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Copyright Manufacturers’ Monthly is owned by Prime Creative Media and published by John Murphy. All material in Manufacturers’ Monthly is copyright and no part may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means (graphic, electronic or mechanical including information and retrieval systems) without written permission of the publisher. The Editor welcomes contributions but reserves the right to accept or reject any material. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information, Prime Creative Media will not accept responsibility for errors or omissions or for any consequences arising from reliance on information published.

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26 Skills & Training

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28 Business Intelligence

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45 Women in Industry

16 Software

32 Collaboration

47 Pumps & Drives

20 Industry Focus

34 Innovation

48 What’s New

22 Issues & Insights

36 Manufacturing Strategies

51 The Last Word

24 Compressors

38 Instrumentation

the opinions of, or endorsed by the publisher unless otherwise stated. © Copyright Prime Creative Media, 2019 Articles All articles submitted for publication become the property of the publisher. The Editor reserves the right to adjust any article to conform with the magazine format.

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Despite being seen as distinct, software and hardware are in many ways two sides of the same coin.

In this issue, we speak with two manufacturers who are combining software and hardware in their products.

While increasing functionality for customers can be one outcome, SSS Manufacturing has utilised software to overcome a skills shortage in structural steel fabrication.

Bringing software into the manufacturing factory, however, requires an understanding of the differences inherent in the software production process. For some, this

will require two separate business entities, while others, such as SPEE3D, have sought expertise in unexpected places, in this case, video games.

In addition, while not every manufacturer will be able to start coding straight away, there is help out there, in the form of collaboration with universities, and research centres.

This is already starting to pay dividends, with the operation of major projects requiring digital connectivity between suppliers. Furthermore, some manufacturers are developing new business models through the licencing and distribution of software.

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22 Overcoming barriers to digital manufacturing

40 The latest thinking in 3D printing

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Comment

SYED SHAH – Managing Editor, Manufacturers’ Monthly

Manufacturing in 2020: integrating the cyber and physical worlds

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HE launch of the Tesla Cybertruck was certainly a matter of controversy.

Whether it was the unusually geometric design, or the failed testing of its “bulletproof” windows, there is definitely room for improvement in the vehicle’s presentation.

Tecnology analysts and enthusiasts have described Elon Musk’s ute as “revolutionary”, and, in many ways, we agree.

The global financial markets certainly seemed to agree. In June last year, Tesla stocks bottomed out at a three year low of US$177 ($256.40). Following the launch, it shot up to above US$400 in December.

The vehicle promises a new age of manufacturing where software and hardware are integrated not just in the process of manufacturing, but in the finished product. In Tesla vehicles already on the market,

4 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

upgrades to the onboard software are delivered over-the-air. This not only allows Tesla to deliver services such as Spotify or Netflix to the onboard dashboard, but in 2019, when wildfires were affecting California, the company’s homebase, Tesla unlocked extra range so that drivers could get home safely.

This functionality enables both the manufacturer and the user to get more out of the product.

Australian manufacturers are also taking advantage of the potential offered by IoT-enabled devices.

In this issue, we speak with two manufacturers who are leading the charge in this field.

Not only is this making products last longer, through automated updates, but by bringing together software and hardware, manufacturers are grappling with the challenges faced by the sector.

Whether this is in the form of skill shortages affecting the welding

profession, which SSS Manufacturing solved by automating their structural steel fabrication process, or by opening up new business models, in the provision of manufactured products as a subscription service, software is becoming inseparable from hardware.

However, there’s a catch. While software can deliver designs over the internet to anywhere on the planet for an almost inconsequential cost, devices that use data, whether in algorithms or via the cloud, are coming to the attention of global trade agreements.

For now, countries have agreed to a moratorium on tariffs applied to the trade of electronic goods and services, but as the trade war continues, countries around the world are seeking to control the data that is produced or transmitted across borders.

For some manufacturers this has meant that they have had to

differentiate their products for the markets in which they serve. For others, the prospect of navigating the complex landscape of international compliance could be a drag on innovation and the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies such as cloud computing and cyber-physical systems.

These issues will continue to confront manufacturers as they continue to delve into the possibilities in Industry 4.0.

Being successful in doing so requires manufacturers to combine their efforts and leverage the advantage of collaboration, learning from those who have gone before, and keeping their eyes open to the complications inherent in innovation.

In our first edition for 2020, Manufacturers’ Monthly covers these issues and looks to how the future of manufacturing will be impacted by the combination of technology and politics.

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GEOFF CRITTENDEN – CEO, Weld Australia

Australian Standards: Ensuring welded structures and the general public are safe

Standards have an important role to play in ensuring structures are safe and fit for purpose.

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N late October, the New South Wales state government introduced the Design and Building Practitioners Bill 2019 to parliament. If passed, this Bill will see much-needed and longanticipated reforms made to the state’s building industry.

Weld Australia has taken responsibility for maintaining Australian Standards and managing the adoption of International Standards related to welding.

The purpose of both Australian and International Standards is to ensure that welded structures are safe. Standards have been developed, reviewed and revised over many years by volunteer engineers and tradesmen who are 6 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

enormously experienced in the design and construction of welded structures. In this way, the accuracy and validity of technical data and specifications contained within Standards is indisputable.

If applied properly, Standards ensure that fabricated structures meet all design criteria, are fit for purpose, and remain structurally sound for the entire lifecycle of the asset. The application of Standards to a process, such as welding, is particularly important— it is impossible to undertake complete verification of a welded joint without destroying it. Unfortunately, inspection after completion does not guarantee weld serviceability. As such, quality must be built into the

welding process, right from the very beginning.

Welding must be done correctly the first time. A weld cannot be adjusted once it is complete. The only course of action is to scrap the weld entirely, and start again.

As such, the welding processes set out in Australian and international Standards are crucial – they must be followed exactly.

If Australian and International Standards are not followed exactly, then there is a chance that a structure will fail.

Just such a failure occurred recently in Holland. High winds caused part of Dutch club AZ Alkmaar’s stadium to collapse.

Dramatic pictures emerged of the

damage to the 17,000-capacity stadium in Alkmaar, which was built 13 years ago.

Luckily, the stadium was empty at the time. In this case, the European Welding Standards weren’t followed, and the roof failed.

I would like to be able to say that this will never happen in Australia.

But, I am aware of many structures in Australia have been built using welds that fail to comply with the relevant Standards.

What is of perhaps most concern is that when such failures are pointed out to consulting structural engineers, they argue that – despite the fact that welding Standards are not adhered to – the structure is still safe. Engineers often make this manmonthly.com.au

Australian and International Welding Standards are quite clear. Either Standards are complied with and a structure is safe, or they are not complied with and a structure is dangerous. judgement under pressure, with weld faults usually not discovered until a structure is almost complete.

For example, Weld Australia was recently retained as the Engineer of Record by an Australian state government for a pedestrian bridge fabricated overseas. Throughout the construction phase, Weld Australia was unable to access the project, despite repeated attempts to confirm that the project met Australian standards. Therefore, Weld Australia could not certify that weld procedures were in place, that welders were qualified, and that supervision and inspection practices met the standards.

As the bridge was comprised of tubular structural steel with

complex nodes, it was critical that full penetration occurred on all joints. Given the circumstances, Weld Australia was not confident that full penetration had been achieved. When the bridge components were ready to be delivered, the state government asked us to certify the welding, which we refused to do.

At this point, the engineering company produced a highly experienced expert argument why we should certify the bridge as safe. The expert was unable to demonstrate to our satisfaction that the structure met all the requirements of the design and the Standards. Again, we refused to certify the welding. To their great credit, the state government concerned scrapped the fabricated steel and had the pedestrian bridge re-fabricated in Australia.

Unfortunately, not all projects result in such a successful outcome.

Weld Australia was recently informed by a whistle-blower of a structure in Australia that has been fabricated without compliance to Australian Standards. When we inspected the structure, we discovered that it was totally non-compliant, and deemed it to be unsafe.

Again, the consulting engineers argued that Australian Standards need not apply. However, in this case, the state government involved

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High winds caused part of Dutch club AZ Alkmaar’s stadium to collapse.

The expert was unable to demonstrate to our satisfaction that the structure met all the requirements of the design and the Standards. accepted the argument of the consulting engineers and continued with the fabrication and erection of the structure. In our view, the noncompliant welds in this structure are placing the public in harm’s way.

Australian and International

Welding Standards are quite clear.

Either Standards are complied with and a structure is safe, or they are not complied with and a structure is dangerous. As such, it is of concern that engineers are trying to secondguess the Standards.

Engineers are making assumptions, and then relying on these assumptions to certify a structure, and the welds within, as safe after the fact. This simply does not work. Welding must be performed correctly the first time to ensure that stadium roofs, pedestrian bridges, and major structures do not collapse.

Standards exist for a reason; to ensure public safety. When it comes to welding, we cannot simply wave a magic wand and make a weld safe after the fact.

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Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 7

Comment

DAVID CHUTER – CEO and managing director, IMCRC

Effective industry and research collaboration: redefining return on investment Business needs and academic capabilities need to be taken into account in any industry-research collaboration.

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S the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) gathers momentum, manufacturers are becoming more aware of the commercial benefits of research and development (R&D) collaborations with research organisations. At the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC), we’ve seen these collaborations not only stimulate innovation but help companies compete commercially in the rapidly changing world of manufacturing.

By several metrics, Australia is a powerhouse of research and academic capability. Many companies have access to some 8 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

of the country’s most advanced research facilities, business schools, and subject matter experts within a stone’s throw of their head office.

But for many business leaders, the question remains: if we invest in collaborative R&D projects, will we see a return on our investment?

And is there a sufficient connection between what our business needs and what research organisations can provide?

In the second of a three-part series on navigating the path to successful industry and research collaboration, we look at the challenges businesses face in relation to return on investment and how these challenges can

be overcome through effective collaboration.

The first challenge: demonstrating real-world outcomes We often speak to manufacturers who understand the importance of R&D for innovation and are open to the prospect of reaping the benefits that research organisations provide, such as specialised skills, advanced technologies, infrastructure, and scale.

Examples exist of prominent Australian manufacturers and global multinationals operating in Australia that have successfully embraced collaborative R&D models

– BlueScope, Cochlear, Visy, and Boeing, just to name a few.

But more local case studies are required to convince business leaders, particularly of small and medium enterprises, that collaboration between research and industry organisations can lead to a serious return on investment.

Critical to any form of collaboration is an aligned focus on outcomes, including commercial outcomes, and R&D collaborations should be no different.

As a CRC, part of our role is to champion and showcase examples of successful R&D collaborations and the business outcomes they deliver. Through our publications, manmonthly.com.au

annual conferences, and our proprietary futuremap education program, we help manufacturers see the potential and transformative benefits they could gain from partnering with a research organisation on their Industry 4.0 journey.

The second challenge: aligning objectives When it comes to measuring return on investment (ROI), manufacturers tend to prefer methods based on numbers and tangible results, such as growth in sales and jobs. But in the rapidly changing world of R&D, the results of Industry 4.0 projects are not always immediately tangible or monetary. When digitalising manufacturing processes for example, your ROI could simply be “not being left behind”.

Even if a manufacturer has a clear idea of how they will measure the ROI for a collaborative R&D project, research organisations might have a different approach with less emphasis on the financial returns. A researcher’s ROI may include high quality publications, for example, although most academics we engage with also want to see impact from their work.

To ensure alignment, addressing the commercial elements of any project right at the start is key, right from the project concept, creation and scoping stages. Before we endorse an IMCRC project, we require participants to describe their desired ROI – whether that’s sales, jobs, exports, investments, or simply getting on with their Industry 4.0 transformation.

Whatever the desired outcome, we find that willing and ambitious project participants who are working towards aligned objectives from the outset are more driven to achieve that return on investment in the end. They also have a measurable success factor during the project.

The third challenge: embracing risk In the world of manufacturing, business leaders tend to focus on short to medium-term gains, based manmonthly.com.au

Determining a ROI on R&D requires foresight from all parties. on cost analysis and estimates for the next one to three years. A decision whether to invest in more design and engineering or expand a product line, for example, would be based on the likelihood of a positive ROI. An R&D journey, on the other hand, can be much longer-term – and by its nature higher risk.

Companies that deliver genuine innovation understand their investment may deliver no return or a negative return, and are not afraid of failures. The ongoing challenge is de-risking a project as much as practicable without impeding on the creativity required for success.

A smart way to de-risk R&D investment is through collaboration – connecting businesses with the right people and resources that they might otherwise be unable to access. CRCs are a great vehicle to enable this, as well as further de-risking through co-funding of cash towards projects. As an

example, IMCRC matches industry cash invested in collaborative R&D projects on a dollar for dollar basis, which (with the value of in-kind costs such as access to facilities) delivers a total project investment of more than five times the industry cash contribution, which is pretty compelling from an ROI perspective.

And we do not just connect companies with the scientists and engineers of our research partners.

Take, for example, the collaboration between global medical technology company Stryker, RMIT University, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and St Vincent’s Hospital. While RMIT researchers are working on the R&D, the UTS Business School has been busy preparing a business case and go-to-market plan for the project.

We believe an important part of derisking a collaborative R&D project is to ensure not only the research but also the business case and strategic plan are market-leading.

The solution: focusing on the what, why, and how Whenever you bring industry and research organisations together, key to success is overcoming any perceived barriers to achieving a ROI. Successful projects will focus from the outset on what is possible and get aligned on why a project is worth investing in, the critical success factors, and what de-risking levers are available. Marry these with a good cultural fit between partners and great outcomes are possible. We know this, as we see it happen.

Ultimately, Industry 4.0 is about embracing new and innovative ways of working and thinking.

And with companies around the world partnering up with research organisations to rapidly transform their businesses and the products and services they provide, Australian manufacturers must be prepared to take a leap of faith and embrace collaborative R&D. Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 9

News@MM Lack of Australian industry involvement in defence contracting criticised

Billions of dollars of work and thousands of jobs are at risk of being lost.

The Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN), has chastised the implementation of the Australian Industry Capability (AIC) Program, for not including Australian manufacturers. With announcements of subcontracts from defence prime contracts going to overseas manufacturers, Lester Sutton, national board chair of AIDN, said that the federal government needed

to review the AIC program.

“The current AIC policy framework, established by the government through the Department of Defence, is well intentioned and has been warmly received by Australian industry. However, the AIC Program as implemented is not facilitating development of sovereign industry capability or business opportunities for the local Australian

defence supply chain to the extent envisioned,” said Sutton.

With almost $200 billion of investment outlined as a result of the 2016 Defence White Paper, the potential involvement of local industry was in danger of being minimised, said Sutton.

“Australian industry, particularly small and medium business, is now at risk of losing out on sovereign industry capability, billions of dollars of work, and thousands of local jobs.”

In a statement from AIDN, the network outlined a number of changes that could be made. These included: the creation of an assurance regime to track the delivery of local content in purchase orders, greater enforcement of AIC commitments with penalties for non-compliance, incentives for overseas companies to work with existing Australian businesses, rather than setting up Australian subsidiaries, and Australian industry being immediately involved in the early stages of the Future Submarine

and Future Frigate programs.

“Australian industry is not after a hand out, but it wants the opportunity to compete on a level playing field, for the first-of-class of Australian military platforms, otherwise there is a high likelihood Australian industry will be excluded for the life of the platforms – and sovereign industry capability will not be achieved,” said Sutton.

With future programs still at the early stages, Sutton noted that now is the right time to ensure that local businesses have the greatest possible involvement.

“AIDN members are grateful for the significant reform achieved in defence industry policy by the government over the last five years and fully support the drive to generate more local capability and corresponding jobs through the transfer of overseas technology. But we need to ensure the intent and extent of these good policy settings, particularly around AIC, are actually achieved.”

HSV invests in digitalisation A new digitalisation initiative at Holden Special Vehicles’s (HSV) facility in Clayton, Victoria, will enable the automotive manufacturer to increase its performance by a fifth, according to Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Karen Andrews.

“What’s so exciting about this announcement is that it demonstrates the benefits of going digital in all types of industries. By increasing the digitalisation of HSV’s manufacturing process, they expect at least a 20 per cent increase in performance,” said Andrews, who noted that this will lead to more demand for the components and materials that local industry supplies to the vehicle assembly line.

“Embracing digital technology allows Australian manufacturers to compete on value, not on cost, which is so important to their ongoing success and will allow them to grow 10 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

and create new local jobs,” said Andrews.

The initiative brings together HSV, the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC), and industrial automation provider Siemens Australia Pacific.

According to Tim Jackson, CEO of HSV, the specialised manufacturing process at HSV requires a precision solution.

“Right now we have around 350 people, with one of our lines operating 24 hours a day (three shifts) to keep up with demand. The re-manufacturing process requires significantly more work to the vehicles than when we were producing the Commodore.

“This software will make a big difference to the flow of information across our organisation and will connect everyone through a centralised digital thread,” said Jackson.

Noting that the manufacturing of HSV vehicles requires further attention to detail than standard models, the continuation of automotive manufacturing in this project continues to support the wider manufacturing industry, said Jackson.

“We have a great product, that competes in the highly competitive Australian Automotive market. Each new product adds between 350 – 600 new components. This hi-tech software will support our new model portfolio.

“In order to bring these new vehicles to life we have nearly twice the engineers, and five times the manufacturing team than when we rolled the last Commodore off the line. We are proud of the level of design and engineering happening in Australia, and the use of improved software tools to improve our productivity,” said Jackson.

Supported by the AMGC’s project

The technology will enable information to flow seamlessly within the company. fund, the HSV project will help guide other Australian manufacturing businesses on their digitalisation processes, said Jens Goennemann, managing director of AMGC. “I’m really proud to see a company like HSV, with such great Australian heritage, adopt digitalisation in their manufacturing facility because it sets a great example of what is possible for the many thousands of Australian SME manufacturers.” manmonthly.com.au

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News@MM Austrian metal manufacturer uses hydrogen for green steel

The project hopes to lead the way in the decarbonisation of steel production.

