Behind the Codes
1
The white 3G dongle plugged into the side of the laptop gave off a faint blue-green light.
It was twenty to six in the morning in Cape Town and the sky was still dark. Twenty thousand kilometres away at 81 Golf Road, Fuyang, the clock had already gone past twenty to twelve.
Six hours of difference. The Monday morning executive meeting at home usually broke up at half past eleven, and ten minutes later the targets, resolutions and chasers settled in that room came across the cable and landed on me.
Outlook gave a sharp chime from the bottom right of the screen.
A new message came up at the top of the inbox, from Zhao Chenyang, the subject line carrying a capital RE. The cc line was full: Xiong Ying, Xiong Zhangyou, and next to them several people from technical and planning at home.
He had answered straight into the site report I had sent back the week before.
Zhao kept up the plain memo habits of a senior man in a foreign company. The whole greeting was six words.
"Larry, my reply is below:"
Scrolling down, under my section on South African material shipments and packing, he had typed a block of bold text:
"The situation in South Africa is understood. Chairman Xiong stressed again at the weekly meeting that the first domestic hull starts very soon, that cost pressure is severe, and that the supply chain for building these boats has to be in our own hands. We cannot simply wait for the foreigners to ship. Based on what you now have in South Africa, produce as soon as possible an implementation plan for our own independent supplier system, with a specific localisation ratio and a timetable. This needs to go to the board at next Monday's meeting."
Further down, against the drawings that needed confirmation from the technical department at home, his note carried no more feeling than the rest:
"Jackie, discuss with William and ask South Africa for the drawing standards. Feedback at Monday's meeting."
No fist on the table, no line with an exclamation mark on it. But the words "ratio" and "timetable" came across the twenty thousand kilometres and pressed down on me, level and steady.
I looked at that last line, about the board at Monday's meeting, for a while. The Monday was not Zhao Chenyang's idea. He sat between Chairman Xiong and the site, and what he wanted was a number he could put in front of the board.
The trouble was that the number could not be filled in out of the air. Five years at Xiasha had taught me about the reefs under that kind of memo. To close out a task, typing a percentage into a report costs nothing at all. But the catamaran's five hundred and something items were scattered across dozens of workshops in Cape Town, and the list the South African technical department had given us did not even have the basic tolerances on it. A figure invented in a flat above the sea would come back as a whole plant standing idle and waiting on material the day work started at home.
Out in the sitting room there was the rasp of canvas work clothes being pulled on.
Zhou went past the door carrying a jacket with old oil stains on it. He saw the screen lit in my room, stopped for a second in the door frame, gave me a small nod, did not disturb me, and went to the entry to put on his heavy steel-toed boots.
Outside the window the sky was turning from grey to silver.
I closed the laptop, put it into the padded compartment of the backpack, put in with it the contact sheets covered in local abbreviations that I had got out of the South African logistics department the two days before, and pulled the zip shut.
2
I came out of the assembly hall and onto the galvanised grating stair on one side.
The stair hangs straight off the plant wall, and the salt wind lifted the glassfibre dust off my soles and scattered it. At the top there is a heavy damp-proof steel door. I scraped the dried resin off my soles on the scraper bar beside it, pushed the door open and went into the general office on the second floor.
The door closed behind me and I got a faceful of dry paper smell and the hot air coming off the cabinets. The perforated aluminium blinds at the end of the corridor were half closed, and the dawn came through them in stripes of light and dark, laid across the steel filing cabinets.
The typing on the second floor was busy, with low English voices mixed into it.
I went through the office and stopped at Bridget's desk. Three kraft-paper boxes stood at the corner, each labelled with a hull number.
I pulled out the folding chair beside the desk and sat down.
"Morning, Bridget."
Bridget looked up, her fine-tipped pen stopped in the air, and gave me a brisk professional smile. "Morning, Larry. Still going round in circles over that packing list?"
"Julius is helping me sort out the packing list down in the store." I turned the contact sheets over and laid them by my hand. "Today I'm here for the full L38 material master, including the register of every supplier, local and overseas."
Bridget's eyebrows went up a little. "The whole boat? Five hundred and something assembled items?"
"The whole boat," I said. "We have to plan our own purchasing at home, and I need the original register out of the system."
Bridget did not ask much. She turned to SYSPRO and brought up the L38 material master.
She exported it to Excel and angled the screen towards me a little.
The rows went down the screen page after page, and each notch of the wheel was another few dozen items.
"L38 Bareboat, five hundred and seventy-four assembled items, eighty-four registered suppliers." Bridget pointed at the summary row at the top. "Fasteners, bolts, nuts, washers, those are not on this sheet. There is another one, two hundred and sixteen items, and that belongs to Julius's store."
I took out a pencil and wrote on the back: "574 + 216".
Then I read down the columns line by line.
What was on the screen was like a stone wall with no gaps in it.
