AUTOMATION for plenty

A CURRENT economic map of the Soviet Union would show lines from many of the country's industrial centers converging on Minsk, the Byelorussian city where one of the largest machine-tool plants built in recent years is located. It manufactured the 2,300 new types of machines and the more than 2,000 conveyors, automatic and semiautomatic lines set up in Soviet plants during 1959 and the first half of 1960.

A national program to speed the automation of industry is in operation. It was mapped out at the 21st Congress of the Communist Party and worked out in greater detail at subsequent plenary sessions of the Party's Central Committee to which scientists, industrial engineers, plant executives and leading workers were invited. Each of the republics also worked out a plan for its own industry.

Every factory in the Soviet Union, without exception, is streamlining its production. Processes wasteful of labor power are continually analyzed and earmarked for automation. It is the job of the Minsk plant and others like it to create the machines that will do the work automatically.

The Minsk Transfer Line Plant does not take orders indiscriminately, however; it would be swamped if it did. The requests are channeled through the USSR State Planning Commission and the planning commissions of the 15 Union Republics.

A factory presents its automation needs and suggestions to the Economic Council that administers the particular economic region in which

it is situated. The Economic Council coordinates the various requests and passes them on to the Planning Commission. The commission analyzes the applications, establishes priorities and distributes the orders to the appropriate machine-tool plant. The Minsk Transfer Line Plant gets its orders this way. They are extremely diverse.

The shops at the transfer line plant are modern, with high ceilings and a great deal of glass to let in maximum daylight. The heart of the plant is the 320,000 square-foot machine and assembly shop, where the parts and components of the machines and lines are manufactured, assembled, tested and shipped.

At the time of our visit, a transfer line ordered by the Shadrinsk Plant in the Urals, designed to turn out hydraulic jack housing bases, was being tested. It incorporated the latest techniques in electronics and machine and instrument making. The blanks, held fast in chucks, moved all the way round on an endless circular conveyor. As a blank rolled along, one machine drilled it, a second turned it, a third milled it—each machine performing one assigned operation. The process involved 14 lathes and semiautomatic machines operated by 32 workers. Installed, the line will save the Shadrinsk Plant more than 35,000 rubles a year (in the new currency).

Another Urals plant, the Kungur, will be getting a transfer line now in production in Minsk. This one is for the mass production of turbo-drill rotors and stators that will replace 158 semiautomatic lathes and constitute a whole shop.

Consumer industries are also cutting labor costs with automatic lines. The plant is presently assembling a transfer line to machine meat-grinder bodies that will replace 55 workers and 40 machines. It will turn out a million meat grinders annually.

Production chief Sergei Furtsev tells us: "Last year we manufactured 16 transfer lines of various types. This year we will be turning out 35. By 1965, when the seven-year plan ends, we expect to be manufacturing them at the rate of 65 to 70 a year. This is in addition to automatic machine tools we also make to order for different industries. We turn them out in the hundreds."

We ask about the expanded production facilities and staff that this ambitious program will need, and Furtsev explains that more space is already being built. This year 200 pieces of equipment will be installed and 700 more workers added to the payroll.

The plant's design offices are in a new light-hooded four-story building. It looks like a carefully ordered beehive with hundreds of people at drafting boards drawing outlines for future machines. During working hours the building has the quiet absorbed atmosphere of a school in session. At lunchtime it is like a school at recess—with radios playing in all the offices, a documentary film being shown in the assembly hall and ping-pong balls clicking in the lounge. The school feeling is understandable; most of the 550 designers were students not too long ago. Only one out of every ten is over 30.

Nikolai Bodry, deputy chief designer, a busy little man who looks like a ruffled sparrow in his crumpled gray jacket, stops rushing about for a moment to tell us: "The day of the solitary inventor is past and gone. Machines these days are designed by groups of inventors working together. Automatic machines or lines are made up of many components which were used singly before." He gives us a picture of the way a team of designers takes an order that comes into the plant and breaks it down into components. Standard assemblies are drawn up in practically no time, almost in the automatic way that good chess players begin a long-studied opening. Then a special design group joins in to add the new elements that are needed. The likely versions of the design go to the bureau's technical council—the "brain trust" it's called locally—where they are discussed with the customer. Then the drawings are sent to the shops to be translated into metal.