As Australia grapples with how to develop its own hydrogen industry, an Austrian partnership has begun operating a green hydrogen plant to replace fossil fuels in steel production.

The plant has a capacity to produce over 6 megawatts in a CO2 neutral

manner, to power voestalpine’s steel manufacturing in Linz. The facility utilises the world’s largest electrolyser, and will potentially supply power to the local grid and provide network services.

The hydrogen power generator is

part of voestalpine’s investment in decarbonising steel production, and has been delivered with a consortium of partners and €18 million in EU funding.

“We have set ourselves a clear goal of greater direct avoidance of CO2 emissions in steel manufacturing over the coming years,” said Herbert Eibensteiner, chairman of the management board of voestalpine.

Until recently, steel has had to be produced through coal-based blast furnaces, however, through using electric arc furnaces powered by electricity generated by hydrogen voestalpine hopes to produce steel without coal.

The potential of green hydrogen to decarbonise the industrial sector is one way for companies that traditionally emitted large amounts of CO2 to avoid carbon emissions in ways that cannot be done otherwise.

Austrian electricity provider, Verbund, worked with voestalpine on the project, and Wolfgang Anzengruber, CEO of Verbund, noted this potential for hydrogen.

“The use of green hydrogen is both a win-win situation for power generation and industry, and a perfect example of sector coupling through electrification,” said Anzengruber.

There is also potential for green hydrogen to be used in other industrial applications that would otherwise be difficult to electrify or decarbonise, as Bart Biebuyck, executive director of public-private partnership Fuel Cell Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU) pointed out.

“Green hydrogen produced through electrolysis, using electricity from renewable energy sources, can be used by industries like steel production, refineries, methanol or ammonia, making their products green,” he said.

Advanced manufacturing to drive NSW’s trillion dollar economy NSW has outlined a plan for its economy to grow to a trillion dollars in 2040, with advanced manufacturing named as one of five key sectors.

Designed by the NSW chief economist, Stephen Walters, the NSW 2040 Economic Blueprint sees the state’s growth being driven by investment from innovative and globally competitive businesses, as treasurer Dominic Perrotet outlined.

“The future success of NSW is unlimited if we are prepared to back ourselves, innovate, build our skills, and have both a domestic and global economic focus to attract investment and create the industries and jobs of the future.”

Following from the state’s Advanced Manufacturing Industry Development Strategy, released in 2018, the current Blueprint recommends that the government immediately invest in long-term 12 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

funded initiatives to encourage advanced manufacturing. This would further utilise the programs already funded by the government, which Perrotet noted as a driver of growth.

“The billions we are pouring into infrastructure is helping drive the economy and create jobs now, but also positions the state for ongoing growth,” he said.

While noting that the state’s current economy is dominated by services, the Blueprint cites the high growth of advanced manufacturing as a reason to shift the state’s economy towards the sector.

Under the advanced manufacturing banner, the Blueprint cites additive and precision manufacturing, advanced materials, robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, advanced sensors, and quantum technologies as technologies which characterise the sector. These

technologies are being deployed in NSW in sectors including aerospace, defence, automotive, medical technology, digital technology, clothing, and food.

What distinguishes this sector from traditional manufacturing, however, is the focus not on production, but on product design

and sales and services. Walters noted that the future of the state’s economy requires grappling with the critical issues facing the state.

“The Blueprint sets the tone for our continued success – it doesn’t shy away from the challenges, but highlights the opportunities we have to really grow our economy,” he said.

As a high-growth sector, advanced manufacturing will have a key role to play in NSW’s future

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News@MM Australian-made 3D printers to be installed on Navy vessels Australian-made 3D printers will be installed on Australian Navy vessels in a trial of in-situ advanced manufacturing.

Announced on November 21, the Department of Defence will invest $1.5 million in the Supersonic Deposition 3D printer pilot – a world first. The printers will be used on patrol vessels to streamline maintenance processes, as Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price outlined.

“This high-tech machinery enables metal components to be produced quickly and efficiently, meaning our ships can get back on the water without delay,” she said.

The pilot is a collaboration between Defence and Charles Darwin University’s Advanced Manufacturing Alliance, with SPEE3D producing the printers themselves. Price hopes that the trial will enable other partnerships

in the future.

“Benefiting both the Navy and industry, the knowledge transfer gained using this capability also positions the Advanced Manufacturing Alliance to pursue further opportunities,” Price said.

Also announced on November 21 was the beginning of construction of the $95m Naval Guided Weapons Maintenance Facilities Project.

The facility will be located in Orchard Hills, Western Sydney, with WATPAC the head contractor.

According to Price, the facility will enable the parts which contribute to the weapons systems to be locally updated.

“The new facility will enhance maintenance components for Navy’s Guided Weapons systems, directly supporting the operations of the Australian Defence Force,” she said.

The pilot project will conduct maintenance while onboard the vessel.

Member for Lindsay, Melissa McIntosh, noted that work to support the facility will be delivered by local subcontractors.

“This $95m investment and WATPAC committing to sourcing 95 per cent of their sub-contract

work from local industry within 50 kilometres of Defence Establishment Orchard Hills is a win for Western Sydney jobs.”

As the systems develop, their implementation and development will be based at the facility.

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News @MM Is hydrogen the fuel of the future?

Hydrogen will play a key role in the transition to a planet that runs on clean energy, but scaling up production is a major challenge currently facing the world’s engineers, investors, and governments, according to Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel.

At the World Engineers Convention 2019, Finkel and Paul Durrant, head of innovation strategies at the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) hosted a discussion about whether hydrogen is the fuel of the future.

“Hydrogen used as a fuel, as an energy carrier, is critical to our collective ability to tackle the climate emergency and to contribute on several sustainable development goals,” Durrant said.

A key driver of interest in hydrogen identified by IRENA is the dramatic fall in price of renewable energy in recent years.

“As a result, renewables are already the lowest cost source of new power generation in many parts of the world today,” he said.

“By early next year, onshore

The release of the national hydrogen strategy outlined how Australia can adopt this new source of energy. wind and solar photovoltaic will join hydropower in consistently offering cheaper sources of electricity.”

Some of the issues facing renewables are the variable nature of energy production, especially at low levels of deployment, and the need to be able to store energy for potentially long periods of times.

In addition, Durrant said that some of the applications that involve the direct use of electricity is not a viable option, such as the building, industry, and transport sectors.

“Together, these account for about 60 per cent of the direct energyrelated carbon dioxide emissions.

Electricity can address some of those, but we need molecules as well as electrons in our energy mix if we are really going to decarbonise,” he said.

Finkel, who presented at the event via video, said that there is no limit on the amount of solar and wind energy we can tap into, but it’s not always continent and that hydrogen could act as a high-density transport or fuel to solve this issue.

However, there is no free hydrogen on earth – it isn’t possible to drill a hole and extract it like natural gas – meaning it needs to be produced.

“The method that most of us are excited about is to produce hydrogen through a combination of solar, wind and water taken into electrolyser or electrolysis unit,” Finkel said.

“The challenge is to make it economical in really large volumes.

We’re not talking about doing a beaker in a lab class every second, we’re talking about doing swimming pools of water every second.”

Three types of producing hydrogen labelled as colours were also discussed in the presentation, with Durrant emphasising the importance

of moving away from fossil-fuel based production of hydrogen, also known as grey hydrogen.

Fossil-fuel based production of hydrogen with carbon capture storage and utilisation is known as blue hydrogen and renewable-based production of hydrogen, namely water electrolysis, is known as green hydrogen.

“Crucially, as we scale up, we need to avoid getting locked into high energy processes that lead to stranded assets or we will still be making emissions for decades to come,” Durrant said.

“We need to start shifting the existing production from grey, to blue, or better still – green, and crucially ensure future hydrogen production is not grey hydrogen.”

The discussion came as Finkel released the National Hydrogen Strategy, which was adopted by a meeting of Council of Australian Governments (COAG) energy ministers on November 22. The Strategy sets a roadmap for the development of a hydrogen industry in Australia.

Steel manufacturer expands property management arm

The move allows for the vertical integration of the business.

British billionaire, Sanjeev Gupta, has brought his property management business, JAHAMA, to Australia.

As part of the GFG Alliance group of businesses, which Gupta’s family owns, JAHAMA manages 14 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

the property assets of the industrial group.

In Australia, the business will manage GFG Alliance’s property, which includes 170 freehold and leasehold assets, covering 200 ha.

These sites comprise heavy and light industrial sites and are valued at in excess of $300 million. While no solid plans for the properties have emerged, Gupta indicated that the business will be looking to add uses beyond standard industrial capabilities.

“We have an extraordinary portfolio of industrial property assets across every Australian state, with a powerful vision of how they can be transformed into vibrant assets with higher value uses through development partnerships in the

years ahead,” said Gupta.

Taking the reins will be Simonne Bailey, previously general manager of Connected Living, a business unit within Sydney-based developer Lendlease.

Bailey and Gupta indicated that bringing in mixed use to industrial sites would be part of the company’s strategy.

“JAHAMA has a clear vision and strategy to evolve the portfolio of assets from capital-intensive, single-purpose properties to high performing assets that provide a range of benefits to GFG businesses and their communities,” said Bailey.

“We plan for these sites to continue hosting our Australian manufacturing businesses into the future, but alongside the

manufacturing operations, there is so much more we can do to deliver jobs and homes of the future with a sustainable outcome,” added Gupta.

In announcing JAHAMA, GFG Alliance highlighted that the property development arm would enable the business to incorporate building materials and other manufactured products into the properties built on sites managed by the company.

“We will evolve these assets into showcases of how sustainability and industry can develop in tandem to benefit the entire community.

We will use this as a launch pad for JAHAMA, a global first for the business, to partner with other like-minded industry portfolios,” said Gupta. manmonthly.com.au

Limited Edition

Software Bridging the cyber and the physical As manufacturers are producing “smarter” devices, the integration of software and hardware is becoming part of the unique value proposition of Industry 4.0 technology. Connor Pearce speaks with those at the forefront.

I

T is no secret that software is changing the way that manufacturers work. And, while software has not been foreign to the manufacturing shopfloor for the last four decades, cyber and physical systems becoming increasingly interconnected.

One company that has seen this play out in its own processes is SPEE3D, which is emblematic of where manufacturing might be going.

“SPEE3D manufactures and sells metal 3D printers, so not the parts, but the actual printer,” said Byron Kennedy, co-founder of SPEE3D. “Our customers want to make parts either quickly or economically or a combination of both. The process we use is a spraying process where we spray metal powders, which has been used in the military for 10 years, but what was not known was how do you use this spraying technology to actually build parts. The missing element of that was the software, so we are even though we sell hardware, primarily it’s all about the software and the big improvements from now on will always be software based.”

As software companies coming to any number of economic sectors, with disruption in tow, getting ahead of the curve was in SPEE3D’s DNA, according to Kennedy.

“Co-founder Steven Camilleri, 16 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

SPEE3D took cues from video game design for its user interface. and I previously had another company developing variable speed electric motors, so it was something that we had just done from day one; making sure we marry software and hardware together, because the reality is that software is leading the world. Even in the manufacturing sector, it’s all about bringing intelligence into these hardware components,” said Kennedy.

While a new technology such as 3D printing may seem a natural instance for software and hardware to meld together, other businesses are bringing software to more traditional manufacturing sectors.

Chris Brugeuad, now CEO of SSS Manufacturing, has brought software-driven automation into the manufacturing of structural steel, but driven by the emerging needs of the sector.

“It originally started as Smart Steel Systems, and the organisation grew out of a need to compete with Chinese imported fabricated steel as well as addressing a fairly

significant shortage of trade labour, due to the mining boom eight years ago,” Brugeaud told Manufacturers’ Monthly. “The aim for the organisation was to develop an automation system that was highly flexible and would drive the full production environment directly off the 3D drawing files in support of typical fabricated construction steel projects.”

When starting out, SSS Manufacturing sought to not only develop its own software in-house, but also find a way to locally make their own 6-axis robots for the software to run, Brugeaud explained.

“At the time SSS Manufacturing was struggling to get support from the robot manufacturers because they were looking to use their own software platform and not use the native robot language. I came on board not long after that. I had pretty good ties back to KUKA Robotics and was able to convince them to open up their control

platform to enable us to use our own software, and effectively use their hardware as exactly that – a hardware platform.”

In the process of developing this solution, Smart Steel Systems became in effect two companies.

The first, SSS Manufacturing, would be an operational company, that would continue to fabricate structural steel. The second, IR4, would continue to develop this combination of software and hardware as a turnkey solution for industry. Combined, Brugeuad and his team were developing a fully automated manufacturing system, combining software and hardware.

“We were seeking to take a 3D drawing file, import that file, have the system assign a list of tasks that were required, the sequences of tasks for fabricating the structural steel, and then execute on the tasks, without having to teach any of the robots anything.”

Running both systems, those at IR4 and SPEE3D, are proprietary manmonthly.com.au

Software algorithms that the companies have developed to drive the physical systems. In SPEE3D’s case, this virtual technology is the organisation’s lynchpin.

“The key is the underlying algorithms, which enable the spraying of powders to be able to build parts, and that was about a two-year process to develop the software from scratch, to bring in a computer-aided design (CAD) file, and then work out how to build this particular part, and all those algorithms were developed in house.”

This is where the companies’ true value lies, unlike in a traditional manufacturing enterprise which are in the products or processes.

“The key part of the software on our side is that these key algorithms and we have all that patented to be able to build parts, the beauty about being first in there is you can protect your intellectual property,” said Kennedy.

In-house or out-source?

Just as there are many stages in the development of a physical manufactured product, producing software requires breaking down a job into its constituent parts. With that done, the question comes, to develop in-house, or out-source to a third party? For SPEE3D, the system behind the spraying of metals was done in-house but for a key component, the company needed an external force.

“The other element, in terms of software, is the user interface and we did this separately,” said Kennedy.

“The user interfaces of machine tools are awful, they look like they’re from the 80s, where there’s 100 buttons and you’ve got to know which button to press in which order to make these things work, and we didn’t want to go down that path.

“We then took a step back and said, ‘Who makes the best user interfaces?’ and what we came up with was gaming – PlayStation and

Xboxes – their user interfaces are usually pretty easy to use, so we actually then went to the gaming department of RMIT and worked with them to develop a user friendly, gamified user interface which is easy to use and easy to understand and easy to learn and we outsourced that work to the universities.”

This left the core SPEE3D team to work on what was distinctive about their product, which has enabled the company to develop a unique value proposition.

“Our printer is a lot different to most of the printers. Most 3D printers out there have a very sophisticated hardware with a simple software.

We’ve gone the other way, we’ve put relatively simple hardware together with very sophisticated software, and the advantage of this approach is that most of our upgrades have been software based and don’t require the latest and greatest printer.

“Typically, when companies bring out new printers, they’re pushing

new printer on people because of the hardware having varied, but a better approach is to upgrade through software.”

For SPEE3D, this enables the company to reduce the cost of ownership of its hypersonic printers, while also providing ongoing services and updates to their customers over a longer period.

By splitting IR4 and SSS Manufacturing into two separate entities, Brugeuad has also come up with an alternative value proposition, with the potential to licence IR4’s software for uses beyond structural steel fabrication, where automation is required in the flexible development of steel products.

“IR4 is now a turnkey facilities provider for automation, seeking to provide flexible automation solutions, and leveraging the technology that we developed in and around the structural steel space,” said Brugeuad. “Most recently, we did a demonstration for Rheinmetall on

Automating the structural steel fabrication process allowed SSS Manufacturing to compete with cheaper imports, and overcome skills shortages.

manmonthly.com.au

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 17

Software how to automate welding processes for the LAND400 Phase 2 projects because globally, they have an issue where they attach the bosses in the process there can be as much as 50mm variation in the plate they’re attaching it to. Most automation systems will struggle with that, but because of the way our system works it really accommodates that without too much concern.

“IR4 in its own right now is leveraging that technology and applying it into different fields in different industries.”

This process, for IR4, has been by breaking down the constituent parts of a welding process, all the way from a 3D drawing to final finished product, into processes that can be automated.

“If I break down the value proposition of what we’ve developed, the software is the key driver; the ability to be able to take 3D drawing information and distil that down directly into production level code and tasks. We define it as

If the future is software, will manufacturers become software developers?

18 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

task based automation.”

Here, Brugeuad distinguishes between product and process tasks.

Product tasks can be either additive or subtractive processes and involve the cutting or shaping of the steel.

Process tasks are the material handling tasks, which require an object to be brought to the tool or moved from one sequence to another.

Breaking apart the steel fabrication process into these tasks allowed for the process to be translated into a manner that the software systems could understand and be programmed to follow.

“What the system does from a software view is, it sequences the tasks based on the hardware constraints and product constraints, so the hardware can reach within a certain range so the products have to be presented in that range in order for it to be able to process.”

With a sequence of processes such as this having not been done before, by bringing together software and

hardware to automate the production process, Brugeaud came to an understanding about the nature of manufacturing today.

“We quickly realised that we were largely a software company that happened to manufacture steel.”

Finding talent Behind both of these systems were the developers and coders who made the software happen, as well as those who could connect those products to the manufacturing system.

“We knew software people,” said Kennedy. “As a traditional manufacturer, trying to find software people will be nearly impossible.

Generally, the software engineers are a breed of their own, and you need to understand how to work with software engineers and being able to drive the software team is not an easy thing to do.”

Kennedy acknowledges, however, that this kind of management draws on the same kinds of skills as working on any other project.

