Levi

I first read the book described at reference 1 about five years ago, a reading noticed at reference 2. Then a few weeks ago, for some reason I now forget, I took it down from its shelf again, a taking down noticed in the margins of trolley 113 at reference 3. Second reading now completed, and I am impressed now as I was five years ago.

I offer a few comments, in addition to those I made five years ago.

I start with the matter of records, a matter in which regular readers will know that I take some interest. See, for example, references 4 and 5. Now industrial chemistry seems to be rather like cooking, with recipes and boiling things up in large saucepans, perhaps now called vessels, perhaps just the sort of thing which used to be made from sheets of stainless steel by Vestec, on the Longmead industrial estate just down the road. These ingredients all come with specifications of their own and the success of any particular batch often depends critically on all the ingredients conforming to those specifications. So you expect your supplier to check ingredients before dispatch and you check them on delivery. All of which generates lots of records. You also keep records of the cooking of each batch, records of all the temperatures, pressures and times.

Then, perhaps some weeks, months or even years later, there is some kind of a problem. One of your customers complains that whatever it is that you are selling is not working properly. So you get your chemists to go on a long expedition, trawling through all the records to try and find out what might have gone wrong with these particular batches. What might turn out to be an ongoing, if intermittent problem. But an expedition which is only possible if you keep good records.

All of which might explain why BP used to employ state of the art records people to look after all their records. People whom we came across from the Treasury, on the other side of the river.

In one of the cases that Levi mentioned, it turned out to be to do with the days of the week on which a local tannery was flushing its waste into the local river, which then contaminated the water used by the laundry a little way downstream, which then contaminated the overalls used in the laboratories of the company with the problem.

Then, having run down your problem, there might be the question of remedial action. In Levi's time this might have meant a time consuming search of the relevant chemical literature for new recipes, of which literature there could easily be a good deal. With a lot of it in German, just to complicate things a bit more. I wonder now whether this searching has got easier with internet and computers: the search time per unit volume has probably come down hugely, but then the volume has probably come up hugely. Probably cheaper, as one no longer needs a library, with book and librarians, of the old sort. Who knows.

All of which leads onto lawyers and litigation. In a complicated process of this sort, it is always going to be tempting to cut corners, to cut costs. To bear down on expensive ingredients. And then things are going to go wrong in a more or less random way. Putting all this right often costs a great deal of money and those costs have to be apportioned between the various parties in some way. Apportionment which might be helped along or even specified by the relevant contracts. All those contracts which commercial departments spend much quality time on. And all the various parties are going to find it worth their while to hire lawyers to fight their corner, perhaps all the way to some branch of the European Court of Justice.

Which strikes me as a good reason for having both lawyers and European Courts of Justice. The world is a complicated place and you cannot wish these sorts of problems away. However much you spend on quality control, things are still going to go wrong and the costs of putting them right are still going to have to be apportioned. Enter the lawyers to do your pushing and shoving for you. No need to get your own hands dirty.

PS 1: I don't think that, in the event, I ever got around to reading the other two books of Levi's that I own, sitting next to this one. Perhaps I will now.

PS 2: when I left the civil service, commercial department was the then fashionable name for the people who did what might otherwise be called procurement, purchasing or even buying. No doubt there is some other term now. Maybe, even, the fashion for big, central, all-powerful commercial departments has faded and people are allowed to do their own thing once again.

Reference 1: The Periodic Table - Primo Levi - 1975.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/more-red-book.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/trolley-113.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=towers+filenet.