It's a research laboratory atmosphere you feel in the design building. These are not people working just to make a living. The creation of machines is their calling.

Here is one of them—designer Alexander Koblov, a lean, high-strung man. He spent a quarter of a century working in a factory near Moscow, first at the bench, then as a foreman and a process engineer and, finally, as a designer. The factory made gear-cutting machines. They were good and durable, but Koblov thought they took too much time and labor. As he operated these gear cutters, he saw with his mind's eye a new kind of machine that would turn the work, cut teeth, check quality, reject flawed units and flash a red pignal to show which machine element was responsible for the defect.

Later Koblov learned that a transfer machine like the one he had in mind had been designed by the Mechanical Engineering Research and Development Institute in Moscow. It had drawbacks, however. A major one was that the whole line stopped when a single unit developed trouble.

He kept pondering over it. He thought that he'd have more chance to work on the idea at the Minsk plant, and so he moved there. He designed various machines and production lines while waiting for an order to come in for a gear-cutting transfer line.

When it did come, it came in multiples. First, an order from a spare-parts factory in Omsk, followed by similar orders from the Gorky Motor Works on the Volga, the Zavolzhsky Engine Plant and the Minsk Spare-Parts Factory.

A special design department was set up to handle these orders, with

Koblov at its head and twenty young engineers assisting. The team has worked out scores of creative ideas, and the transfer line will soon be finished.

Antonina Bushina is one of many young engineers who have carved a real place for themselves in the design bureau. She was graduated from the Moscow Machine-Tool Technical School, then worked for several years in a heavy machine-building plant in Kramatorsk, the Ukraine. While there she took a correspondence course at the Moscow Polytechnical Institute. She and her husband—he is a designer, too—went around to various plants looking for automation ideas. They were both very eager to get placed with a plant like the one in Minsk, and the opportunity finally came. Antonina now designs electrical components for transfer lines.

Designer Vladimir Kravtsov came to the plant by another route. He lived in an outlying Byelorussian village near Vitebsk and was graduated from the local school. Then he went to a technical school where he demonstrated an uncommon talent for design. From school he came directly to the Minsk plant. He develops subassemblies for transfer lines, and when he isn't at his board he can be found in the bureau's library digging up data from handbooks or keeping up with the foreign literature in his field. Vladimir has a host of ideas he wants to work out. He has time—he's only 23 now.

Designers and engineers aren't the only ones who develop new machines and improve manufacturing processes. As often as not, original ideas come from benchworkers at the Minsk plant—lathe and milling-machine operators, foundrymen and smiths. These are skilled and bright men. Nine out of every ten of them attend technical schools and colleges after work. They are masters of their own trades and have more than a smattering of skill in others. There is no dearth of new ideas at Minsk; every third worker at the plant has contributed worthwhile suggestions for improving machines. A good many are inventors in their own right.

Leonid Potapovich is one, a 30-year-old planing machine operator who has been working at the plant ever since it opened. He is responsible for any number of features to speed up and simplify planing operations and has originated methods for sharpening and hardening cutting tools.

These inventions have increased machine shop efficiency and added considerably to Leonid's income. He gets a bonus for every idea accepted.

Electrician Alexander Manulik is another worker with inventions to his credit. What motivates these men primarily is not personal gain or aggrandizement, but the admirable human urge toward technical progress. They are craftsmen who want to get more done with less expenditure of labor power.

Automation displaces human labor—that's its reason for being. The question which suggests itself immediately is this one: What happens to the workers displaced by the automatic lines the Minsk plant manufactures?