“With any style of engineer, give them the role that they’re good at and if you don’t have expertise in house, go and find them elsewhere.

You won’t get one software person to cover a broad spectrum, and they’ll be typically good in one area and then you focus on that area.”

For Brugeaud, skills gaps were part of the reason why the company invested in automation and software development in the first place.

Putting those systems into place however required a range of talents.

“We’ve leveraged mechatronics engineers fairly heavily, but at one point we had a guy that had a PhD in artificial intelligence.”

At the same time, Brugeaud has retained the craft skills that made traditional metal manufacturing possible.

“We still have a number of trade level staff. But what we’re seeing is that there’s a decreasing number of trade qualified people coming through the system and it’s getting harder to secure those trade level resources.”

With a greater demand for specialised steel fabrication, not

only in construction, the need for alternatives to established manufacturing systems only becomes more pressing.

“Projects like the significant defence projects coming through, one of the key risks associated with the delivery of these projects is the availability of suitable welders, which will only be a further draw on the resources of the industry. Our ability to be able to utilise the automation process significantly improves our market advantage but only through the efficiency of the process and our ability to run on a reduced trade level staffing number,” said Brugeuad.

The manufacturing software of the future Developing a software solution to drive a manufacturing process has the potential to innovate in a way that may not have been possible in the past. At SPEE3D, Kennedy is looking into automating quality control, which when completed, can be implemented through the software, rather than requiring an upgrade to the hardware.

“Working with UTS, we asked, ‘Could we automate the scanning process?’ It’s one thing to be able to build a part, it’s another thing, once you’ve built the part, to then measure that part and machine that part in some way.”

The solution that Kennedy and UTS are working towards is utilising 3D scanning to put quality control directly into the printing process.

“You’ve got to develop the software, test the software, and see how good it is, and then adapt it to the market,” said Kennedy.

For Brugeuad, on the other hand, having a software platform allows the process of steel manufacturing to fit into a wider, digitalised system that spans multiple points of the value chain.

“Particularly in construction, in the SSS manufacturing business, there’s significant opportunity. An organisation called PT Blink are seeking to automate and digitise the construction drawing process.

They’ve automated and digitised the architecture and engineering process, manmonthly.com.au

Software

Manufacturing is not only about the physical object, but the software that is integrated into its construction.

Through a collaboration between our two organisations, we’re now able to digitise everything from the automated drawing process, all the way through manufacturing. and they were struggling to identify organisations downstream that could bring the same level of digital maturity into the manufacturing process, where we were having the other problem. We had a very digitised manufacturing environment but most of our customers would manmonthly.com.au

deliver 2D drawings on paper.

“Through a collaboration between our two organisations, we’re now able to digitise everything from the automated drawing process, all the way through manufacturing.

What we’re now doing is we’re bringing the scanning technology to

the construction process whereby what gets installed gets scanned and validated against the digital drawing model so that we have the full digital provenance for the certification of buildings.”

While this is one example, the digital integration of products along the supply chain is also occurring in the shipbuilding industry. The Hunter Class frigate, being built at the Osborne shipyard will use a digital design where suppliers will be integrated through a digital platform.

Brugeuad sees this as the natural evolution of the systems in place.

“The level of integration across the value chain is what I see as the next

years of growth, but what it highlights is that, for highly integrated digital platforms that are digitised across the value chain, there needs to be a high level of collaboration across industry participants.”

As Australia’s manufacturing sector focusses on the techniques of advanced manufacturing, the role of integrated software and hardware platforms will only become more pronounced, according to Kennedy.

In advanced manufacturing it is all about the software. It is the software driving efficiencies, it’s driving cost out, it’s driving speed to market.

Software is going to play more and more of a role.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 19

Medical Leveraging expansion to go global Staking out its plan for rapid growth, one medical manufacturing business took on the situation it confronted and customised the rest to fit. Manufacturers’ Monthly explains.

I

N 2017, Malcolm Turnbull visited the gleaming new headquarters of Vitex Pharmaceuticals. The then Prime Minister was there to open the largest complementary medicines manufacturing facility in Australia. Previously, Vitex had been producing from the smallest complementary medicines manufacturing site in Australia.

Despite this scale of change, for CEO Aniss Chami, the decision was not so much of a gamble as an investment in the growing industry.

“Once we saw that there was a greater need for complementary medicines and an exponential growth in the exportation of complementary medicines, we realised we needed to build a larger site,” Chami told Manufacturers’ Monthly.

“Most of the competition thought maybe we’ll expand a little outside or buy more, faster equipment and that’ll be it, they never expected that it was going to explode to this level.”

The level that Chami is talking about is an export-focussed industry, with sales reaching almost $5 billion in 2018, a doubling on 2007 levels.

According to Chami, Vitex’s aim to capitalise on this growth was what set it apart and led to the creation of the new facility.

“We had the mindset that that was what we wanted to achieve and focus on,” he said.

The facility, costing $100 million, covered 26,000 sqm, and required Australia’s most technically competent construction contractors to grow with Vitex in the creation of the facility, which would produce 20 billion tablets per year, once fully operational.

“We were concerned to enter into this high throughput market because unfortunately the country doesn’t have really technical contractors that can build the air-conditioning structure and the dust extraction systems,” said Chami.

“We had to work with them. Our

biggest asset now is a little black book with the names of people who are our contractors who know how we operate and the speed and requirements that we operate at.”

Vitex manufactures vitamins and supplements for Australia’s leading brands. While these brands handle retailing and marketing, Vitex ensures that the medicines are the best they can be, as there is increasing demand for Australianmade complementary medicines in growth markets in Asia.

“We drive the quality and the innovation,” said Chami. “For example, X brand could come to Vitex and say we’re looking for Australia’s best beauty tablet.

“Then, we would direct them to the best ingredients, we would test those ingredients, create the best tablet, , and all they need from us is a certificate of analysis for each batch that comes out, with full assurance it was made in Australia.”

Pursuing speed and consistency in flexible production Not only was Vitex increasing the volume of its production, its new facility at Eastern Creek had to adapt to a new way of manufacturing medicines.

“The way we were manufacturing medicines in Prestons is the traditional way in Australia,” recalled Chami. “It was semi-automatic, there’s a lot of manual processes in there and there’s a lot of heavy lifting.

We needed to find better systems to transfer ingredients from different processes without anyone touching it. We were focussed on the risk for contamination.”

As a contract manufacturer of medicines, Vitex has to easily switch between different products, without having any cross contamination. With this in mind, the process of moving the ingredients to the pill presses was the critical point.

What sets Australian pharmaceutical manufacturing apart is the sector’s commitment to upholding quality standards.

20 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

manmonthly.com.au

Medical Vitex Pharmaceuticals’ rapid expansion has drawn the attention of prime ministers.

“The transfer systems really were the big challenge,” said Chami. “In the world there are two types of manufacturers of medicines; there are those who are dynamic and have to have systems that quickly change for different clients. The contract manufacturers use those systems, and, as a contract manufacturer myself, if the X brand wanted to make medicines with us, I would have to change my piece of equipment from Y to X, within spans of minutes.

This requirement, for both high-throughput and flexibility, led Chami and Vitex Pharmaceuticals to scour the globe for equipment manufacturers who could meet their demands. Settling on suppliers from Europe and Asia, Vitex had to bring its own knowledge of working in pharmaceuticals for almost three decades to find the right balance, all the while ensuring that the potential for contamination was as low as possible.

“The tablet press wasn’t hard for us, what was hard was customising the tablet press to maintain that quality, and moreover, how do you feed a high throughput tablet press with the ingredient?” asked Chami. “We mix medicine in batches of 500 kgs, so how do you transfer half a tonne of raw manmonthly.com.au

material into a blender, blend it all to 99.999 per cent homogeneity, and then transfer it from the blender to the tablet press, without a single finger touching it? That’s hard.”

The solution for Vitex is a suction transfer system, along with medical grade intermediate bulk containers (IBCs). Looming above this solution, however, is the constant requirement for as little human contact as possible.

“The issue with the manufacturing of medicines is not speed, it’s maintaining the quality of the product at that speed. Could you guarantee within an hour you make a million tablets, and those million tablets all look the same, weigh the same, and have the same composition?” questioned Chami.

Looking forward, Vitex has already committed to going to the next step.

Vitex will be one of the founding members of the new Western Sydney Aerotropolis with a 10,000 sqm training and research facility. Chami expects this site to be a further development of the technology at the Eastern Creek facility.

A regulatory blessing In part, what has fuelled Vitex and the wider Australian complementary medicines sector is that traditional

whipping boy of industry – regulation.

“We’re blessed in that we work in the country that has the strictest regulatory requirements in the world, which adds a ‘premiumness’ to our brand.”

Unlike other countries, in particular the US, Australia regulates complementary medicines in the same way as traditional medicines. In the US, complementary medicines are regulated as a food supplement and have the same requirements as food and beverage manufacturing. This distinction has made Australian complementary medicines in demand globally, due to these higher standards. For Vitex, medical manufacturing standards set their products apart and require an extra standard of assurance.

“We do process validation, cleaning validation, method validation, and stability studies before you can even manufacture a medicine.”

Finding the right people In this context, the human element in the manufacturing process comes down to quality control.

“No matter how much automation we have in production, we still need people to monitor the

quality aspect of that output,” said Chami.

The unique capacities that people bring to manufacturing are for Vitex an extension of what is possible with sensing technology and automated quality processes.

“Where we would like to use sensors is just to maintain the consistency, but the quality checks – nothing can replace man,” said Chami. “Man can think faster, process better than any computer, and the only thing the sensors do is maintain the consistency, to give you a high degree of assurance that if you checked something every 15 minutes that the last 15 minutes was what you’ve got in front of you.”

Naturally, then, with the expansion of Vitex’s capacities, there is a concomitant increase in personnel. When opening the Eastern Creek facility in 2017, Vitex predicted that the site will support up to 420 jobs, triple the size of the workforce at the time. Filling these positions was easier said than done, highlighted Chami.

“We have a massive skills gap. We have a skills gap in the manufacturing of medicines.

Secondly, there is a massive gap between the graduand’s and the industry’s expectations. Universities are producing good textbook worms; they are not producing people who are employable by industry because they don’t liaise with industry to make them industry ready.”

At Vitex’s new facility at the Western Sydney Aerotropolis, the company will train up to 200 students at a time. This is a model that other companies should adopt, noted Chami.

“If industry is willing to dedicate sections of their factory as the guinea pig sections for people to train, learn and be taught, at the end of that training you could pick up the ones that really suited your business, you’d be internalising recruitment, you’d be moulding people to your objective.”

With the market for complementary medicines continuing on its upwards trajectory, it seems Vitex is on track to realise these ambitions.

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 21

Issues &Insights Data rights: Bursting the Industry 4.0 bubble?

How are manufacturers affected by the splintering of the industrial internet?

Connor Pearce reports.

O

N September 18, 2019, Swiss industrial automation provider ABB, announced that it would utilise Chinese IT company Huawei’s cloud platform to support the adoption of its ABB Ability platform in China, the company’s second largest market.

In other markets, ABB Ability is run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. In this division of ABB’s infrastructure for delivering a key product in the digitalisation of industry, the company illustrated what happens when the metaphor

of the “cloud” comes up against the geopolitical realities of today’s splitting world.

The first modern use of the term “cloud computing” is often traced to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at a 2006 industry conference. The term implies a fluffy, transient location for data, unencumbered by the rigid, fixed network of wires and servers which had previously characterised the internet. But the metaphor didn’t make the essential architecture of the internet go away.

Rather, it pushed it out of sight, into

ICT International has manufactured IoT-enabled devices adapted to data requirements in each market it serves.

22 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

unmarked data centres.

For manufacturers, the idea of being able to access data from the cloud with the only requirement being a reasonable internet connection, promises much, and is a key enabler of the connection of physical and digital systems under the Industry 4.0 umbrella.

Enabling physical devices to access data held offsite has the potential to reshape the value proposition of manufacturing, Clive Milham, technology adviser for the Australian Government’s Entrepreneurs’ Programme, told Manufacturers’ Monthly.

“A product that has data capability is valuable from a number of perspectives; it provides performance and operational insights to the end user, but it also provides insight for the provider of that product or service because when they aggregate that information and desensitise it, they can look at the behaviour of their product. Data on the use of that product and the performance of that product helps you to improve the product’s design and value proposition,” he said.

This data can then be used to enable the servitisation of manufactured goods, where a customer no longer buys a product, but purchases the right to access the product’s function and capabilities via a service contract or subscription.

The outcome of the utilisation of this technology varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, but one company has used cloudbased functionality to bring the manufacture of sensors for agriculture to Australia. Peter Cull, director of ICT International, a business that has been operating since 1979, described to Manufacturers’ Monthly how this occurred.

“We’ve been innovating and disrupting ourselves for 40 years,

but we had always been importers of product until 2006. Then, we decided that the American and German sensors weren’t up to pass. We started to engage our own engineers to develop what our customers were asking for.”

What ICT International’s customers were asking for was to be able to download the data from their sensors from anywhere, not just from local networks. To do this, ICT International has developed sensors that use cloud computing to allow remote access to data recorded by the devices.

When aggregating data from a number of sensors or devices into a single location, cloud computing facilitates analytical processes such as predictive modelling, as Milham outlines.

“If you’re a manufacturer and product developer looking to provide a cloud solution, a lot of the value that’s associated with that product is in the data; data that can be desensitised, aggregated, and analysed to provide insight into product performance, user behaviour, market trends, and so on,” said Milham. “From the developer’s perspective, consideration of the cloud platform that underpins your product and service is paramount.”

To do this, the data needs to be stored in a way that enables standardisation, a singular language, or location, essentially, what Schmidt suggested to conference delegates in 2006. However, the data still has to be stored in a physical location – a data centre – which must comply with the legislation of the country it sits in, something that is increasingly being tested as countries realise the value of the data that is sitting in these centres.

Regimes of data protection A term that has come to prominence in the last decade manmonthly.com.au

Issues&Insights

Operating across multiple jurisdictions can impact on how devices access cloud computing capacities.

is the “splinternet”. Often applied to corporations such as telecommunication providers segmenting the internet, the term also refers to nations segmenting the internet for political and economic reasons. Louise McGrath, international trade specialist at the Ai Group, explained how this has come about.

“We’re at the cusp of three main regimes. One is the EU regime, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that some might argue limits innovation. The other is the Chinese model, which is even more restrictive but is not so much about protecting private citizens’ data but making sure that the government has access to all data for security reasons. Then manmonthly.com.au

there’s the US, which doesn’t actually have a national privacy regulation.

California has privacy legislation and companies that are going to the US have started complying with, the California legislation,” said McGrath.

“The problem for Australian companies is we trade with all these three regimes.”

With these data regimes in place, companies, from ABB to ICT International, have had to begin differentiating their product, based on the legislation in the country they are operating in.

“Customers in China will have their data go to the cloud, or their own server systems that we help them set up, and in Germany they want it straight to the server,” said

Cull. “In both Germany and China you work these problems through together with those people that you’ve been working with for years.”

In some respects, these issues are not new, and can be seen as analogous to other distinctions, which each country applies within their own borders to technology, as Sam Fisher, environmental scientist at ICT International, explained.

“You’ve got different frequency bands that you need to actually plan for. We need to manufacture devices that can support those frequency bands. You need to look at the regulations in these different markets and work out where you can sell into or what you need to embed into your hardware or your firmware.”

While this might be a technical fix at certain scales, and when selling to smaller scale clients, the barriers of geopolitics can have a more significant impact at other scales, as McGrath pointed out.

“This trade war between the US and China is really about a battle over technology and the link between security and technology. As artificial intelligence is being increasingly used in industrial products, more companies are being captured by ‘dual use’ export rules. These rules apply to products with both commercial and security applications and restrict sales and exports.

“We all start very innocently, trying to connect everything and using all the technologies, but there are now these geopolitical, security implications that are overlaying,” said McGrath.

As the battle for technological supremacy heats up, countries are instituting limits on the sharing of data to protect their sovereign interests, with Australia’s encryption laws, for example, requiring developers leave a “backdoor” open to allow government access.

According to McGrath, it is these laws that are impacting Ai Group member companies most immediately and has led to undesirable outcomes.

“The obligation for technology companies to provide a backdoor for Australian government agencies to access metadata in fact makes the

system more vulnerable to attack,” said McGrath, who noted that the Australian requirement mirrors that required of Chinese companies to provide access for the Chinese government.

“That’s the argument to keep Huawei out of the 5G network here, but our encryption legislation actually puts Australian companies in the same boat,” said McGrath.

One response to security concerns, whether motivated by commercial or political imperatives, has been to localise data storage to where it is generated. When implementing projects overseas, ICT International has had to grapple with these requirements.

“We’ve done projects with the German government where we can’t take any data offshore. It’s all got to go to a local server,” said Fisher.

“The data is obviously encrypted from the point of sensing to where it’s delivered, and it’s stored securely.

More countries are more protective of the data and don’t want data basically getting into foreign hands or to other businesses.”

Furthermore, McGrath sees the potential for cross-border digital trade to be subject to tariffs. While the moratorium on such tariffs have been extended to June 2020, countries such as India have objected to the free flow of information such as files for 3D printing.

“3D printing disrupts customs trade, it disrupts the ability for a country to apply tariffs on the goods trade,” said McGrath. “So, if people start emailing drawings and 3D printing, it’s really like smuggling in India’s view.”

From Cull’s perspective, however, these global dynamics are in some respects a distraction from the most important part of manufacturing, making a device that solves an identified problem.

“Whether it’s plant water use, soil temperature, or humidity in the air, you build a device for that and then the rest is a moving feast and you’ve got to sort it out as you go along because you can’t sit here and predict the future,” he said.

