Acceleration of scientific and technical progress is closely linked with raising the technical level and quality of the machines produced (tractors, cars, machine-tools, TV-sets, refrigerators, etc.), the production of which requires numerous units, components, reliability and durability of the final product.
Some four thousand items of new machines, equipment, instruments, and automation units are annually introduced into the economy in the country; some 160,000 units of equipment are modernized. By technological standards (output, reliability, metal consumption, power intensity, and other indices) these machines are as good as the best foreign makes or even better.
With the demand of constant improvement of the technical level and quality of production, standards have become one of the most important state tasks. Improvement of standards has assumed a special importance. Therefore, parameters must be determined that would dictate the need for the whole of industry to produce only high-quality commodities. It is obviously necessary to single out five or six leading standards for the principal machines and mechanisms, for the final product, which, reaching the highest technical level, would enable us at the same time to raise the quality of other products too.
Now, what standards are the leading ones? In the first place, those are which reflect the output of a certain type of mechanisms. In the second, material consumption is. The third group of standards points to the limits of energy consumption. The fourth group has to do with reliability. Finally, the fifth group of standards is oriented, on the whole, towards attaining the specified economic efficiency of the product.
In connection with standards it should be stressed the machines must be designed according to the standards which will be characteristic of the future, not only the present, development of the given industry.
The chief task of the industry is to ensure production of machines, equipment, tools and materials conforming to the highest world standards, and substantially boost labour productivity in all branches of the national economy. To solve this task, it is necessary to work out fundamentally new kinds of mechanisms and technology, to retool production continually and on a broad scale, to implement its all-round mechanisation and automation, to raise the level and effectiveness of research and standards.
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