We need not go far to answer the question. There are several factories right in the city itself that have been automated. Take the Minsk Tractor Plant, a large setup with up-to-date equipment built after the Second World War.

A few years ago the Moscow Mechanical Engineering Research and Development Institute installed a large transfer line in the engine shops of the plant. It produced cylinder heads, a key engine component. The line operated faultlessly and turned out quality work. But it brought a new problem. One of the final operations on a part had to be done by radial drilling machines, and these couldn't keep pace with the transfer line. The bottleneck meant that the drills had to be worked on a three-shift basis.

The Minsk automating plant was given the job of producing an

auxiliary transfer line to replace the radial drilling machines. It designed a line that streamlined the flow of work in the shop, eased the work load, tripled labor productivity, and reduced the production cost of the part in question by two-thirds.

Now, the point we are coming to is this. With the auxiliary line keeping pace with the main line, there was no need for three shifts, and the night shift was therefore discontinued. What happened to the workers?

Two of them, Ivan Muravitsky and Vasili Chaika, are now servicing the new line. While it was being set up, they and others were taught the theory and operating principles by engineers from the transfer line plant. They drew average monthly wages during the retraining period. Now, as operators, they make as much as they did before, but the job is cleaner, easier and more interesting.

Two other men who worked on the old drilling machines now service the main transfer line. They took over the jobs of trained technicians Boris Chaika and Victor Sheban who were asked to join a designing team working on the expansion of the engine shop. Shifts of this kind are frequent since the tractor plant keeps growing all the time.

The same sort of thing, on a smaller scale, happened in the crank shaft department of the plant where threading operations were done manually until the transfer line plant designed an automatic machine to take care of thread-tapping. The job of Vladislav Gudkovsky, who used to tap threads, was eliminated. He was transferred to the chassis shop where he operates a lathe and makes the same wages he did before.

It should be fairly obvious that the workers of the Minsk Tractor Plant—and any other factory in the Soviet Union, for that matter—have nothing to fear from automation. They are no less interested in technical progress than are the men at the transfer line plant. Some 1,600 of them are efficiency idea people and inventors. They turned in more than 3,000 suggestions last year to improve production techniques. These innovators seem to be particularly numerous in the tractor factory's engine shop where the new automatic line is operating. Half of the 134 idea men are benchworkers, the others are engineers and technicians. They have formed a shop design bureau of their own, headed by Vladislav Maimusov, a recent graduate of the Minsk Polytechnical Institute.

Electrician Alexander Mamai is an active member of this voluntary design group. He and Maimusov have been huddling over blueprints lately. Oftimes you'll find them checking over the plant's two transfer lines, the main one developed by the Moscow Research Institute and the auxiliary line set up by the Minsk automation plant. Their idea is to design a turntable to link up the two lines. That would cut out the jobs now being done by the two operators of the auxiliary line. But neither Mamai nor Muravitsky worry about that. They'll tell you the reason. Not a single worker has ever been laid off at the Minsk Tractor Plant because of automation. You can say the same for any other factory you care to name.

Pick up the phone and check with some of the other plants equipped with automatic lines made in Minsk. Sergei Kulikov of the Penza Textile Machinery Plant says, "Yes, the Minsk plant made three automatic spindle-machining lines to our order."

"How many workers did the machines displace?"

"Ten."

"Where are they working now?"

"Right here at the factory. We need them. In 1959 we doubled our production over 1958, and in 1960 we doubled it once again. We employ a lot of people and could use more if we had them."

Call Iosiph Litvakovsky, chief engineer of the tractor plant in Vladimir. "Sure, Minsk set up an automatic line for us to manufacture housings for ball bearings. It cut our labor cost to a fiftieth and multiplied labor productivity by a factor of 25."

"Have you laid off any workers on account of it?"

"I should say not. Ball bearings don't make up the whole of a tractor engine. We've shifted the men to other departments. They're glad to have them."

You'll get the same story from every other plant where automatic lines have been installed to free workers for jobs where they can use their minds as well as their hands.