“You’ve just got to build flexibility and common sense into it.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 23

Compressors A machine on a mission Aiming to fulfil an ambitious goal has led to ELGi Equipments adopting a people-centric approach in Australia. Manufacturers’ Monthly explains.

S

HAKING up a market which supplies one of the critical products for manufacturing and industry more broadly was undoubtedly going to ruffle some feathers. As Greg Gillespie, national sales manager at ELGi Equipments Australia described, the global manufacturer of compressed air technology is aiming to do just that.

“ELGi’s mission worldwide is to become the second largest compressor company in the world by 2027,” said Gillespie. “The company set that mission in 2017, and so far, it is going to plan.”

While that target spans the global compressed air market, Australia is not forgotten as part of that growth, and the company has committed to growth in Australia through the purchase of Pulford Air and Gas, an Australian designer and manufacturer of compressed air and gas systems that has been operating since 1925.

“For us to do our part of that

Operating through its local subsidiary and a network of dealers, ELGi has a wide reach across Australia. global mission, our aim is also to be the second largest compressor business here in Australia, in terms of turnover,” said Gillespie. “So, you need a fairly aggressive approach to achieve that, and ELGi’s acquisition of Pulford Air and Gas was one of

ELGi has brought the manufacturing of its machines and components in house, ensuring total quality control.

24 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

the steps towards achieving that.”

While the strategy may be aggressive, when it comes to interacting with customers, Gillespie describes his team’s sales approach as a human-centred one.

“People buy compressors

from people.”

This has led to ELGi’s distribution network being one of the largest in Australia of any compressed air company. This network enables ELGi to establish itself in the Australian market.

“As distributors of ELGi products, we do it one person at a time,” said Gillespie.

Although the ELGi name may not be as widely known as other brands, the global reach of the company has led to larger companies being quick on the uptake of the brand’s range of oil free and oil flooded compressors. Manufactured from start to finish at ELGi’s plant in Coimbatore, India, the control that the company has over its product is something that Gillespie emphasises with customers “The product is 100 per cent controlled by ELGi, from the casting of the air end and the components to the machine being tested and leaving the factory; it’s all done in house, whereas a lot of competitors are pieced together with parts from all over the place,” said Gillespie.

However, the ultimate test is how the machine will operate when in use. manmonthly.com.au

Compressors “People are more concerned about what happens after they buy a machine,” said Gillespie.

A wide network Speaking with Gillespie at ELGi Australia’s office in Sydney, the boardroom overlooks a warehouse split in half between spare part, and product storage and a full overhaul facility for air compressors.

After purchasing Pulford Air and Gas, ELGi retained the company’s local service capabilities, something they bring to the ELGi offering in Australia, along with another 15 service centres around the country.

“We now have the capacity and the experienced staff to be able to technically support dealers or distributors locally, whether it’s building up full feature machines to Australian specification or doing major overhauls, we can do that here,” said Gillespie.

Where service cannot be done on site, ELGi will bring the piece of equipment to the nearest service centre and service the machine with the 100 years of local experience that they have built up.

“With large machines, you tend to either pull the air end out or pull the whole machine out and send it back to a workshop. You just physically can’t do those overhauls on site,” said Gillespie. “Air ends are big and heavy, you don’t pull a rotor out or the air end physically out by manpower, so overhead cranes are required to do those overhauls.”

Retaining Pulford’s experience is not just about the physical infrastructure, but the knowledge and expertise that have built up.

“Pulford has 25 technicians, full time, nationally. Fifteen are based here in New South Wales, and when we add the ELGi distributor network in, that number would be near 40,” said Gillespie. “Every compressor business in Australia, whether they’re a multinational or a distributor, would say finding and retaining good service technicians is one of the biggest challenges.”

Confronting this issue has led ELGi to ensure that the foundations that it inherited from Pulford remain. manmonthly.com.au

“We have a really core group of long-term employees and service technicians,” said Gillespie. “We have a number that have in excess of ten years experience, we’ve got two that are in excess of 20 years, so when you have that ongoing consistent and knowledge base, we can build upon it.”

rate on their workshop floor. A job for life,” said Gillespie.

The investment in quality was recently recognised when ELGi won the Deming award.

The award, administered by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, recognises a company’s total quality management (TQM)

ELGi Australia have taken the qualities of the machines and fitted them to Australian conditions.

Where necessary, ELGi Australia have gone a step further, developing containerised solutions for offshore and remote clients, or adapted the machine’s control interface for digital integration.

Supporting ELGi’s sales network are a base of local technicians.

Ensuring core efficiency When Gillespie was able to visit ELGi’s factory in India in 2019, it made a lasting impression on him.

“The factory totally blew my mind and the expectation that I had was totally exceeded. Standing inside their factory you could be anywhere in the world; Germany, Belgium, here in Australia. The factory is world class.”

Not only does the factory assemble the machines, but the company has vertically integrated to bring the manufacture of components in house. This was done in support of the company’s overall goal to be the second largest air compressor company by turnover.

“There’s no chance of achieving that without that level of quality.

Their plant is purpose built and their staff are purpose trained, they have their own trade school, and they have a 100 per cent retention

implementation. Gillespie describes the win as a step towards the organisation’s overall goal.

“TQM was seen as a necessary part of the mission to become the number 2 compressor company in the world, because you won’t become to be the second largest player in this industry without a quality product.”

For customers in Australia, this recognition filters down to the operation of the machines. Driving this efficiency is ELGi’s focus on manufacturing.

“In the development of their products, ELGi has focussed on producing the most efficient machines that they possibly can, which gives us, as a distributor, a unique selling advantage,” said Gillespie. “We will put our machines up against anything in the world.”

In servicing the local market,

“Even though we are owned by a multinational manufacturing business, we still think and operate like a small business,” said Gillespie. “We can be quite flexible in what we do for customers and the solutions that we offer with the knowledge and then the space in the workshop that we have.”

Now, Gillespie is working on taking innovation in Australia back to the rest of the company, while adopting the latest innovations the company has to offer.

“The new oil free range is something that’s going to really shake up the market. It’s one of the most efficient oil free options on the market. The long-term goal with that water injected product is to actually have it replace lubricated machines.”

In the meantime, ELGi Australia are connecting customers to their product, one person at a time.

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 25

Skills & Training Strategies to support mature age employees to retirement As the manufacturing workforce shifts, understanding changes ahead of time is paramount. Ai Group explains.

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ICTURE this scenario: Your business has a long serving trade skilled employee in their early 60s who has told you he wants to work for another 10 years.

However, it is clear he is tiring, and his enthusiasm and productivity is declining. He has worked for you for over 15 years. You want to support him to transition to retirement. Can you require him to work part-time?

The short answer is that the business cannot require him to work part-time unless the employee agrees.

This would be a breach of his employment contract which is for ongoing full-time work. Also, any attempt to force or pressure him to move to part-time employment could result in allegations and potential legal action in relation to

discrimination, general protections, or unfair dismissal.

However, the situation can (and should) be managed and the employee may ultimately see that it is in his best interests to go parttime, creating a win-win situation for all involved.

This question highlights an issue that many, if not most, organisations are experiencing at the moment.

This is due to the ageing Australian population and consequently the ageing workforce.

While highly experienced employees are a great asset to a business, the physical and cognitive impacts of ageing can begin to noticeably impact employees even before their 60s, particularly if they are engaged in physically demanding work. This can

create challenges for business and the employee.

The ageing workforce The Australian Productivity Commission has predicted that labour shortages due to the ageing of the workforce will start to hit in the early 2020s, so strategies to retain mature age employees and to have them work safely and productively will become key to the success for many businesses in the future. A business should aim to support a valued mature aged employee who has worked reliably and productively for a long period of time in the business – especially if they have skills that might be in short supply.

However, the employee may be physically struggling and fatigued in their role leading to a decline in

both work and wellbeing and an increase in workplace health and safety concerns. In fact, numerous studies have identified the impact of ageing on our bodies with the average person experiencing a progressive decline in physical capacity including aerobic capacity, muscle strength, and joint flexibility throughout adult life. This decline becomes more noticeable in a person’s 50s. The likelihood of conditions such as arthritis, osteoporosis, and blood pressure also increase.

An employee in their 60s is also staring into the abyss of possible significant life changes and may be struggling with the upcoming transition. For example, pending retirement has implications for: • finding meaning and social

Starting a conversation early regarding retirement can ensure businesses are prepared for changes to their workforce.

26 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

manmonthly.com.au

Skills & Training In fact, numerous studies have identified the impact of ageing on our bodies with the average person experiencing a progressive decline in physical capacity including aerobic capacity, muscle strength, and joint flexibility throughout adult life. connections in life outside of work; • financial challenges related to declining income if they retire or transition to retirement (especially if the employee is a carer of ageing parents or if they have dependent children); and • spending far more quality time with their partner than they have ever done before (the “I married you for dinner not for lunch” syndrome).

Potential solutions There are many approaches to addressing the implications of an ageing workforce; however, three potential strategies related to the employee in this question are detailed below: 1. Workforce planning: Forecasting future labour, skill and knowledge needs in the immediate and longer term future • As a business needs information

to plan its labour resourcing, skills, and training, it is not discriminatory to make enquiries with employees (of any age) regarding their intention to stay or leave the business within the next 1 to 5 years.

• Discuss with employees their ideas on how their role or skills can be maintained within the business over the planning period and what influences their decisions to stay or leave.

• It is an opportunity to discuss whether flexible working hours such as part time or job share would influence an employee’s decision to stay with the business.

2. Flexible work practices/formal transition to retirement policy • It is important to develop flexible work practices that enable the employee to self-manage their whole of life well-being and plan a transition to retirement over a

protracted period.

• This is potentially the most effective strategy a business can adopt to manage the fatigue and related WHS risks impacting mature aged workers.

• Enables an employee the time to develop activities or interests outside of work that will give meaning to their life in retirement.

• Research indicates that 80 per cent of Australian employees do not wish to fully retire immediately from work, their preferred path is via part time work.

3. Financial information • Understanding financial implications of retirement (superannuation and Centrelink income options) is crucial and liberating for mature age employees as it empowers them to make plans for their future. A key strategy is to therefore facilitate employees obtaining the financial information they need to make decisions about their financial and work future.

• Media reports suggesting people need an unrealistic amount of superannuation to retiree has frightened many employees into thinking they have no option but to continue working fulltime.

• Some employers are funding or subsidising access to financial advisors to assist workers with this issue. However, this is beyond

Forecasting future labour requirements can help businesses plan for the future. the financial capacity of many employers.

• An alternative no-cost (other than work time) approach is having the default superfund conduct on-site information sessions and oneon-one meetings with interested employees but ensure they discuss transition to retirement strategies.

What about performance management?

The above discussion has only touched upon the range of issues and human resource strategies that may be appropriate when tackling mature age workforce issues. One issue that may arise is performance management.

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Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 27

Business Insights Getting the most out of data Manufacturers may be sitting on an untapped goldmine of intelligence.

Unleashed is making that visible. Manufacturers’ Monthly explains.

I

N an uncertain and slowing global economy, finding ways to increase productivity and profitability can be difficult.

Manufacturers have utilised various methods to get more out of their business, but according to analysis from global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, there’s one significant asset that manufacturers have yet to extract value from: data.

In many ways, this is not the fault of manufacturers. Many manufacturers are smaller enterprises, with leaders of the business working for the company, rather than on the company’s operations, a legacy of the technical backgrounds they began the company with. While this knowledge and passion may have been the driver for the company’s early success as they created an innovative product that targeted an identified need, once the company has grown other needs arise, and there’s only so many hats a manufacturer can wear.

Rhys Roberts, founder of inventory management software integrator Cloudsolve, works with manufacturers to streamline their operations, and knows how growth can stretch a company.

“I find, working with small manufacturing businesses, they’ve got really good skills in terms of what they do, but a larger organisation would have a finance manager, an IT manager, and HR,” said Roberts.

“Smaller businesses can manage what stock they’ve got in the warehouse, what open orders they’ve got to fulfil, what purchases are coming, in their head, and then the business grows a bit and it becomes all-consuming. We then work to put in those systems to manage buying raw materials, assemblies, batch tracking, finished goods, through to sales orders, pick, pack and deliver; 28 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

Rhys Roberts, founder of Cloudsolve, highlighted that this software will be particularly of use to smaller businesses.

the end to end process of managing inventory.”

One of the tools that Roberts uses with these manufacturers is an inventory management software designed for manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors, Unleashed. Chief product officer of Unleashed, Julian Wheeler, described how the product fits into the many demands of manufacturers.

lot of our customers to answer point in time problems, or to help them with specific parts of their workflow around their manufacturing process,” said Wheeler.

Hearing from manufacturers that there were pain points that needed addressing and knowing that there was an untapped wealth of data being generated, Unleashed developed its Business Intelligence

What BI really tries to do is enable answering questions that are not immediately known. It’s giving insights to people at different levels within the organisation by combining the data in different parts of Unleashed to provide dashboards from which people can quickly take insight and take action.

“Unleashed is a real-time system that provides a lot of the workflows and processes that manufacturers have, from procurement, to inventory management, manufacturing processes and sales processes as well. There’s a great amount of existing reports that are used by a

(BI) module. By drawing on data from across the business, the module can generate insights which were unseen, until now.

“Some of our customers process an awful lot of transactions across all those different functions and crunch a large amount of data. The key thing

for BI is presenting that data easily and in a meaningful way, so you’re not spending a lot of time sifting through that data,” said Wheeler.

Currently, highlighted Wheeler, data is being generated within individual sections of a business, whether that be procurement, warehousing, production, or sales. BI aims to transcend these compartments.

“This is about breaking down those silos of data and providing customers with insight across the business.”

As Roberts pointed out, the BI module easily provides access to information throughout the company.

“Looking at invoices and seeing what is sold to each customer, that’s easy, but then if you want to combine customer, invoice, and inventory data and look at which categories make the best margins in each channel, that’s really hard to do,” he said.

“The BI tool addresses that, it’s designed to pull together the data from multiple sources and present it, analysed and ready for the business owner to then use.”

A key consideration for Unleashed when developing the tool was the usability of the module. In early trials of the software, Roberts has found this has paid off in an intuitive user interface.

“What I’m really excited about with the Unleashed BI tool is the way that it puts that information front and centre, often displayed graphically, and you don’t actually have to go and run a report, you click on a dashboard and there is the data right in from of you.”

With these insights, Wheeler expects that companies will be able to extract value from data that was not otherwise apparent.

“What BI really tries to do is enable answering questions that are not immediately known. We’re manmonthly.com.au

BusinessInsights

The module from Unleashed allows manufacturers to easily visualise the data their operations are generating. combining the data in a simply presented form, which allows organisations to get better insights into their operations so they can make decisions and take meaningful actions quickly and confidently.”

According to Wheeler, one application of these insights will be for companies to track their progress towards key performance indicators (KPIs). Setting these goals based on data that the company is generating enable businesses to make productivity-boosting improvements.

“About 90 per cent of Australian customers are not actually using formal KPIs in managing their business,” said Wheeler. “But, at the same time, if they start doing online research, they can be inundated with

literally thousands of different KPIs that they could use, so they’ve got this problem of, ‘Where do I start, what should I start doing?’”

Combining targeted KPIs with the ability to visualise trends and processes in data is what BI is designed to do.

“For example, a manufacturer can look at overdue assemblies. They can see what assemblies are due, orders placed, and identify those really quickly,” said Wheeler.

“Then they can start drilling down to see, is it for particular products, or particular materials?

Is there a particular problem in the manufacturing process? We’re providing KPIs that are linked with the heart of their business, so that

Chief product officer of Unleashed, Julian Wheeler, noted that business intelligence software arose from a need presented by existing users.

manmonthly.com.au

users can take action to improve their manufacturing process.”

Roberts concurs, noting that the data that is being generated needs to be applied for a businesses’ purpose.

“If it’s data for data’s sake, or even information for information’s sake, there’s not much benefit. Once you start doing something with it, you start saying, ‘Based on this analysis I can see we’re not charging enough for this product’, or ‘We should be focussing more of our marketing effort on that category because that’s where our margins are better’.”

Indeed, Roberts points out that data, as it is currently being used, can be counter-productive for manufacturers. He cites an example where on the one hand, an accountant will provide an average figure for stock on hand, and conclude that the business is holding too much stock, while the business owner, on the other hand, will know that each day customer orders cannot be fulfilled because the company is out of stock.

“The issue is looking at that item-by-item, whereas the account is looking at an average for the business as a whole,” said Roberts. Using BI instead would allow for a more granular and useful analysis.

“The BI tool will let you drill down to how many days of stock we are carrying of each item. With that information you can look at all stocked items. For some of them there

will be an average of one to five days on hand, but at the other extreme there’s two or five years of stock on hand. It’s those slow-moving items that blow out the overall average.”

At the other end of the business, BI is designed to provide insights into the effectiveness of a company’s sales practices. Roberts sees the potential for insights such as which customers are buying certain products but not others in a company’s range, through to which customers have had a drop off in purchases.

“The key is that the data is instantly available. You haven’t got to go off and run reports through pivot tables or whatever to try and extract that information,” said Roberts.

What drives all of this, however, is a company’s own data, an asset that, as Roberts highlights, is often underappreciated.

“One of the magical things about your business information is that it’s a strategic advantage for you, because you’re the only person that possesses it. Every other bit of data that you want to look at, whether it’s Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) trends or economic projections, is publicly available. The only entity that can access your business data is your business so if you can drill into that, there are insights in there that you can access and you can adjust your marketing campaigns, or your price, to yield benefits for the business.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 29

Lean Learn from the best: Five takeaways from AME Chicago 2019 Following from the largest Lean and continuous improvement conference, Manufacturers’ Monthly speaks with Australian attendees to find out what they learned.

