At 01:51 PM 2/2/2002 +1100, Pat Naughtin wrote: >Could you elaborate on the 'financial benefit (s) in a reasonable time' that >were relevant to your particular business.
I wish I could answer this with lots of wonderful pro-metrication "ammunition," but I cannot. In fact, I have been asked on a couple of occasions to write an article for Metric Today about my company's metrication efforts, but I have not done so because I am not sure I can say much that will help the effort. There are numerous reasons why my company's metrication effort is not particularly useful for showing the benefits of metrication. (1) We started metricating when we were a very small company (about five employees, perhaps $800k of sales or 2,500 units in a year). This means that we did not have a huge amount of training to do (three of the five were technical employees), we did not have a huge inventory of parts and drawings and specifications that needed conversion (hard or soft), and we did not have a large customer base that we would irritate by changing product specs. (2) We started metricating at a time we were switching from one product line to another, and the older (non-metric) product line died within a couple of years. (3) Our products are not particularly dimensional, in the sense of lumber or pipe or steel or fasteners. Where dimensions are critical (connectors), they are not within the purview of the user. When one of our terminals is mounted in an instrument panel, it is always a made-to-order hole, and we provide the mounting hardware. (4) Where dimensions do come into play (in the internal mechanics of our products), most of it is entirely internal to QSI. It matters not to the customer whether we mount a display with metric or colloquial fasteners, since they neither see nor use the fasteners. (5) The electronics industry has always been somewhat more metric than older industries, and has always been entirely metric in its fundamental measures (e.g., volt, watt, amp, ohm). While many of the mechanical aspects of electronic components has been colloquial (e.g., the ubiquitous 0.1" pin spacing), it is a very global industry, and metric mechanicals started creeping into electronic design at least 15 years ago. Today component and connector pin spacings are commonly metric (1 mm, 0.5 mm, etc.). Example: the "D" connector used on PCs is a horrendous connector (0.109" x 0.112" pin spacings, if memory serves), whereas the more recent USB connector was designed to hard metric dimensions (although the platings are still specified in microinches). In summary, I cannot point to substantial short-term savings by converting to metric. There were no substantial costs, either, but QSI is not a good example of where metricating saved us a lot of money. Jim Elwell