The whole list was strings of codes made up inside the South African plant: `HLYD TLBG L40`, `BL-ST-022`, `PIP-NYL-012`, `CH-LAT-005`. After each code came a description shortened past shortening, in English, with no material grade, no tolerance, and no engineering drawing number of any kind.
I pointed at `HLYD TLBG L40` in the middle of the screen. "Bridget, this halyard bag, and the blocks and deck hardware in the rows below it, the supplier is Central Boating. Where are their engineering drawings and technical specifications?"
Bridget picked up her water glass and took a sip.
"There are no drawings, Larry." Her tone was level, as though she were answering something obvious.
"No drawings?"
"No." Bridget leaned back in her chair and looked at me. "Ian Coward, who runs Central Boating, has been with our boss since Robertson & Caine was first set up. They have worked together for sixteen years. From the thirty-seven to the forty, whatever deck block or what specification of rope bag goes on the boat, Ian can put his hand on it with his eyes closed. When we want to order, purchasing just rings him up with the code and the hull number, and their van is at the plant gate the next morning."
She tapped the edge of the desk twice with the barrel of her pen.
"To hedge the exchange rate, Central Boating keeps four settlement accounts in our system: sterling, euro, dollar, rand. Whichever currency is better that day, we settle in that one. Their non-standard parts start at twenty sets. Why would we want drawings? Ringing Ian is the drawing."
I looked at the dense field of codes on the screen.
Behind the codes was an information wall built up over twenty years out of favours, trust and verbal understanding. The modern ERP system, so proper on the surface, had a network of people embedded in it that you could not get a pin into.
At home, management still thought of a supply chain as going to the market and buying by brand, as though one written instruction could swap every South African item for a Chinese one. The brutal fact lying open in front of me was that I could not find one plain sheet of drawing that could be taken away and made from.
"If you want to make it in China," Bridget said, looking at me, the corner of her mouth lifting a fraction, "you will have to drive out and visit them yourself. Go out of this building, ask in the workshops, look on the shelves. What is not in the system, you will not find sitting at a computer until the end of the day."
"Send it to my email," I said. She attached the Excel file and typed my name into the recipient line.
"Thank you, Bridget."
"Good luck, Larry." She turned back, and the light off the monitor settled again on the clean line of her face.
3
The Southern Spars mast works sits deep in the industrial area of Cape Town.
Pushing open the tall steel-framed gate, you do not get the choking stink of bulk resin that hangs around an ordinary glassfibre shop. What you get instead is the faint scorch of aerospace prepreg curing and the low rumble of the extraction ducts. A hot-cure oven more than ten metres long lies across the middle of the shop like a silver-grey steel whale. Below the gantry beam a carbon mast, tens of metres long, lies across its trestles while a man with a thickness gauge works his way along it section by section.
This is the second largest sailboat rig manufacturing site in the world, and the source of the whole L38 mast and rigging system.
The engineer who received me, Graham, was lean, in a one-piece work suit covered in grey-white dust, with thick anti-dust goggles on his nose.
On the heavy assembly platform in the middle of the shop an engineering blueprint was spread out, its four corners held down by four machined solid copper sleeves. On it were the section tolerances for the composite sandwich panel and the aluminium masthead reinforcement.
Graham picked up a digital caliper and put the jaws on a chamfer tolerance. "The tolerance between the carbon tube and the metal transition sleeve has to be locked inside a tenth of a millimetre. The lateral wind load out there runs to tens of tonnes. One point of stress concentration and the aluminium sleeve will cut the carbon wall open in the swell."
I bent down and ran a fingertip along the thin pencil line on the blueprint. At home plenty of people think that hardware only has to match on dimensions. On a Cape Town fitter's blueprint a tenth of a millimetre is a line that does not move.
"You can look at the drawing," Graham said, putting the caliper back in its wooden box and looking up at me, his voice level. "You cannot take it away."
I nodded and did not argue.
When I had looked my fill I went next door to the assembly consumables store.
Two rows of tall green angle-iron racking ran along the wall, with boards chained to the uprights carrying a full set of material safety data sheets. I took the digital camera out of the bag, crouched down and put the lens close to the labels.
On the middle shelf stood several large rolls of black and white hook-and-loop, the plastic wrapping printed with US flame-retardant Velcro labels, SKU 193787 and SKU 194066. The data sheet beside them stated flame retardance of over fifteen seconds and two thousand hours of salt spray. Below that, a rank of white Dow Corning B15 neutral-cure silicone tubes stood upright in a carton.
In the cool corner at the back of the racking stood the chemistry set used only for bonding the curved saloon windscreen: black tins of BETASEAL 1407 polyurethane structural adhesive, and beside them small thin-necked aluminium bottles with green labels, BETAPRIME adhesion promoter. A few smaller cans of BONDstick 497 contact adhesive lay about, and on the masking-tape seal of each lid a shop worker had written the batch number and opening date in blue ballpoint. Against the wall stood two knee-high yellow drums painted with the red and black name of a well-known South African brand: Genkem Contact Adhesive.