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MPLEMENTING Lean manufacturing processes in a business can be an ongoing process, but one that, just as it expounds in production, can always be improved. For businesses in Australia that have embraced this philosophy there are a myriad of sources to inform this journey. Sometimes, however, an international perspective is needed, and for a select group of businesses this was gained through attending the Association for Manufacturing Excellence’s (AME) 35th annual international conference. Held in Chicago, from November 4 to 7, representatives of Australian manufacturing business Note Printing Australia were in attendance.

Note Printing Australia, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia, manufactures Australia’s bank notes and passports, as well as for a number of other countries.

As Peter Ballas, head of business excellence, described, the business had been on a Lean journey for the past few years. This began when Note Printing Australia had to prepare for the roll out of Australia’s second polymer bank note series, with the new $5 note entering into circulation in 2016.

“It started with Strategic Policy Deployment. We are now in our fourth year of that process.”

This Lean tool, known as hoshin kanri, ensures that the entire business is aligned with the strategic goals set by management. However, Ballas found that in implementing the strategy, only a few employees were implementing the delivery of the tactics set out at a midmanagement level, and that the wider capabilities of the workforce were not driving the overall goals.

This would become a more 30 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

what’s available. See where the gaps are in what you’re doing and going with an intention to fill those gaps,” said Ballas.

2. Target your learning

The conference encouraged first-hand learning. significant issue as the initial production of the new series of bank notes wound down.

“We were faced with a significant change in the future,” said Ballas.

“Once we’d come off our launch volumes our replenishment volume is significantly lower, so we had to prepare for that change. We looked at Lean as the only viable strategy.”

Tactics that Ballas and the team implemented involved not only strategic policy deployment, but also A3 thinking, which emphasises the plan, do, check, act (PDCA) process.

In addition, 5S (sort, straighten, shine, standardise, sustain) methodology, and value stream mapping exercises.

Having begun to work through these strategies, Ballas saw a change in the organisation.

“We’ve still got a lot more work to do, but off the bat we started to really see a significant engagement.

Front-line workers can make a contribution in the business and are very enthusiastic about it because they see their own development and they see they’ve had a positive

impact in the business. They’ve impacted strategy and they can see they also have a positive impact on our customers.”

In these circumstances, Ballas and a colleague, Frank Correa, strategy deployment and business improvement manager, travelled to AME Chicago. After returning, they shared their top five reasons why AME Chicago was right for them.

1. Go in with a plan Stretching over five days and with sessions spread all throughout each day, Ballas highlighted the importance of knowing what he and his organisation needed to get out of the conference. In addition, there were 40 best practice tours of surrounding manufacturing businesses, so selecting those that make the most sense for the business maximised the learnings from each session.

Ballas came in with this knowledge having been to the 2018 version of the conference, held in San Diego.

“For me, the San Diego experience was go in with an intention and make sure you research the program and

Understanding that Lean is not one single gospel that can be distilled into a single set of teachings was part of appreciating the diversity of approaches that were on display at AME Chicago. For Ballas, this dovetailed with his own attitude to Lean.

“My understanding of Lean is it’s a holistic business system and it needs to be developed for what makes sense to the actual business and customer context it works in,” he said. “I’m not a believer in cookie cutter, off-the-shelf claims that get imposed on organisations. It’s more about building a system that makes sense for the business and putting in the right tools and the right philosophy at the right time for what the business needs.”

The particular issues that Note Printing Australia was confronting informed Ballas and Correa’s approach to AME Chicago.

“We’re currently building our daily management system,” said Ballas. “It’s a somewhat fragmented system that we’re trying to pull together into a connected link system. We’re also struggling to keep track of all the cost savings.

“I was looking for ways of improving or bringing in some newfound information.”

Having a clear understanding of which programs and processes they needed to improve, both Ballas and Correa targeted their attendance to these areas needing refinement.

“A lot of the workshops that I went to at Chicago were driven around looking for improvements and looking for ideas in the strategic manmonthly.com.au

Lean side,” said Correa. “Getting the alignment at the executive level, the key projects that drive the strategic change for the business, as well the people centric side of trying to engage your complete workforce at every level.”

Having this in mind, Ballas and Correa applied what they heard at the conference to their own issues.

“A theme that came out, was run the experiment,” said Ballas. “You’ve got to experiment and take that risk, in a controlled manner, and do those continual steps forward.”

Using this theme, Ballas and Correa are now planning how to implement this at home.

“The next step forward is that focus on continuous improvement in a particular area for a couple of days and just see what comes out of that,” said Ballas.

For Correa, applying what he learnt at AME Chicago created a firm foundation for further implementation.

“It was a lot of validation on the path we were on. We’ve really got an aggressive target on what we want to do. We want to compress our strategic planning cycle to three months, and I was worried that was too aggressive,” said Correa. “I’ve come out thinking this is the right thing to do.”

3. Find people who share your experience For both Correa and Ballas, while the keynotes and demonstrations were important, a great value of being at AME Chicago, in person, was the human interactions they had.

“To me, the goal is not necessarily the information that you get in the presentation but the connections that you make; the ability to contact someone and just tease out another level of detail on what you got from the conference,” said Ballas. “That’s invaluable.”

In particular, Ballas and Correa noted how attendees from the US were more open and willing to engage than those who they would have otherwise spoken with.

“Culturally, Americans are very different to us, very sharing, while we tend to be a little bit more guarded,” said Ballas.

“They’re very open and they’re very willing to share their experiences and what’s worked as well as they’re very willing to share what hasn’t worked,” said Correa.

These connections have also gone towards implementing further development of Note Printing Australia’s processes.

“One network connection I made I brought into Australia,” said Ballas.

“He did a workshop on site. He

did two or three days of consulting directly with our executive and management team, and he ran a workshop for the local AME at the 2018 conference.”

To make this possible, however, the sharing has to go both ways, something that Ballas noted after visiting a US manufacturer.

“We visited a business for a whole day, and they opened up their books.

They welcomed us and rescheduled their monthly meeting so we could attend and watch how they did their monthly continuous improvement meeting.

“That’s the power of networking and it just builds, but you’ve got to get out and talk to people and share your frustrations and your breakthroughs. Invariably it all comes back from what you give, but you’ve got to give.”

4. Get first-hand insights Although keynote speakers can often be the initial draw for conferences, for Ballas it was the workshops and practitioner sessions that kept him engaged.

“You have your professional presenters, your keynotes – real pros that do the speaker circuits in the US. They’re always interesting, but they’re usually pretty high level. It really piques your

Workshop sessions allowed participants at AME Chicago to learn from experts.

manmonthly.com.au

interest and then you go and do a bit more research in that space, but the practitioner sessions can be really good. They can be anywhere from an hour to two hours long, and these are guys actually doing work that presents their work.”

What particularly interested Ballas was a presentation from a continuous improvement leader from a municipality in Canada who presented a cost analysis for all the projects in a town of 40,000 applying Lean inside the council.

“It was just fascinating. If he can do it with a council and get these results, there’s no reason why I can’t.

He openly shared his models and information and supplied his email, and said, ‘Please talk to me because, in explaining it, I understand it better’.”

5. Grapple with a more uncertain business environment As global and local changes alter the outlook for businesses both at a local level and through global trade networks, being able to be agile and responsive to change is increasingly important. For Note Printing Australia, this is combined with changes in consumer practice.

“In the business we’re in – cash manufacturing – we’re getting lambasted with all sorts of technologies, which is impacting the use of cash, creating an increasingly more complex and fickle environment to operate in,” said Ballas.

By empowering people, as seen in the people centric leadership focus of Lean, which was on display in Chicago, practitioners and participants shared their strategies for agility.

“The world’s becoming increasingly more unstable and it’s increasingly more important for businesses to become more agile,” said Ballas.

“Stitched right through was the importance of people and really engaging people in the business. If you’re not doing this and doing it well, you’re going to be left out of the race.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 31

Collaboration Supporting quality manufacturing For the past 17 years, SEMMA has provided a collective voice for manufacturers.

Manufacturers’ Monthly speaks with newly appointed CEO, Vonda Fenwick.

At SEMMA’s recent AGM, the organisation appointed a new CEO, Vonda Fenwick.

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HILE the announcement of the end of Australian vehicle assembly in 2017 may have awoken the broad public’s consciousness to the importance of a vibrant and healthy manufacturing sector, those in Australia’s manufacturing heartland, south east Melbourne, had been preparing for that day for more than 10 years.

In 2002, following a series of workshops sponsored by the City of Greater Dandenong, local manufacturers joined forces as the South East Melbourne Manufacturing Alliance (SEMMA).

32 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

As Vonda Fenwick, the recently appointed CEO of SEMMA, recalled, there was a need for urgent action.

“One of the people at an industry breakfast stood up and spoke about how he had lost business to overseas competitors for work that traditionally he had done. Everyone was devastated about the loss of work for this business that was known to be a good business producing high quality products,” Fenwick said.

The sector itself makes a significant social and economic contribution not only to the surrounding region, but to the country as a whole. As of 2016,

roughly one in five manufacturing jobs in Australia are located in south east Melbourne. In addition, manufacturing’s contribution to the economy can be estimated at $1.28 for every dollar spent, significantly higher than other sectors. Furthermore, what distinguished the manufacturing businesses of south east Melbourne was their size, primarily SMEs, making a collective voice all the more necessary.

“While a number of our members are large, household names, the bulk of our members are the smaller companies so we’re talking the

1-20 or the 20 to 40, through to the classic SME definition of up to 199 employees,” said Fenwick. “SEMMA was really established to advocate for those businesses. They can feel as if they don’t have a voice when it’s just one business struggling with an issue impacting them, so we endeavour to advocate for all our members who are concerned about a particular issue impacting manufacturing.”

Although these businesses, which now number more than 200 members of SEMMA, may be small in size, they have and continue to make an impact due to their capabilities and highmanmonthly.com.au

Collaboration quality processes and product. This was where Fenwick began her career in manufacturing, as a consultant working with companies to improve their operations by applying total quality management principles across an entire company.

“Originally, in a lot of the companies, they saw quality in a very narrow way. The standard has changed over the time that I’ve been involved with manufacturing, so meeting the requirements of international standards has become a basic, fundamental aspect for businesses,” said Fenwick.

In the last two decades since the initial conversations which led to the foundation of SEMMA, what has carried manufacturing through as supply chains reorganise are those Australian manufacturing businesses that have been able to distinguish themselves based on their commitment to company-wide quality processes and continuous improvement. Fenwick was reminded of this when recently visiting several SEMMA members.

“I was delighted when Richard and Nikki Weinzierl at APT Engineering said the start of their success had been actually getting someone in to help them get their quality system established, and it was from there that they actually took off with improving their business.

“It is only a small engineering business doing beautiful machining, but they’re providing to defence and also to aerospace now,” said Fenwick.

“They’ve gone from a mum and dad company where the owner will say, ‘Oh, I’m just a fitter and turner’, to having a business that is incredibly impressive from the values on the walls right through to their process control, the quality of the parts that they’re dealing with and their ability to meet demanding customers requirements.”

At TransGlaze, another SEMMA member, Darren Laidler, told Fenwick when she visited, the company’s focus on quality enabled the business to sell into overseas markets often thought of as impenetrable for Australian manufacturers.

“What distinguishes the TransGlaze offering from the local product that manmonthly.com.au

the buyer could get in China is they know that when they’re buying the Australian product it is meeting those safety-critical standards,” said Fenwick.

“Darren said he doesn’t even talk price initially. He secures the work because they know that the company’s product is good, and the standards are being met.”

SEMMA has been an active force in assisting businesses to distinguish themselves and overcome issues such as higher input prices. One area where the organisation has done so is through group purchasing deals for rapidly increasing costs including energy. The organisation has also held networking sessions and develops connections between members which help overcome the limitations of operating a small business.

“Members would say to us, ‘I’ve been in this factory working away and making sure that I have a healthy business, but I didn’t realise that the guy in a factory down the street could actually help me and be part of my supply chain’,” said Fenwick. “The business to business connections are a plus, because they don’t have a lot of time to get out there. Also, they’re often hands on in a smaller business, so we perform the function of being able to find out what’s going on in the larger environment.”

While local governments have been involved in SEMMA since the beginning, the association has also acted as a voice for its members to state and federal governments, raising the profile of manufacturing and alerting policymakers to the benefits of a strong manufacturing sector. These actions often come down to finding areas of shared common ground.

“We want the same things.

We want those robust businesses, we want employment for people, we want community, we want those social benefits that come from manufacturing businesses being healthy, so it’s a natural partnership,” said Fenwick.

SEMMA has also partnered with local educational institutions such as Monash University, Chisholm Institute, Swinburne University of Technology, and Deakin University,

SEMMA represents Melbourne’s diverse manufacturing sector. as well as CSIRO, which operates a significant proportion of its research out of Clayton.

These partnerships again go toward confronting the critical issues that manufacturers face, that of finding a skilled workforce. Here, SEMMA is the vital middleman, ensuring that courses are fit for industry requirements, and that industry members are prepared to receive apprentices and trainees.

“Whether it’s stand-alone internships or part of a course to have work experience, the businesses benefits having people selected for them through our contacts at the universities,” said Fenwick. Further, a number of our members are also working on leading-edge research into new materials through Deakin and Monash Universities.

Educational institutions have approached SEMMA to provide feedback on course structures and design, to ensure that businesses are able to participate fully. Now, SEMMA is exploring the potential for microcourses or microcredentials that upskill workers in a short period of time.

In concert, these efforts ensure that local manufacturers, no matter their size, are ready and prepared for the work that is available.

With Victoria preparing to invest in significant infrastructure upgrades with the requirement for local content as part of the delivery of those projects, and the federal government looking for local manufacturers to fulfil defence contracts, combining the

skills and expertise of Australian manufacturers can ensure that local content targets are not just met but exceeded. For SEMMA, this will be a priority for 2020.

“The Victorian government has assured us that they are very serious about developing a robust local supply chain for major projects, that might be rolling stock, that might be helping to support and grow defence suppliers in Victoria, and we’re certainly looking to ensure that SEMMA members can win more of the big contracts,” said Fenwick.

What this requires, however, noted Fenwick, is a shift in thinking from government, an understanding that in working together local manufacturers can compete with major international firms. However, Fenwick highlighted, there needs to be a recognition of the difference between contracting with SME’s and major corporates.

“Your typical SME does not have a legal department and cascading of onerous risk clauses down to SME’s is unacceptable. Moreover, the rationale for government purchasing decisions needs to be one of total cost benefit.

To compare simply on the basis of price without recognising that if work goes to overseas suppliers, we lose employment of direct labour, we impact service jobs and other related jobs that depend on manufacturing,” she said.

“When we source overseas, we increase unemployment with the consequential societal and economic costs that result from the failure to recognise the critical role a vibrant manufacturing industry plays in a healthy economy,” said Fenwick.

Another challenge is prime contractors wanting to limit the number of suppliers they deal with.

“They would prefer to work, understandably, with a smaller number, so we are definitely looking at ways that our members can collaborate to increase the scope of work that they do and the scale of what they can provide, because we believe that that’s going to be key to securing the work on offer.”

SEMMA, now 17, is committed to advocating for local manufacturers and growing the region’s capability for the coming decades.

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 33

Innovation Taking flight Developing a locally made, ultra-high performance jet engine might sound like an impossible task, but it’s one that Jet Engines Australia is undergoing, while utilising the latest in rapid product design technology. Manufacturers’ Monthly finds out.

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ECHNOLOGY dominated the 2019 AFR Young Rich List.

At the top of the list were Atlassian founders Mike CannonBrookes and Scott Farquhar. Next were Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, founders of graphic design software as a service company Canva. Rounding out the top five were Collis and Cyan Ta’eed, who brought online creative marketplace Envato to world, and then founder of real estate technology company Compass, Ori Allon.

While the stories behind each start-up are significant on their own, they all lacked one element – hardware. The perils of a hardware start-up are well known, including long development times, and greater expense incurred before a product can go to market, but elsewhere the stirrings of a revival of the hardware start up scene are beginning to be felt, as technologies such as 3D printing, digital design, and simulation reduce the time and cost involved with prototyping. If the AFR’s rich list is anything to go by, this thinking is yet to catch up with the VC circuit.

One company that is trying out the hardware product development trajectory is Jet Engines Australia.

Which, although only a few months old, has come out of a long period of development on the part of cofounder and chief technical officer, Terry Burton, as Philippe Bonnet, chief operating officer of Jet Engines Australia, described to Manufacturers’ Monthly.

“The idea behind Jet Engines Australia is to commercialise the technology that Terry Burton has developed. This engine design is actually part of a process to design an ultra-high performance jet aircraft designed by Terrence Jets known as the UltraJet 1672A aircraft. Burton decided to design his own jet engine because there was no suitable engine available for the 34 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

aircraft he wanted to design.”

Terence Jets began as the result of a childhood dream that turned into a Guinness Book of Records award for the smallest jet engine. From there, Terence Jets has sought to develop an ultimate performance aircraft for air racing, defence, and private use.

Jet Engines Australia will provide a critical component, the jet engine.

“Burton is building a very high performance, single pilot jet, that will have similar capabilities to a F-18,” said Bonnet. “In doing his design for this aircraft, he realised there’s no engine out there that can actually meet the requirements for what he wants, in terms of size, power, and manoeuvrability of the aircraft.”

While this specific application led to an engine design for the specialised motorsport of air racing, defence, and private applications, the process of building the engine has also opened up other markets. This expansion of applications followed the growth of interest in startups entering the aviation sector.

