gathered once a year or more at the licensor’s offices to hear the latest and greatest developments made, presented with justifiable pride. Since it was thought, very stupidly, that the licensees had no technology of value to the US licensor the exchange was a one way affair. As the years went by, it seemed never to occur to us, the licensor, that there was very valuable technology to be obtained on a royalty free basis from the technologically advancing licensees, so there never was a demand for that reverse licensing to be initiated. Soon the licensees began terminating the agreements, since they had nothing further to learn, and the opportunity to gain their technology was lost to the Americans. The downward spiral was beginning to have serious consequences.
One Indian customer, having been given the ‘royal’ tour of Wean United’s huge and well equipped manufacturing facilities, observed to me that if it was ever necessary to put an axle through the center of the earth, certainly Wean United would be the one able to provide it. And it seemed to be the case, but all those hundreds of thousands of square feet of manufacturing space and expensive machine tools needed to be fully utilized to recover their overheads; without major orders that could not be accomplished. Inevitably the slippery slope became more perilous until the end was in sight. It seemed to our senior management that this could never come to pass, but it did, despite many warnings from some of the heads of our overseas licensees, who had had to shut down major manufacturing facilities in expensive, union dominated locations and sourced offshore.
Very unfortunately, in early 1982, I was appointed to the position of Vice President of Sales for the whole corporation, over the heads of many very experienced and competent sales managers. There was little synergy between the various products lines that the company had acquired over the years and I thought it would be a good idea to try to develop some. I had not considered two factors. The first factor was that I seemed to be the only one who could see potential synergy and the fellow selling e.g. gloves couldn’t see any benefit in talking from time to time with the fellow who sold e.g. scarves. Secondly, my boss didn’t like the idea of any group sales meetings which were not held in Pittsburgh and I abandoned the idea of exposing my colleagues to the other fellow's facilities.
Being appointed to such a high position or responsibility is always a danger, but never more so than at the precise time when all the factors mentioned above started to erode our potential sales at an increasing rate. I raised warning flags with suggestions as to how we could try to escape the inevitable, but was admonished for ‘trying to confuse me with the facts’. After three years of predictably declining sales, it was decided that my services were no longer required and I started looking for a new career. Very kindly, I was allowed to remain as an employee with full benefits for almost a year, until the end of 1985. I needed every minute of it before being was taken on by Westinghouse in the closing days of that year as an unpaid consultant.
But, before we move on to my time employed at Westinghouse, one detail must be recounted from 1977. As part of my Indian activities I was required to process all the cost estimates for the equipment, which was to be made in India. I soon realized that this was a big job to undertake with a pencil and four function calculator with all of three memory registers. I calculated that I would need to make well over a million calculations before I was finished. The answer was quite simple, so I drove up to Ohio to meet our man who ran the corporate mainframe to tell him what I needed. He assured me that it would take them possibly just less than a year to develop the programming to do what I wanted, assuming that management permission could be obtained for such a lowly task as helping a salesman.
By sheer good luck, I heard that Texas Instruments had just produced a programmable calculator with a full 100 memory registers, or program steps. I acquired one immediately and after a day of using it I ran out of memory. TI had also produced a more expensive big brother to the machine I bought called the TI59; it had 1,000 memory registers; it could be programmed from magnetic cards which were fed through its built in reader; it could be programmed and then record a program on a blank magnetic card for countless reuses and, finally, it could sit on a thermal printer cradle and print out the results of the programmed calculations. I was lucky enough to sell my TI58 immediately to a colleague with less demands than I had and spent my solitary evenings in the Pittsburgh apartment studying TI’s extensive user manual and mastering the science of getting exactly what I needed, even to the point of cheating the limit of 1,000 registers. Without this little machine, in the time before fax machines (we international types headed to the telex room before going to our desks to see what our far flung customers were saying), in the time before PC’s, in the time before email, in the time before spreadsheets, in the time before the internet, I would never have been able to do what I had to do and did do. I carted my TI59, its printer, its precious magnetic strips with my programs and spare rolls of thermal paper around the world with the necessary power adapters. Thus did I discover how to program at a very rudimentary level and understand the incredible benefit of computing to other people than the main-framers.
By sheer good luck, I heard that Texas Instruments had just produced a programmable calculator with a full 100 memory registers, or program steps. I acquired one immediately and after a day of using it I ran out of memory. TI had also produced a more expensive big brother to the machine I bought called the TI59; it had 1,000 memory registers; it could be programmed from magnetic cards which were fed through its built in reader; it could be programmed and then record a program on a blank magnetic card for countless reuses and, finally, it could sit on a thermal printer cradle and print out the results of the programmed calculations. I was lucky enough to sell my TI58 immediately to a colleague with less demands than I had and spent my solitary evenings in the Pittsburgh apartment studying TI’s extensive user manual and mastering the science of getting exactly what I needed, even to the point of cheating the limit of 1,000 registers. Without this little machine, in the time before fax machines (we international types headed to the telex room before going to our desks to see what our far flung customers were saying), in the time before PC’s, in the time before email, in the time before spreadsheets, in the time before the internet, I would never have been able to do what I had to do and did do. I carted my TI59, its printer, its precious magnetic strips with my programs and spare rolls of thermal paper around the world with the necessary power adapters. Thus did I discover how to program at a very rudimentary level and understand the incredible benefit of computing to other people than the main-framers.
In 1984 a couple of bearded Steves produced a tiny little thing called a Macintosh computer, which was an amazing step up from my TI59. It had 128K RAM and could process 400K of application software and data on a tiny 3.5” disk. Sometime before my birthday, I knew something was up in our house in Moon Township and discovered that me dear wife had blown an incredible chunk of change of this little machine and a dot matrix printer with almost incredible abilities to print out text, numbers and graphics. What a wonderful wife and what a wonderful birthday present. Very quickly I outgrew the machine. A young, brainy looking lad called Gates had worked with Steve Jobs to offer something called Microsoft Multiplan, a tiny spreadsheet application which could run on the tiny Mac and produce a massive 30K file. Not fully understanding what a spreadsheet did, but suspecting it would be useful, I jumped in and was suitably amazed. Next year Apple introduced the Mac Plus with a much better spec than the original one; Bill Gates developed Microsoft Excel and the possibilities of personal computing struck me hard. Mr. Gates also produced a Microsoft Basic interpreter, which allowed me to understand how to program at a simple level, but most of all, to realize and understand the concept of computer modeling and control.
Without the TI59 I could not have done my job. Without the Mac, I could not have got my job at Westinghouse or enjoyed another 20 or so years of productive and successful employment.
Without the TI59 I could not have done my job. Without the Mac, I could not have got my job at Westinghouse or enjoyed another 20 or so years of productive and successful employment.