I crouched on the floor and ran my fingertips over the cold metal of the tins.
In Fuyang, people in meeting rooms say it easily. What is hard about glue? There is all-purpose adhesive by the bucket in any hardware market for a few dozen yuan. Buy it, smear it on, done.
But a yacht does not sail on a quiet inland river. In Atlantic swell a curved windscreen takes thousands of kilos of alternating wind load and twisting shear every day. Without that inconspicuous bottle of BETAPRIME biting a firm micro-bond into the glass surface first, you can spread the best polyurethane adhesive there is. Leave it soaked in salt water for a fortnight and the whole pane can be lifted off in a storm like a shell.
The adhesives, primers and hook-and-loop on these shelves were not picked up from any small workshop. They were the settled answer that twenty years of Atlantic swell had paid for. Swap any of them for an ordinary industrial adhesive from home and you are not cutting cost. You are fitting a fuse into the hull with your own hands.
I stood up, pressed the shutter, and put the hand-written batch numbers and specifications on the labels into the camera card.
4
Over the next three days I followed the addresses on the long list and drove out to the main material distributors in Cape Town.
The first was Sondor.
This is the largest foam rubber manufacturer in South Africa, and the plant carries the burnt-sweet smell of expanded polyethylene. Under the tall steel beams of the warehouse, stacks of grey-black cross-linked polyethylene foam board and neoprene sealing strip, two metres high, run up to the roof. A hydraulic press rises and falls with a dull beat, punching big sheets of foam into round deck sealing rings.
The technician receiving me cut a piece of foam and handed it over. I pressed my thumb hard into the black cross section, let go, and watched the fine sponge cells come slowly back to level, flat and even again in two seconds.
I asked him for the Lloyd's-approved flame certificate and the salt spray report, and for three sets of strip in different densities. The samples went into a clear plastic bag, the bag got a label, and the label went into the backpack. These had to go home quickly so that the rubber factories there could test hardness, rebound and oil resistance against them. Buying on colour was not going to work.
Coming out of Sondor, I turned into the Cape Town branch of Maizey Plastics.
On the list, the high-density acrylic for the saloon's front windscreen and the deck hatches all came from this supplier.
In the reception room the quotation the salesman handed me made my back go cold. For the same specification of clear cast acrylic sheet, Maizey's unit price was more than three times an ordinary acrylic sheet at home.
I did not rush into haggling. I asked to look at the flatness of the surface and went with a shop man into the cutting room at the back.
A big sliding table saw was turning at speed, water jets throwing a fine mist. In one corner of the shop stood sheets of twelve-millimetre clear board, just cut. I went over, bent down, and picked with my nail at the kraft protective paper taped on the corner.
Lifting it a little, on the light-passing film underneath, was a line of pale green print:
`EVONIK Industries - PLEXIGLAS GS - Made in Germany`
Evonik, of Germany.
Seeing that line, the ledger in my head lit up.
Maizey does not make marine acrylic itself. They are Evonik's local distributor in South Africa. The sheet comes from the port of Hamburg to Cape Town, gets cut in the warehouse, and is sold on to Robertson & Caine. How much of that threefold spread was Evonik's ex-works price and how much was theirs, I did not know yet.
That night, back at the flat, I wrote a memo to Huang Yuan and to purchasing at home. First ask Evonik's Shanghai branch for a direct price at the same specification and the same quantity. If the direct price comes in clearly below Maizey's, drop the South African channel and take the middleman out. If the gap is small, think again.
But seeing through a distributor's hand does not mean the road is open.
In the weekly report I listed two more suppliers. Connoisseur Moulding supplies the whole set of teak door frames, wooden handrails and interior panels. Astore supplies the nylon pipe fittings and PVC valves for the entire boat.
Our carpenters in Fuyang are not unskilled, and there are plastic moulders all over China. Given tolerances on drawings, these non-critical parts could be cut and made at home, saving boxes of sea freight.
The choke point is not on the shop floor. It is behind us.
Replacing these parts has to be notified to the classification society, and there has to be an engineering blueprint and a material specification signed off by the technical department at home.
I sent Xu Junjie two emails with the timber section sizes and the valve pressure ratings listed in full, asking for drawing confirmation and sign-off on the substitution.
Three days went by and nothing came back.
Xu Junjie cannot read an assembly manual in full English, and the young technicians at home have never read a Lloyd's clause through to the end. Nobody dares put his own name on a drawing he has never seen and carry the risk of a boat going down on him.
At the sharp end we were prising up every card in the deck. At the back end they could not catch hold of a single drawing.
5
At midnight the flat above the sea was finally quiet.