Traditionally, aerospace engineering, and the manufacturing of engines especially, has been centralised in a few major manufacturers. Now, as the technology to develop and build an engine has become more accessible, and the market for flying devices has opened up, Bonnet and Burton are hoping to take advantage of a new wave of interest in home-grown solutions for the sector.

“As we’ve had the globalisation of industry and aerospace in particular, the capability within Australia has diminished over time,” said Bonnet.

“Given that there’s very innovative

growth areas such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 3D printing, and digital prototyping, this is an opportunity to bring some of that capability back in to Australia.”

In 2014, Australian researchers at Monash University and Amaero Engineering built a world first, 3D-printed jet engine. Milestones such as this have democratised the creation of the once highly

complex technology behind jet engines, something that Bonnet is well aware of.

“Traditionally, if you’re building an engine for a civilian or military aircraft, your development time could be very long. For instance, GE have only recently designed their new turboprop engine and it’s the first clean sheet design in 30 years.

“What happens in industry is there are only a few manufacturers, so the imperative or motivation to come up with new designs is very low because it’s very costly and the time to develop is quite long,” said Bonnet.

What Jet Engines Australia has done to overcome this is simplify

the architecture of the engine, use advanced digital prototyping, and combine 3D printed parts with commercial, off-the-shelf components.

“The more parts you add increases complexity, and then you have increasing reliability problems, cost, and weight,” said Bonnet. “Our design is quite simple; we’ve got a single, axial flow compressor and a single centrifugal compressor, and then we’ve got a single turbine, so by having just the one single stage it means you just need one shaft as well for that turbo jet engine.”

This not only reduces the time it takes to develop the engine, but decreases the cost, allowing

for the product development to be done locally, in Australia.

“It’s home grown, Australian technology. We are using existing technology, but in an innovative way, to develop engines,” said Bonnet.

At this point in the company’s progress, the engine design and digital prototype have been completed, as well as a 3D printed manmonthly.com.au

Innovation Jet Engines Australia has utilised local 3D printing capabilities to produce a prototype of its engine.

manufacturing verification model of the jet engine. The company is preparing to manufacture a physical prototyping for testing.

“These days, you might call it a design algorithm,” said Bonnet.

“It’s a series of calculations that can be automated and, depending on what inputs you put into your system, help develop the optimal configuration of the engine. That’s basically what’s able to give us the ability to design to all of the requirements of the customer.

We’ve got a design with 200 pounds thrust and if someone comes back and wants 300 pounds thrust, we manmonthly.com.au

could easily develop that in a short amount of time.”

Once the physical prototype has been tested, Bonnet envisions working with local manufacturers to realise the commercial range of engines. The TB400 turbojet engine range was released at the Pacific 2019 exhibition in Sydney this October.

“We don’t see ourselves developing the capability in house to manufacture, so we want to work suppliers such as 3D printing and CNC machining companies.”

Flight paths Having come up with the design, the next step for any hardware start up is to find a market. While remaining

flexible to the customer, the sudden outcrop of drones, whether for logistics, military, or transportation uses, presents an opportunity for a simple, but effective jet engine design. This is an area that Jet Engines Australia are keen to tap into.

“Because of the advent of UAVs, optionally manned vehicles, there’s a lot of innovation at the moment, and different configurations, and that’s where we see our range of engines can meet a lot of those evolving requirements where nothing exists today.”

However, the initial interest of the company was in using the jet engines for applications such as target drones for armed forces to test their defences against attacks by missiles. Other areas where the engine could be used are closer to

the ground, with high speed mobility applications for the movement of troops, materiel, fuel, or other supplies in need. This morphing of potential uses is part of the hardware start-up process now, that becomes closer to software in its initial release, then refinement as the customer base firms up.

“At first, we saw there’s interest in the engine developed for the UltraJet 1672A at Terence Jets, for different applications so then we thought, ‘Ok, we’ll look at developing this business of Jet Engines Australia’. Then, along the way, we found that there’s interest in other areas, so that’s why initially it was target drones but now we see there’s a lot of interest in developing unmanned drones for cargo delivery systems.”

Bonnet cites both Amazon and Uber’s investigation of drones for cargo delivery as areas where his jets could be used. With such final customers as these, the potential for a hardware start-up such as Jet Engines Australia goes well beyond what was previously thought possible. With cost barriers to product development broken down, indeed, Jet Engines Australia is self-funded by its co-founders, the product development of hardware similar to jet engines is no longer the domain of large corporations, as Bonnet reflected.

“I’ve been in engineering my whole life and to participate in this world of UAVs has opened up my opportunities. What’s difficult in Australia in terms of your commercial start-up hubs, is that there’s a lot of focus on media startups, software start-ups, financial start-ups, but there hasn’t been interest in the deep tech start-up phase but we’re starting to see that improve,” said Bonnet.

As incubators designed to facilitate the needs of hardware start-ups open up across Australia, both inside universities and outside, the process of developing hardware can continue to open up.

“We’re dealing with actual detailed engineering and physical products, rather than the software system.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 35

Manufacturing Strategies It’s what’s on the inside that matters One manufacturing company, with half a century of heritage, points the way to what’s next for manufacturing in Australia. Manufacturers’ Monthly explains.

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N a backstreet in south-west Sydney, behind a doubleheight roller door, lies some of the most advanced manufacturing machinery in the world - one of which is the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere.

Between a coordinate measuring machine, micromoulding machinery, and precision moulding tools, is the latest in additive manufacturing. But, even describing this machine as a 3D printer is somewhat of a misnomer.

The machine is a hybrid technology, combining additive manufacturing, 5-axis machining, and in-process inspection.

This is the advanced manufacturing facility of Romar Engineering and operating the machine is Steve Milanoski, formerly of SpaceX. According to Milanoski, the key advantage of this new type of 3D printer is the flexibility, which allows Romar to meet the demands of its varying customer base.

“Being a contract manufacturer means that we specialise in a process that companies don’t want to internalise,” said Milanoski.

The Lasertec 65 joins a range of other specialised machining tools which enables Romar to stay ahead of the varying requirements of the wider Australian manufacturing sector.

“Whether it’s compression moulding, injection moulding, silicon biomedical assembly – all those things we can do, and now with advanced manufacturing we’re focussing on different technological sectors in aerospace, mining, and defence,” said Milanoski.

Now, with the machine on hand, Romar has the ability to shift between different materials, industries, and processes, depending on the requirements of the job.

“You can 3D print metal and machine metal simultaneously, 36 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

and that allows you a lot of design freedom,” said Milanoski. “You can repair parts, you can make them from scratch, you can just use it for typical subtractive machining or as a typical additive machine.”

At SpaceX, Milanoski printed some of the largest parts that were installed on the company’s Raptor Engines. At Romar, Milanoski is going one step further, testing the machine’s capabilities in any number of configurations.

“We know that the technology works, now it’s just a matter of leveraging that and using that in Australia to advance other industries,” said Milanoski. “I’m here to help other industries adopt these technologies and make them more agile and responsive and also to be more competitive against offshore supply chains.”

So far, Milanoski has been testing out the potential to manufacture aerofoils with a hollow core, for reduced weight without losing strength. In addition, as new materials come onto market, Romar can adopt them in its manufacturing process, the challenge now is to ensure the potential meets the demands of industry.

“When it comes to defence, aerospace, biomedical – whoever we’re working for – the advantage is that our processes, whether it’s different compounds of polymers, which we have decades of experience with, or whether it’s industrial metal products that we’re 3D printing, our process chain is essentially the same. The difficulties we’re finding is mostly in the project and product specific details.”

These details are where the technological possibilities encased in any machine run up against the human realities of the manufacturing industry. In the first instance, Milanoski notes, you need someone

Romar Engineering has collaborated with partners to stay ahead of the technological curve. to know how to run the machine.

“This platform demands a very specific knowledge set, you have to have a materials and mechanical engineering background, design knowledge, and materials testing skills. Then you have the application side, programming and the physics background of monitoring a melt pool.”

Collaborating to remain distinct Within the additive manufacturing section of Romar, it is not only Milanoski’s knowledge, and that of the wider team, that makes the operations possible, but connections to a wider ecosystem of manufacturers.

This has been put into practice

partly through the development and use of new materials tailored for additive processes, such as maraging steel which is high strength, high ductility steels, with a low carbon content, overcoming existing issues with die cast aluminium alloys, pointed out Milanoski.

“One of the really exciting things that’s coming about in additive technology is materials and metals that are tailored specifically for the additive manufacturing process.

Typically, some of the aluminium alloys that were made for die casting, for example, were tailored specifically for that process.

With the advent of additive manufacturing, the metals supplied are now designed from the atom up for 3D printing. manmonthly.com.au

Manufacturing Strategies Taking these qualities to additive manufacturing has required an approach that goes beyond Romar.

With a low heat treat temperature, until now the maraging steels were not highly corrosion resistant, yet in working with the local arm of specialty steelmaker voestalpine, Romar is utilising the increased qualities of the maraging steel for additive manufacturing.

“You can get incredibly highstrength steel with good ductility now and on top of it, we can process it through machining before heat treatment and not have to worry about any distortion in the heat treat.

You can get a part, inspect it, come straight off the machine, put it in the oven, and put it straight into service with insanely good properties and corrosion resistance,” said Milanoski.

“To me, that’s one of those materials that can enable the next industrial revolution, but that’s just one of those things of us working with industry closely to pioneer that.”

The collaborative nature of this kind of manufacturing can, however, be discerned without getting into the internals of the company. On the exterior of the site, the Romar logo sits next to that of CSIRO, and it was through these two organisations working together that they were able to acquire a machine such as that which is now in its advanced manufacturing facility. Despite this, just as in working with voestalpine, the associations that Romar has with the CSIRO and other industry networks such as the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) and research institutions are about collaborating to deliver on the potential of Australian manufacturing.

“Everybody at that table is very good at one thing, or they bring certain strengths to that table, and it’s a situation where you’re better than the sum of the parts,” said Milanoski.

“Collaborations with CSIRO are mainly more novel ways for us to evaluate and process builds for additive manufacturing. For example, do you need X-ray to validate the quality of your metal, or metal parts.

If we can bypass that, you’re looking at anything from a 10-20 per cent cost manmonthly.com.au

Focussing on advanced manufacturing has opened up new areas for Romar Engineering, including aerospace, mining, and defence.

saving per part, not to mention the lead-time.”

Leveraging the potential of such partnerships enables Romar to stay competitive when challenging overseas engineering firms for contract work, Milanoski explains.

“I don’t look at those partnerships as being essential to day to day operations, but they’re definitely essential when it comes to future technology and developing a competitive edge. While at Romar we want every Australian business to succeed, at the end of the day we want to be better than every other business that does what we do globally.”

Ensuring longevity amid change To compete with other manufacturers around the world requires a point of distinction for Romar. For the company, and many other smaller Australian manufacturers this is its highly educated and adaptive workforce.

As the workforce ages, grapples with change, and avoiding losing the

knowledge that is contained within the minds of the working population requires thinking about new methods of knowledge transfer.

“Carlo Cartini, director of technical development at Romar, is the guy that knows the secret sauce to almost anything,” said Milanoski.

“In the time that Rita Nicolas, manufacturing manager, and Bing Jing, injection moulding process engineer, and some of our other employees have worked here, Cartini slowly hands that knowledge down and then it gets passed on.”

To ensure that expertise is not lost, Milanoski acknowledges that one area of improvement for the company is to take the “tribal knowledge” of the business, and to centralise that in an accessible central repository to future proof the company and also gain some efficiency, Milanoski explained.

“Romar functions on the strength of its engineering, and that engineering has a tonne of IP that we’ve generated. If that IP goes to pasture and employees retire or leave, or anything like that, it detracts from the overall value of the company, so

having that in some central location that everyone can access, it helps,” said Milanoski.

As global and local shifts occur that impact upon each manufacturing business in Australia, local manufacturing has to compete and stand out in a global market. For many, Australia’s distinctiveness is its ability to be agile, producing short runs of product at high quality. For Romar, which has been continuously manufacturing since 1968 and has weathered changes to the sector across that time, combining internal expertise with partnerships that incorporate the best that the rest of Australia has to offer has enabled it to remain competitive.

“We’re finding customers that have gone to China or India and they are coming back. They’re saying, ‘We tried this, but we couldn’t get the parameters down’. Whatever their reason might be, they come back to us and say, ‘That trial you ran for us went really well and if we could just continue doing that that would be great’. Then, we can pick up where we left off.”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 37

Instrumentation Tools for hardware development Turning an idea into a working prototype requires a place to work and tools that will get the job done. Mouser Electronics and Bob Martin, senior engineer and subject matter expert in rapid prototyping at Microchip Technology, provides a high-level overview of the resources you will need to build and test prototypes.

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ORPORATE engineers or those who have hardware accelerator support will have access to equipment and hardware. Entrepreneurial engineers and makers must either build their own lab or find access to the equipment they need.

Regardless of who you are, every engineer will need some basic tools to develop their hardware project.

Lab facilities Every engineer needs a lab of some kind. Many begin with a workbench in their basement or garage. A great place to start is one of a number of well-equipped fab labs and makerspaces available for use at a reasonable cost (Figure 1).

In addition to parts for building prototypes, you need equipment to test them.

Many of these facilities are associated with university engineering programs, but there are often programs and arrangements available that give qualified people access even if they are not directly involved with the university. Martin, notes that these facilities often come with a built-in community of engineers and enthusiasts who like to share ideas.

“It’s amazing how much people 38 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

at colleges love to talk about engineering projects,” he said.

Eventually, many engineers want to build out their own lab space.

The basic ingredients of a good bench are plenty of workspace, good lighting, and a good bench power supply. In addition to these basics, you will need components and test equipment.

Parts and components When you begin building early-stage prototypes, you will start collecting parts. You may use a generic evaluation board, and in scrounging for components, you will discover that certain parts are popular. In working out key aspects of a design, you might purchase breakout boards from vendors to quickly test concepts and do rapid prototyping in a process that’s like building with electronic Legos.

Eventually, you will need to take that early-stage prototype consisting of breakout boards, wires, sensors, and other components all plugged into a breadboard and start refining the design with actual parts and components. That’s when you see the real benefit of working in a lab with a large collection of parts.

“Those part collections are like tribal knowledge. They’re the canon of popular parts that lab managers collect because they trust those parts. With that knowledge comes the schematic symbols and footprints whatever CAD package you’re using,” Martin explained.

Hardware test equipment Every well-equipped lab will need these basic pieces of test equipment: • Digital multimeter (DMM) – used to measure voltage, current, and resistance. In selecting a DMM, consider resolution (more display digits typically indicate higher

resolution), accuracy, auto-ranging, and true RMS capabilities.

• Oscilloscope – used for testing analog sections of a circuit, this is an essential tool for analysing waveforms, troubleshooting circuits, and evaluating signal quality.

When choosing an oscilloscope, consider bandwidth, which specifies frequency ranges it can measure, sample rate, the number of channels it can measure, its ability to store waveforms and the record lengths it can store, triggering capabilities, and the types and configurations of probes that are compatible with the scope.

• USB logic analyser – used to display and test digital signals.

“The USB logic analyser is the real star of the show, especially if you’re working with microcontrollers,” Martin said.

Key features to consider include the number of channels it can track, how much continuous signal measurement it can store, and sample rate. Some logic analysers have their own displays, and some are designed to plug into a computer and run with proprietary software.

In addition to test equipment, you will need electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) to create schematics and printed circuit boards (PCB) layouts.

Electronic CAD ECAD and Electronic Design Automation (EDA), provide essential functionality for designing electrical circuits, creating schematics, creating printed circuit board (PCB) layouts, and generating all documentation needed to fabricate PCBs and build PCB assemblies. Although highend ECAD solutions can be very expensive, there are good free and trial versions that provide sufficient functionality for many projects. Also,

using trial versions is a great way to check them out before investing in a premium version ECAD applications use standard symbols for building schematics, and they offer comparable features commonly used in electronic design.

However, there are certain things to look for when deciding on the right ECAD package. These include: • Complete functionality It used to be that schematics were created in one ECAD application and PCB layouts in a separate program.

Now most ECAD applications provide integrated end-to-end design functionality that starts with schematics and carries through directly to the PCB layout portion of the program. This is an essential capability.

• Intuitive interface One of the most important selection criteria is whether you are comfortable using the application.

“These applications all have different user paradigms in how they organise their interfaces. One of these user interfaces is going to click with you and be much more intuitive than others. That’s the one you want,” Martin explained.

Martin advises downloading trial versions and working with them to find one you like.

“All the good packages, free or not, have excellent video tutorials,” he said. “If it’s sparse on video tutorials, you probably want to look elsewhere.”

• Flat and hierarchical schematics Many projects work fine with flat schematics, but more complex designs benefit from hierarchical schematics that allow you to collapse sections of the diagram while still seeing all the connections that go into that section.

“If your design is only a few pages long, flat schematics work fine. At manmonthly.com.au

Instrumentation some point, hierarchical becomes more manageable. You might start with a flat schematic, and if your design is getting to six or seven pages, you probably want to start looking at hierarchical,” said Martin.

• Back annotation Back annotation allows you to make a change at the PCB layout stage which automatically updates netlists and the schematic. For example, you may discover during layout that routing would be a lot easier if you switched some pins around, which you can easily do.

This changes the PCB netlist, but with back annotation, it will also change the schematic netlist.

Creating a schematic is just the beginning of the design process.

Once you have a good schematic, you will need to turn it into a PCB layout for fabrication.

PCB layout Most ECAD packages have PCB layout functionality integrated into the application. Here are some key features you want to consider when evaluating ECAD packages: • Seamless integration and design constraints Seamless integration is complete functional integration between schematic design and PCB layout.

