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EMEX 2016 Start-up taking on the world.
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REGIONAL MANUFACTURING Balance, the $1 billion co-op.
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SMART MANUFACTURING Use the super computer in your pocket.
Some manufacturing firms that survived the global financial crisis have one unusual secret to their success: stop manufacturing. Though just one of the strategies that helped keep some New Zealand manufacturing firms economically buoyant, it was among the most surprising results of Simon Collins’ PhD thesis.
Simon Collins
Picture courtesy of Victoria University of Wellington.
The Surprising Strategy To Surviving Economic Recession
Simon dedicated his PhD to investigating the factors that increased resilience in New Zealand manufacturing firms to help them withstand the worst of the global financial crisis nearly ten years ago. After conducting in-depth interviews with seventeen manufacturing firms, he identified four resilience-building strategies that separated those that continued to perform well during the recession, and those that did not. “One of the biggest surprises was that some of the resilient firms stopped being manufacturers. They outsourced manufacturing, instead focussing on developing and designing great products, and then taking ownership of distributing and retailing those products themselves. “By delivering their products straight to their customers they captured some of the margin that would usually go to a third party,” Simon says. Simon says this tactic was part of a wider survival strategy
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Networked Manufacturing – Dieter Adam, CEO of the NZMEA The next wave of technological developments, described as Industry 4.0, have the potential to substantially change the nature of manufacturing, around the world and in New Zealand. Though its future and realities are uncertain, it could represent huge opportunities for those who can leverage technology, and risks if we cannot keep up. Take networked manufacturing. At the core of this is the idea that the physical elements on the factory floor – machines, tools, transportation systems and products are all networked; they can send data to a central control point and to each other and receive instructions from a central control point and from each other. Centralised monitoring and control of production equipment is not new – the interconnectivity of all elements and the potential to process and learn from large amounts of data, however, is new.
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