ABSTRACT
Early in 1968 Herbert-Ingersoll Limited began its operations at their brand new premises on the Royal Oak estate in Daventry, Northamptonshire. Modern offices and a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant had been constructed on this 50-acre greenfield site. Work on anglicizing the drawings from Rockford began on time, but the senior engineers in Daventry disagreed with some of the design principles. Accordingly, instead of simply anglicizing the Rockford designs, the British engineers embarked upon a complete redesign of the transfer line machinery. The sad final straw was the collapse of Ingersoll’s main operations in Rockford. This was all a great tragedy. An enormous pool of talent and dedicated staff was left to find other employment at a time when job vacancies were not plentiful. From the project controls point of view, an important contributing factor at Daventry was the failure of Herbert-Ingersoll to use the original American designs for their first project. They redesigned everything, which resulted in enormous expense and delay.