You should be able to work on either and have those results reflected in the other. Design constraints are design rules such as board dimensions, trace dimensions, hole sizes, number of layers, and other essential design features. Being able to specify these design constraints in detail is fundamental to creating a board layout that will work and that can be fabricated.

• Trace length matching This is a very important aspect of PCB layout, especially in designs that involve high-speed signals where uneven trace lengths can cause variations in how long it takes signals to move through the traces.

PCB layout functionality should support trace length matching.

• Auto-routing – proceed with caution Many ECAD applications support auto-routing, and some work better than others. It’s important that the manmonthly.com.au

auto-routing be fully controllable by design constraints. Auto-routing is not a function you would use to layout an entire board. It should only be used in certain cases, for instance in highly repetitive noncritical sections of a layout.

“Most applications do trace length matching automatically, and that is more important than autorouting,” said Martin.

• Documentation This is a standard but essential function of the ECAD application.

This includes maintaining and outputting all the documentation for fabrication and assembly, including bill of materials (BOMB), assembly plots for board layers, and drill tables. Part of the documentation includes Gerber or ODB++ output files, which are used by the PCB manufacturer to fabricate your boards.

In addition to creating schematics, PCB layouts, and documentation, there is one other important function provided by design software. That is circuit simulation.

Simulation A circuit simulator uses schematic and mathematical models to simulate analog circuit operation for analysis. Without building an operational prototype, you can use circuit simulation to look at signal propagation in a circuit, power levels, and thermal dissipation.

This is useful in early design stages to verify a design and help in component selection.

Simulation functionality is increasingly becoming a feature of ECAD applications, either through linking to Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) a widely used open-source circuit simulator, or as an integrated part of the ECAD application. It can be very helpful in designing analog circuits, but it is less useful for digital components such as those involving microcontrollers.

For designs involving radio transmission or wireless connectivity, radio frequency (RF) simulation is essential in antenna design and evaluating the circuit for

Circuit simulation can be useful in the early design stages.

regulatory compliance.

RF simulation is a very expensive, specialised service. That, and the cost of getting Federal Communications Commission (FCC), certification for a wireless design is one reason many engineers use pre-certified modules in their RF designs.

When you have designed, bolt, and tested your PCB assembly, you will need to put it into an enclosure.

For that, you will need mechanical CAD.

Mechanical CAD Many mechanical CAD applications provide 3D modelling functions capable of creating enclosures and supporting 3D printing.

From the electrical engineer’s perspective. A key mechanical CAD capability is being able to import a 3D step model of the PCB board that is generated by your ECAD application. This enables you to quickly see now the assembled board fits into the enclosure and where all the touchpoints will be.

“PCB board designers work with mechanical Packaging guys,” explained Martin. “They’ll generate that 3D STEP model and hand it off to the mechanical CAD guys who will pull it into the enclosure, rotate it, and take dimensions from it if necessary.”

Working with Digital Components In addition to the ECAD tools and test equipment discussed so far, many designs require digital components such as microcontrollers and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that need their own development tools and strategies.

Many development tools used to program these pals, such as the integrated development environment (IDE) for microcontrollers, will be specific to the part or part family you are using. In the case of FPGAs, you will likely be using a hardware description language such as Verilog or VHDL. In both cases, you will need logic simulators designed for digital circuits that allow you to incrementally step through code one instruction at a time and measure how each line of code affects signals in the circuit.

You will also use testing strategies, such as function partitioning, which allow you to isolate just one portion of the digital circuit to test its functions independent of what is happening in the rest of the circuit.

This becomes necessary in complex circuits in which a microcontroller may be performing one kind of process while an FPGA is performing a different but dependent process.

Reprinted with permission from Mouser Electronics. https://au.mouser.com/ Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 39

3D Printing The next wave Often seen as a prototyping tool, a new understanding of 3D printing is emerging.

Manufacturers’ Monthly visits a den of additive manufacturing.

3D printing is now going beyond rapid prototyping.

F

ORTY years ago, the first 3D printer entered the market.

Designed by Chuck Hull, the machine had all the hallmarks of its age, including a bulky design, and a control system run from a CRT monitor. But, the core ability to print an object from a digital design was there and has spawned four decades of innovation and experimentation with the technology.

Taking the latest technologies in this field and bringing them together in the one space is the ProtoSpace at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Opened in March 2019, the facility provides a sandbox for industry to come and experiment with what 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, can mean for the Australian manufacturing industry.

Part of the UTS Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, director of ProtoSpace, Hervé Harvard, explains that the 40 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

facility is there for the benefit of industry.

“The ProtoSpace gives industry access to high-end additive manufacturing capabilities with the help of an operational and engineering team. This is a very different model to a closed door facility managed by a research team, and supports our vision of allowing industry to just walk in and explore how to leverage 3D printing.”

Buried underneath Building 7 at UTS’s main campus, the bare, cinder block walls encase a space in which the latest in 3D printing technology awaits the next project.

All in all, there are eight individual additive manufacturing machines spread across 900 sqm. One of the researchers there to assist businesses make the most of the array of technologies is Matthias Guertler, lecturer in mechanical and mechatronic engineering.

“As a basic first step of our

engagement model, we allow industry to have a tour of ProtoSpace, so they gain a better understanding of what additive manufacturing is, and what machines are out there,” he said.

Unlike other spaces where 3D printers are displayed, such as a trade show or a tech expo, ProtoSpace encourages direct, hands-on experimentation, without the price tag.

“We’re not promoting particular machines or technology,” said Harvard. “We’re advising on additive manufacturing and provide equipment for industry to use, and we’re more than happy if they want to be hands on.”

In total, UTS have assembled one of the largest collections of 3D printers in Australia, something that would be out of reach for many manufacturing businesses.

“Certainly, many SMEs in my view have very little chance of affording a space like this, so I think coming into this space, they can explore 3D

printing and the relevance of 3D printing in their business, without having to spend millions of dollars.”

Before getting stuck into designing a business’s first prototype, both Harvard and Guertler note that 3D printing is only as useful as a business makes it.

“We offer training and assist businesses to decide how they could use a 3D additive manufacturing machine placed in their factory, and adjust the process around that,” said Guertler.

Indeed, for businesses that don’t already have 3D orienting as part of their roster of manufacturing tools, ProtoSpace will be able to guide a business to how the technologies there can best serve a manufacturer.

“If you’re not going to be hands on, we’re going to redirect you to a printing bureau,” said Harvard. “For us, it’s for and about people who really want to understand the technology and explore, even if they don’t quite know yet how it may be relevant.”

From design to manufacturing In a history of Google searches, 3D printing spikes in 2013 and continues steadily after that time, signalling its entry into public consciousness. Meanwhile additive manufacturing begins to grow at that time but continues to rise in prominence to the present day.

This difference, highlights Harvard, is partly due to the successive wave of how the technology has been understood.

When first invested, the technology was used for rapid prototyping, but quickly the 3D printing industry realised that the technology could do more than this.

Subsequently, businesses began using 3D printing for tooling. In the meantime, mainstream consumers have also adopted the technology manmonthly.com.au

3D Printing

ProtoSpace contains over half a dozen individual machines. for their own uses.

“Every single day, there was a news item about 3D printing; the first 3D printed chair, table, and I think the media thought that everybody was going to have a 3D printer in their home like a coffee machine,” said Harvard.

In some ways, Harvard noted, this may have been a disservice to the 3D printing industry.

“Because it’s not new – people have been hearing about 3D printing for decades – there’s a bit of 3D printing fatigue. People think we’ve heard it, nothing’s happening. Well that’s not true, the world is moving and there’s significant advances in 3D printing all over the world, in the automotive, aerospace, medical industries.”

What makes the current wave of excitement around 3D printing manmonthly.com.au

different, according to Harvard, is the potential to use the technology as part of the manufacturing process, rather than just in design or prototype phases. Signifying this shift was GE’s announcement in 2017 that 3D printed parts will be used in its turboprop engine.

Driving this shift are three converging trends, the reduction in cost of the 3D printing machines themselves, the increase in speed, with an associated increase in throughput, and the improvement in the performance of 3D printing materials.

Harvard likes to call the new wave “bespoke 3D printing”.

Making sense of 3D printing One project that is emerging from ProtoSpace and Rapido, UTS’s bridge between its academic expertise and

industry-led design challenges, is a mineral separating device produced for Mineral Technologies. The spiral shaped object was manufactured using 3D printing technology, however from the perspective of the industry partner, the significance of the project was its utility, not its method of manufacturing – a shift that Harvard sees as occurring more broadly across 3D printing.

“We can do many other parts, but that’s the one Mineral Technologies want to 3D print because that’s the one that makes economic sense.” said Harvard.

“This machine does it, but they want the best machine to do a spiral, because when you make it more generic, there are always compromises.”

Being focussed on providing a service for businesses, not just the

university, encourages ProtoSpace to focus on the best outcome for the project, not necessarily the most innovative use of a 3D printer.

“It comes down to sense making,” said Guertler. “We are not a trade show, and also not a consultancy, so we are not interested in selling stuff, we really want to help you to make sense with these new technologies.”

With this in mind, Guertler encourages manufacturers not to see the machines as objects on their own, but potential methods to reach a solution that is relevant for a commercial outcome. Guertler emphasises that businesses should ask themselves a question before getting caught up in the latest technology.

“What does Industry 4.0, advanced manufacturing mean for your company?”

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 41

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Awards Celebrating the best in manufacturing After a record-breaking year in 2019, the Endeavour Awards return in 2020 to highlight Australia’s outstanding manufacturers. Manufacturers’ Monthly explains.

I

N 2019, Australian manufacturing continued its transformation into a dynamic sector, encompassing a wide variety of specialisations.

Proving all detractors wrong, in late 2018 the sector demonstrated its ability to rebound after the closure of car assembly, putting 85,000 more people on the payroll. In 2019 this continued, particularly as food and beverage manufacturing surged, with the manufacture of building materials and chemicals also making a significant contribution, according to figures from the Ai Group.

Beyond the sector-by-sector breakdown, what distinguishes this change is the move to higher-skilled roles, in addition to investment in automation and digitalisation, as manufacturing embraces the fourth industrial revolution, and the integration of cyber and physical systems, perhaps ahead of other industries.

Acknowledging these changes and celebrating those who are pushing ahead of the curve will be the 2020 edition of the Endeavour Awards, held on May 14 in conjunction with the Advanced Manufacturing Expo.

Presented by Manufacturers’ Monthly, the awards return after the largest year yet, with 2019 breaking all records for attendance.

With the launch of the $50 million Manufacturing Modernisation Fund in 2019, manufacturing businesses are looking for ways to apply current technological developments to their businesses in innovative and unique ways. As David Chuter, CEO and managing director of the Innovative Manufacturing Centre Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC), outlined at National Manufacturing Week in 2019, the rapid adoption of new technology can drive positive business outcomes.

“In the manufacturing sector, it is about how you can drive improved efficiencies, extract value, drive lower manmonthly.com.au

costs, create new business models and give such exceptional value gains to your business that banks will be jumping out of their seats to loan you money to invest in further growth.”

This year, SEW Eurodrive, the global designer, developer, and manufacturer of mechanical power transmission equipment, returns to sponsor the Most Innovative Manufacturing Company Award. This award highlights those companies that are doing exactly as Chuter said, utilising technology and combining it with their workforce’s knowledge to respond to the everchanging manufacturing landscape.

Last year’s winner, Andrew Donald Design Engineering (ADDE) exemplified this in its practice of developing one-off solutions to enable manufacturers to take advantage of robotics, automation, and process control systems.

As 2019 progressed, Australian manufacturers also began to confront a major change in the type of work that will drive the local industry. First outlined in the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian Defence Force has begun to see local industry as the fourth arm of its capability. Delivered through the Capability, Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG), and supported by the Centre for Defence Industry Capability, Australian

Nominations are now open for the 2020 Endeavour Awards.

Showcasing the best of the past year, the Endeavour Awards point to the future of Australian manufacturing. manufacturers are tooling up to support the largest peace-time buildup of Australia’s defence technology.

Australian manufacturing SMEs have continued to create technologies in areas where we are world leaders, such as radar technologies, while also embracing the application of the latest in global technology such as unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. However, as major defence contracts continue to be delivered by international defence corporations, Australian suppliers are competing with overseas businesses while also exporting to the other customers of these international corporations.

Recognising excellence in this area is the Global Supply Chain Integration of the Year Award. With the Industry Capability Network (ICN), a network for businesses connecting suppliers and buyers, the award celebrates those Australian manufacturing businesses that have been able to compete globally, a key aim of developing a local defence industry. In addition, ICN has worked with the Department of Defence, major prime defence contractors, and industry organisations, to enable Australian manufacturing SMEs to find their niche in the competitive defence industry.

In the midst of these overarching developments, Australian companies

have continued to target themselves to emerging needs elsewhere in the nation, whether that be in fighting fires or utilising Australia’s deposits of high-value minerals to produce batteries and energy storage devices.

Weld Australia, the peak body for welding in Australia, continues to support these new companies and organisations, with its backing of the Outstanding Start-Up Award in 2020.

What remains at the heart of all of these manufacturers are the products they have developed. Whether these be the latest IoT-enabled devices which have adopted a subscription model in line-with Chuter’s prognosis, or have beaten their international competitors by being cheaper, faster, lighter, and stronger, the Australian Industrial Product of the Year in 2020 will go to an innovative solution that puts the best technology to serve a pressing need. The award is once again sponsored by Vega Australia, which distributes in Australia the measurement technology manufactured by its parent company.

Nominations for the Endeavour Awards are now open. Nominations for the 10 categories close on Friday, March 27 and the overall award, Manufacturer of the Year, will be chosen from an outstanding winner in one of the awards. www.endeavourawards.com.au/ Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 43

APRIL 2020 – ENERGY MANAGEMENT A rising cost to manufacturing businesses is energy. High gas prices and increasing electricity bills are putting pressure on manufacturers. Getting a handle on energy use can put a dent in both of these challenges

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In April 2020 we speak with energy management providers about what managers need to consider to reduce their energy costs.

In every edition of Manufacturers’ Monthly, we’re proud to work with our commercial partners on content that helps connect you with your future customers.

Booking deadline: 4 March 2020

To book contact DANILO CORTUCCI now danilo.cortucci@primecreative.com.au | 0434 419 663

Women in Industry Participation paving the way for diversity The dual challenges of diversifying the manufacturing workforce and filling its skill gaps could share a solution. Manufacturers’ Monthly speaks to Atlas Copco to find out how.

I

NCREASING participation of women in the manufacturing workforce is greater than any one company. Indeed, sector-wide surveys have found that the participation of women in manufacturing is small but growing.

In an April 2019 report from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, an Australian federal government agency, female representation in the occupations of craft and related trades workers was the lowest in the economy. Second lowest were plant and machine operators, and assemblers, both of which are in high demand in manufacturing.

Manufacturing as a whole performed slightly better, with 29.5 per cent of the workforce women, a 3.6-point increase on 1998 figures.

At the same time, these occupations are some of the most in-demand occupations across the economy as a whole. In 2018, the Ai Group found that the occupation that employers found most difficult to fill are technicians and trades workers, along with other occupations requiring STEM skills.

Encouraging the greater participation of women in the workforce, and highlighting the demand for workers in these fields, confronts a key issue facing the Australian workforce and the manufacturing sector.

In addition, diversifying the manufacturing workforce will prepare the industry for the changes that are forecasted to occur with the adoption of the next wave of technological innovation.

One company that is contributing to these figures is Atlas Copco Australia, a subsidiary of the global air compressor manufacturer Atlas Copco. According to Geoff Gavan, the company’s HR business partner, Atlas Copco targets a diverse workforce, while only hiring the best possible person for the vacant position.

“In Australia, we have a figure that manmonthly.com.au

we have to recruit for, in particular we are looking for female engineers and female service technicians.”

Gavan admitted that the company is facing the same pressures as the rest of the industry, but has had its successes, too.

“We have just hired a female mechanical engineer and, going forward, we would like to be able to continue to be doing that,” said Gavan.

What made this candidate stand out, however, was not her gender, but the experience and knowledge she could bring to the company. Gavan hopes that this hire will enable others to follow.

“When we saw her application, we thought ‘Wow, here’s an opportunity to break the mould’, because it’s not easy to find female engineers with that level of experience.”

To meet their targets, Atlas Copco has one advantage that not every Australian manufacturer may have.

“Atlas Copco operates in more than 180 countries. We have more than 35,000 employees. It’s a large, global business and, wherever possible, we try to move people around to give them experience, and also to broaden the depth of diversity in the business,” said Gavan.

This has seen engineers and other employees move from international divisions to Atlas Copco’s operations in Australia, some of whom have put down roots.

“We have two people here who are now permanent residents, both women in management roles, who have come from other parts of Atlas Copco in the world,” said Gavan.

“We participate in that program where we can, and if the opportunity arose for more, we would do that.”

As a global business, the success of women in each part of Atlas Copco’s business contributes to the company’s overall strategy, which identifies diversity as a goal of the company. As Gavan outlined,

Atlas Copco is committed to creating pathways for women in its workforce, wherever they may come from.

Australia has a part to play in that strategy.

“We are the biggest compressor business in the world, so globally we have the challenge of living up to that diversity target. We have some local input to what is achievable here and what is not achievable,” said Gavan.

In getting to these targets, the company acknowledges that the areas it is hiring towards have some of the lowest numbers of women participating.

“It’s hard to get women interested in swinging spanners and engineering work, but they’re out there and we will find them.”

To do so, the company has developed relationships with universities, including the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

These relationships enable the company tp provide internships and placements, so that the dynamism of manufacturing can be highlighted and perceptions of the manufacturing sector as dirty, dull, and dangerous can be alleviated.

“We’ve got one person here, a fulltime employee, who started out as an intern and she’s now doing our web presence,” said Gavan.