Through the thin partition came the slow heavy breathing of Zhou and Chen Liansong in the next room. They had spent the last days climbing up and down in the yard, checking process, and they were asleep the moment their heads touched the pillow.
A small clip-on lamp was lit on the dining table.
It is a habit of many years with me. Any number that goes up, I run again by another method.
In the first blank cell I typed =574+216.
Enter. Seven hundred and ninety.
Laid out on the screen was the complete L38 master list I had spent two days putting together. Assembled parts, piping, mechanical and electrical equipment, plus every stainless steel bolt, nut and washer in the box classifications. The whole boat's base number came down to one line.
Seven hundred and ninety items.
On the table in front of me I spread out the nearly forty South African suppliers I had visited, the sample cuttings I had collected, and the correspondence I had confirmed with the original makers in Europe and America. By process and by supply chain route I sorted them into four hard categories.
The first: where there is already a mature channel at home that can pass class. Yanmar engines through their agents in China, acrylic direct from Evonik, resin and consumables bought together with Xu Jianmin's help at Flying Eagle, and 316 stainless screws from the specialist fastener plants at home. Domestic direct buy.
The second: European and American brands on which the South African distributor marks up hard. The Italian Vitrifrigo marine fridges, the American Harken deck blocks, the British Lewmar windlass systems. All of them to bypass Cape Town, ordered direct from the makers, shipped straight by sea to Shanghai. Overseas direct purchase.
The third: teak door frames, water deflectors, wooden handrails and cabin upholstery pads, which could go to the carpentry shop in production. But this category has to wait on drawings from the technical department at home and filing with the classification society. It is stuck at Xu Junjie's desk. I could only list it separately and leave it out of the number.
The fourth: Quantum's custom main and headsails, Southern Spars' carbon mast components, the dezincification-resistant brass through-hulls and seacocks, and the special sealing consumables that have to carry class certification. These stay with the South African makers, and there is no argument about it.
Under the lamp I put the filter arrows on and went down category by category.
I selected a category and a number jumped up in the count box at the bottom right of the screen. I copied it into the first column of the schedule and clicked the next category.
One category, then the next, until the last item, a watertight gasket, was in place.
I stopped my fingers.
At the bottom of the sheet, in the summary cell, came up the whole number I had checked three times.
Of the seven hundred and ninety items on the boat, those we would drive ourselves, domestic direct buy plus overseas direct purchase together, came to four hundred and seventy-three.
Four hundred and seventy-three divided by seven hundred and ninety.
In the cell at the bottom right a line came up on its own, with a percentage sign on it:
`59.87%`
I looked at the figure, exact to two decimal places, and took my hand off the mouse.
I knew what Zhao Chenyang would ask: by item count or by value. Item count looks well. By value it will certainly be lower, because the sails and the mast, the big ones, all stay in South Africa. I added a second schedule, running each category again at the last purchase price times the quantity used. I had no intention of hiding that number.
Five years at Xiasha and half a year at Fuyang had shown me plenty of men who sat in offices drawing pies and shouting for a hundred per cent local content. But after walking round these dozens of old workshops in Cape Town and handling parts on the shelves with sea salt still frosting them, I knew perfectly well in myself that a hundred per cent of that kind is nothing but a dangerous vanity.
What has to be held, you hold at the maker's quality even if you break your teeth on it. What can be made at home goes back to the shop. What can go round the middleman gets bought direct across the ocean.
I opened Outlook and started a reply.
To Zhao Chenyang, copied to Xiong Zhangyou, Xiong Ying, and every manager in the project and technical departments at home.
I wrote the body level and plain.
"Mr Zhao: the detailed plan is in the attached schedule. The L38 BOM and fasteners come to 790 items together, of which 473 items, or 59.87 per cent by item count, would be bought under our own direction, domestic direct plus overseas direct. The percentage by value is in Schedule 2 and will be lower than this, because the sails, the mast and the through-hulls have to stay with the South African makers.
The carpentry and interior parts that could be made in house are not counted in that percentage yet. They can only be brought in after the technical department at home has confirmed the drawings and filed with the classification society.
The timetable runs in three batches. Batch one, domestic direct buy: quotations and orders completed within three weeks. Batch two, European and American direct: price and delivery confirmed with the makers within four weeks. Batch three, made in house: counted back from the day the technical department signs the drawings."
The cursor rested on the send key for two seconds.
I pressed Enter.
The progress bar at the bottom right of the screen ran to the end, and the mail slid quietly into the sent folder.
I closed the laptop and reached over and turned off the clip-on lamp.
Down on the coast road the sound of a heavy diesel refrigerated truck came up, changing gear as it came, running with a rumble towards the container terminal at Table Bay. The yellow mercury street lamps went out along the row with a snap as the daylight came up behind them.
A grey-blue line of light showed on the edge of the sky.