It’s hard to get women interested in swinging spanners and engineering work, but they’re out there and we will find them.

“We were very pleased to bring her from an intern, to a part time employee while she studied, and now she’s a full-time employee, having finished her studies.”

Putting these achievements and strands together into one package is Atlas Copco’s sponsorship of the Women in Industry Awards, which the company includes on each of its job applications as a sign of its commitment to diversity in the workforce.

In 2020, the company will return for a fourth year as a sponsor.

Nominations for the 2020 Women in Industry Awards are now open: www.womeninindustry.com.au Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 45

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Pumps Making life flow By teaming up with maintenance experts, the performance of industrial pumps can improve. Manufacturers’ Monthly finds out.

R

EPLACING a piece of equipment such as an industrial water pump can be a costly and time-consuming exercise. Avoiding the upfront cost and associated downtime, whether through predictive or regular maintenance, can enable extended product lifetimes.

BSC provides a full suite of services for industrial pumps that includes repair and refurbishment, asset care, site installation, commissions, and condition-based monitoring and assessments. These services are conducted in a manner that directly suits the end users and starts with and understanding of the issues or faults that the pump is experiencing.

“If we’re assessing the condition of the equipment while it’s in an operation, and we’re doing some level of predictive maintenance, then we would be looking for indications that there are flow issues in the pump, from the data that we’re analysing,” said BSC engineering manager, Ryan Kendrigan.

“From there we would see if there is wear inside the actual pump housing and if we need to schedule a shutdown to either exchange or repair that pump to get it back to optimal working condition.”

After the pump is disassembled, BSC can conduct a visual inspection.

This will determine whether the customer can conduct the repair themselves, or if it needs to be refurbished off site by BSC themselves.

Working with the customer to find the solution that fits, BSC has the capabilities for whatever requirements may arise, according to Kendrigan.

“We have done 24-hour jobs where we’ve ripped the pump out ourselves, had it repaired and then back into service. For swimming pools, we’ve been able to pull the pump out at 7pm manmonthly.com.au

We work with our customers to supply them with the right components, and potentially give them the training and advice they will need. and have it back in and running at 5.30am when the filter system starts up again.”

Within this process, whatever the customer’s maintenance program is, BSC draws upon their range of products to find a solution. These include the industry-renowned sealants, protectants and coatings from LOCTITE backed by the world’s leading adhesive company Henkel.

BSC product manager, Michael Rowe, described how these fit in.

“There may be a requirement to repair some damage where whatever fluid that has been passing through a pump has either scoured or damaged part of the metal area in there. LOCTITE have a material that will help rebuild and repair a pump back to specification. So, instead of replacing the pump with a brand-new unit, they can do a repair that also reduces the overall cost of maintenance.”

During the operation of a pump, the constant movement of water, slurry, or other liquid wears down the internal parts. The metal or material will erode, needing to be repaired to ensure efficient functioning. As Rowe highlighted, LOCTITE products are designed to overcome this reality.

“LOCTITE ceramic coatings such as LOCTITE PC 7227 Brushable Ceramic and LOCTITE PC 7255 Sprayable Ceramic can be applied over the original damaged surface area. Then they use a rebuild product, LOCTITE EA 3478 Superior Metal, to build back the actual material of the pump and then they’ll apply another coat of the ceramic over the top of it again – this

will bring it back to a nice smooth surface. It will also allow the medium to pass cleanly over those surfaces without building up,” said Rowe.

Henkel key account manager, Neil Board stated the product’s point of difference.

“What distinguishes Henkel’s LOCTITE products when compared to other, similar products on the market, is that they are available in different colours, LOCTITE PC 7255 sprayable ceramic is available in Grey or Green, LOCTITE PC 7227 Brushable ceramic is grey and LOCTITE PC 7228 Brushable ceramic is White, the later also being AS/NZS 4020-2002 potable water approved.”

“Those different colours allow you to see whether there has been wear,” said Board. “You’ll apply one colour first and then a second coating of a

different colour over the top, so that on a visual inspection you can see what’s happening.”

Deciding on the right LOCTITE product to apply is part of the expertise of Kendrigan and other BSC engineers, who decide which solution fits the user’s need best.

“Depending on the overall wear of the pump, the repair work can use a couple of different products,” said Board. “That’s where the BSC engineering team will assess what’s required.”

Importantly, the BSC engineering team don’t just provide access to the products required but forge a partnership with customers to get the job done right.

“We work with our customers to supply them with the right components, and potentially give them the training and advice they will need to make their programs as efficient as possible,” Kendrigan said.

Kendrigan added: “It’s not a case of supplying a product to a customer and forgetting about them, it’s about how can we make their lives easier and better by the services and solutions that we provide to them.”

Bearings have a important role to play in keeping water flowing.

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 47

What’sNew Kraus & Naimer Koolkuna visible contact isolators The Australian market has seen an increase in the desire for many end-users to have a clear view of the moving contact within the switch to give the user complete peace of mind of the status of the contact. Kraus & Naimer maintains that the switch and operator has been extensively tested to ensure it conforms to local and international standards as a switch-disconnector so that if it says OFF—it is understood that it is OFF. Kraus & Naimer already had a range of switches with visible contacts and a long-standing history of dependability, so it was simply a matter of developing a more suitable way of mounting the switch so the contacts could be viewed clearly.

The innovative addition of an extra door hinging from the side meant proven and certified interlocking mechanisms could be utilised without the need for over-engineered designs that are prone to failure.

The combination of established mechanisms with visible contacts means the user can be 100 per cent assured that safety and reliability has been effectively achieved and that reliability is completely assured.

Since 1907 Kraus & Naimer has maintained high standards and quality products and has established itself as an innovator leader in the switchgear market. The company has focused on local markets and adapting to the needs of the customers has been at the forefront of each branch’s success.

Company: Kraus & Naimer Phone: 0438 700 033 Web: www.krausnaimer.com/au_en

iEi’s new Mustang-MPCIE-MX2 computing accelerator card ICP Australia is proud to introduce iEi’s New Mustang-MPCIE-MX2 Computing Accelerator miniPCIe Card with two Intel Movidius Myriad X vision processing units (VPU), providing a flexible AI inference solution, designed to execute two topologies simultaneously.

The Mustang-MPCIE-MX2 card includes two Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU, providing a flexible AI inference solution for space limited and embedded systems.

VPUs can run AI faster, and are well suited for low power consumption applications such as surveillance, retail and transportation, as its power consumption is 7.5W. This highly flexible product supports Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit for the optimisation of pre-trained, deep-learning models such as Caffe, MXNT, ONNX, and Tensorflow.

With the advantage of power efficiency and high performance to dedicated DNN topologies, it is perfect to be implemented in AI edge-computing device to reduce total power usage, providing longer duty time for the rechargeable edge computing equipment.

Company: ICP Electronics Australia Phone: (02) 9457 6011 Web: www.icp-australia.com.au

Key features: • miniPCIe Form Factor (30 x 50 mm) • 2 x Intel Movidius Myriad X VPU MA2485 • Power efficiency, approximately 7.5W • Operating temperature 0°C~55°C (In TANK AIoT Dev. Kit) • Powered by Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit

48 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

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Texas Instruments’ low-power DACx0501 DACs with internal reference Mouser Electronics is now stocking the DACx0501 digital-to-analogue converters (DACs) from Texas Instruments (TI). These highly accurate, low-power devices feature buffered voltage output and are suitable for a variety of applications, including oscilloscopes, data acquisition instruments, small cell base stations, analogue output modules, process analytics, and DC power supplies.

TI’s DACx0501 family of DACs, available from Mouser Electronics, is comprised of the 16-bit DAC80501, the 14-bit DAC70501, and the 12-bit DAC60501. The devices offer a wide power supply range from 2.7 V to 5.5 V and include an integrated 2.5 V internal reference that delivers three full-scale buffered output voltage ranges.

The devices’ power-on-reset circuit ensures the DAC output powers up at zero scale or midscale and maintains that scale until a valid code is written to the device.

Boasting a very low current of only 1 mA, the DACx0501 family also offers a powerdown feature that lessens current consumption to 15 µA (at 5 V, typical).

Mouser also offers the DAC80501EVM platform, which (in conjunction with the USB2ANY interface adapter) enables developers to evaluate the functionality and performance of the DAC80501 DAC.

Company: Mouser Electronics Phone: +91 80 42650 000 Web: https://au.mouser.com/

Series IEF Transmitters Dwyer Instruments designs and manufactures controls, sensors, and instrumentation solutions for the HVAC and process automation markets.

Dwyer Instruments has recently released its Series IEF Insertion Electromagnetic Flow Transmitter featuring electromagnetic technology that accurately and reliably measures fluid velocity in addition to providing several continuous signal outputs. This series is specifically designed to offer superior performance paired with simple installation and use. One unit is adjustable to fit pipe sizes from 4 to 36 inches (101.6 to 914.4 mm) and offers several output options including selectable BACnet MS/TP or Modbus RTU communications protocol over 2-wire RS-485 in addition to the standard analogue, frequency, and alarm outputs.

Company: Dwyer Instruments Pty Ltd Phone: 02 4272 2055 Web: www.dwyer-inst.com.au

Product Features: • Field configurable, integral, or remote setup displays (-LCD option or accessory A-IEF-DSP) allow for ultimate flexibility by accommodating a variety of application configurations with one model through multiple display configurations i.e. pipe size, pipe material, liquid type, analogue output, pulse/frequency output, alarm outputs, communication outputs, damping, and calibration factor; • High performance accuracy is maintained through temperature, density or viscosity; • Setup Wizard and installation tool are simple to use allowing for quick and precise installation; • Accessory setup kit A-IEF-KIT ensures exact installation application depth with included thickness gauge and measuring tape; and • Long life cycle and minimal maintenance requirements with no moving parts to wear or break and electrodes that discourage fouling.

• Isolation valve accessory options allow for installation in operational systems via hot-tap kit or easy removal without system downtime.

manmonthly.com.au

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 49

What’sNew Hybrid safety I/O modules for control and safety Turck offers two unique hybrid safety block input/output (I/O) modules that combine both standard and safety inputs and outputs within a single device.

They are ideal for use in installations where there is insufficient I/O requirement to utilise individual full safety and full non-safety I/O modules.

Choose the TBIP model for Ethernet/IP and CIP Safety or the TBPN model for Profinet and Profisafe requirements. Both devices can be either utilised as I/O modules connected to a master safety controller or they can operate individually, as stand-alone remote safety controllers. Safety functionality configuration and testing is possible without connection to a master device.

High protection ratings of IP65/IP67/IP69K and temperature ranges from -40°C to +70°C mean the Turck TBIP and TBPN units are suitable for use in some of the most demanding industrial environments. Decentralised plants and modular machine concepts can also be implemented, removing the need for additional control cabinets.

The Turck hybrid modules offer two safety inputs for connecting devices with OSSD outputs, such as light curtains, or devices with voltage free outputs such as emergency stop buttons. The two additional safety channels can be configured as either inputs or outputs. The four universal inputs/outputs are used for non-safety related signals and can switch up to 2A per channel. Two of the non-safety I/O ports can provide the functionality of IO-Link masters.

These ports combined with Turck’s IO-Link hubs enable users to connect up to 32 additional digital I/Os to the TBIP or TBPN modules. Voltage to standard channels, as well as one of the IO-Link channels of the TBIP/TBPN can be disconnected via an internal safety relay, thus considerably simplifying the wiring of auxiliary drives and valve blocks.

The hybrid modules provide a unique problem-solving solution that complements Turck’s extensive existing portfolios of safety and fieldbus devices.

Company: Turck Phone: 1300 132 566 Web: www.turck.com.au

Exair’s anti-static air knife EXAIR’s new Gen4 Standard Ion Air Knife eliminates static electricity 30 per cent better at low inlet pressures which saves compressed air and money. Production speeds, product quality, and surface cleanliness can improve dramatically. It eliminates static on plastics, webs, sheet stock, and other product surfaces where tearing, jamming, or hazardous shocks are a problem.

Gen4 products have undergone independent laboratory tests to certify they meet the rigorous safety, health, and environmental standards of the US, EU, and Canada that are required to attain the CE and UL marks. They are also restriction of hazardous substances compliant. New design features include a metal armoured high-voltage cable to protect against abrasion and cuts, integrated ground connection, and electromagnetic shielding. A new selectable voltage power supply has been designed to operate Gen4 products.

The Gen4 Standard Ion Air Knife incorporates EXAIR’s Standard Air Knife that minimises compressed air use by inducing surrounding airflow at a ratio of 30:1.

The unique amplified airflow carries the ions to the target, making it possible to eliminate static charges in less than half a second. Air volume and velocity are infinitely controllable from a “breeze” to a “blast” to gently wipe or forcefully blow away debris.

EXAIR’s Gen4 Standard Ion Air Knife product line is available from Compressed Air Australia in 3 inch to 48 inch (76mm to 1219mm) lengths. The electrical ion source is shockless and there is no radioactive element.

Applications include surface cleaning, neutralising plastics, bag opening, printing machinery, packaging operations, and elimination of painful static electricity shocks.

50 FEBRUARY 2020 Manufacturers’ Monthly

Company: Compressed Air Australia Phone: 1300 787 688 Web: www.caasafety.com.au

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The Last Word

INNES WILLOX – Chief Executive, Ai Group

Shining a light on mental health in the workplace A new report commissioned by Ai Group highlights the complexity of responding to mental health in the workplace.

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N January, many Australians were still on holidays and having a well-earned recharge for the year to come. Breaks like this are good for families and communities, but also for our national mental health.

Unfortunately though, tens of thousands of Australians have been wracked with stress, uncertainty, and anxiety as the nation grapples with its bushfire crisis. The fallout from this disaster will be felt for months to come, in homes and in workplaces.

Employers are increasingly recognising that mental health issues cannot be ignored and while their origin is more often than not from factors outside work, they frequently manifest themselves inside work where people spend around a third of their day, usually without a traditional family support structure.

Looking at the Productivity Commission’s 2019 Inquiry into Mental Health, it was clear to me that there was little research on the experiences of Australian workplaces in dealing with mental health issues.

What was needed was a deepdive, not just into theoretical factors at play with mental health and work, but in what was actually happened on the ground in workplaces.

Ai Group late last year commissioned Griffith University to undertake this research and help fill that void. In particular we wanted to shine a light on the reasons why some local workplaces have taken initiatives on mental health, the nature of those initiatives, the barriers they encounter along the way, and the results they see.

The study reveals a very human core beneath the efforts of these manmonthly.com.au

organisations to grapple with difficult issues, quite apart from the benefits in terms of productivity, absenteeism, and staff turnover.

The findings will be valuable for employers who want some guidance on what they could be doing and as a benchmark against those who already have mental health initiatives in place.

The first part of the study consisted of searching current academic research for evidence of what workplaces are doing about mental health. This review revealed a focus to date on establishing mental health as a workplace issue.

The second component of the research involved six case studies of organisations from various industry sectors, including large and small businesses, all of whom had indicated they had taken some initiatives on mental health. Case studies were drawn from interviews with management to identify the triggers for them taking action on mental health issues, the scope of initiatives undertaken, the results, barriers to doing more, and plans for further action.

Among the key findings of the research are: • There are a wide range of initiatives being undertaken by the studied businesses, with each implementing an average of seven separate initiatives.

• The most common initiatives included: - Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs); - Mental health awareness day (e.g.

RUOK day); - Mental health first-aid training; and, - Organisational-wide meetings that included discussion of mental health issues.

• Factors that facilitated the introduction of employee mental

health initiatives included: - The personal commitment of an organisational leader to improving the organisation’s response to mental health. This can stem from direct or indirect personal experience with mental health challenges; - A clear business case for mental health support; - An organisational culture that is aligned with or fits mental health activities; - Activities to develop leaders who know their people and so can identify any mental health issues that develop; and - A budget for activities to address employee mental health.

Almost universally, stigma was cited as the greatest barrier to engaging with mental health initiatives within organisations.

This strongly correlates with other studies on mental health generally.

Beyond this, other barriers organisations encountered included: • Managerial reluctance in dealing with employee mental health issues; • A lack of engagement by individual employees or groups of employees with the organisation and/or mental health activities; • Understanding how to access mental health assistance beyond an EAP; • A lack of internal capability and knowledge on mental health; and • Within diverse workforces, differing cultural attitudes to talking about mental health.

A significant, but hardly surprising, finding was that some regionally based businesses reported that mental health issues in their workplaces were driven by social issues such as high unemployment and substance abuse in the surrounding community. In fact, all the businesses studied felt

strongly that many of the mental health issues were generated externally to the workplace, either by community, or individual factors. However, managers also understood that internal factors can cause or exacerbate mental health conditions.

Finally, businesses indicated the intention to improve their capability to understand and assist with mental health issues, particularly by raising awareness and reducing stigma. The larger organisations are looking at taking a strategic approach to mental health rather than implementing discrete initiatives. They are also keen to know how to better measure outcomes.

Managers reported they are conscious of the organisational context surrounding their efforts.

There is no one size fits all approach to supporting mental health in workplaces, according to this research. They reported very different experiences in pursuing their initiatives, depending on the culture of the workplace, attitudes and background of management and the employees and, as mentioned, even the local community.

There is clearly increasing awareness and interest within Australian workplaces of mental health issues.

As well as helping companies benchmark against the experience of their peers, this report will also hopefully inform the growing debate of what policy action is appropriate and help ensure policymakers understand the extent, quality, and complex context of the actions businesses are already taking.

The full report, Implementing mental health initiatives in Australian business – triggers, facilitators and barriers, can be read at: www.aigroup.com.au/policy-and-research/ mediacentre/reports/.

Manufacturers’ Monthly FEBRUARY 2020 51

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