Analysis

Your 2022 sustainability workout programme!

-thinkstep anz Is your business feeling carbon-heavy? Are your waste bins bulging? Is your product a bit out-of-shape? Then a sustainability tune-up’s in order! Here’s our four-step sustainability workout programme to help your business trim down, tone up, and stay in shape in 2022. (And if you already have a sustainability programme, early in the year is a great time to review it.) The good news: this programme is a business plan. So, while your efforts will help sustain the planet and its people, your business will be fitter too. You’ll spot opportunities for your products, uncover risks in your processes, and strengthen relationships with your team, customers, and suppliers. And you’ll become known as a manufacturer who’s doing the right thing. Let’s get started. Step one: build a plan Every sustainability programme needs a plan. Decide what ‘sustainability’ means for your business. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a good place to start. These 17 inter-related goals form an urgent ‘call to action’ for companies to protect the environment, tackle climate change, and improve people’s lives. The good news? All these actions help businesses like yours get ahead too. You can’t tackle all 17 goals and you shouldn’t try. Instead, choose four or five SDGs that are relevant to your business: where can you have the greatest impact? Here are some SDGs which fellow manufacturers have chosen. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare has picked SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) as one of their goals. It’s relevant to their customers and their team. Seafood company Sanford is using SDG 14 (Life Below Water) as one of their goals, to focus their sustainability work. Trans-Tasman manufacturer Eagle Lighting has made SDG 12 (Responsible Production and Consumption) a priority goal. Focus on what matters. Identify your main stakeholders, like your team, […]

The Interview: Mike Hendry, chief digital officer, Steel & Tube

HERA member, Steel & Tube is one of the oldest and largest providers of steel products and solutions in New Zealand. It sources, processes and distributes steel products to customers across New Zealand through its national network and also makes steel products to order on a project basis. The company has expertise across a broad range of sectors, from residential to commercial construction, large infrastructure products, manufacturing, rural and bespoke design. HERA spoke to Chief Digital Officer, Mike Hendry, about the future of the steel and construction sectors and the opportunity and challenges the company faces. How are you finding current business conditions? While demand growth for steel has been strong, macro conditions have been challenging with global supply chain constraints, a higher pricing environment and Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions. The key focus for our team has been to maintain availability of product and high levels of service for our customers while navigating the current market conditions. We have seen strong growth in demand over the past year across a range of sectors and are fortunate to have a significant pipeline of secured contract work in place across the country. The residential construction market remains strong, particularly in Auckland, and government investment is driving large infrastructure projects across the regions. Commercial construction activity has been increasing and manufacturing expanding which is also driving up demand for steel products and solutions. Market conditions look to remain positive. How has your company been impacted by the pandemic? Our scale, diversity across a range of sectors and the ability of our team to adapt to new working conditions have helped to offset the impacts of the pandemic and the current challenging market conditions. We are very proud of our team and their efforts which have ensured we can keep providing our customers with […]

Foster productivity growth for a strong recovery and better living standards

Strong government support to protect jobs and incomes in the face of the pandemic helped New Zealand recover rapidly from the severe Covid-19-induced downturn, but challenges remain to set the economy on a sustainable growth path, according to a new OECD report. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since 2007 while the employment rate rose to its highest level on record in the third quarter of 2021. However, inflation and house prices have picked up significantly and both household and government debt have increased. The latest OECD Economic Survey of New Zealand recommends that fiscal policy be adjusted in the near term to help stabilise the economy. Boosting productivity, particularly by making better use of digital technologies, would support further increases in living standards. Economic growth is expected to slow as capacity constraints bite and macroeconomic policies are tightened. Consumption growth is also expected to ease to a more sustainable pace as employment growth slows. After surging to 4.7% in 2021, New Zealand’s GDP is expected to rise by 3.8% this year before easing to 2.5% growth in 2023. “The near-term economic outlook is positive. The New Zealand economy has recovered strongly from the pandemic. The need for policy action is pressing in a number of areas to make economic growth sustainable. For instance, helping the digital sector to grow would help boost labour productivity.” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said, presenting the Survey alongside Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson and Minister for the Digital Economy and Communications David Clark. “Linking pension eligibility to life expectancy and adopting long-term debt-to-GDP targets would help address the projected increase in government debt.” With affordability for first homebuyers at low levels and a buoyant housing market, it is important for the government to complete reforms to increase housing supply and […]

Steel industry leading the charge into the next industrial revolution

Q & A Wayne Carson, Managing Director, D & H Steel…December issue NZ Manufacturer. D&H Steel is one of the oldest and most respected steel fabricators in New Zealand. It is behind some of the largest projects in the country including Auckland Airport, Deloitte Tower, Viaduct Event Centre, and the Kopu River Bridge. In a sector that is constantly changing to meet the latest technological advances, D&H Steel is an industry leader. From an early adopter of welded beams to the latest ISO standards, the company has placed innovation at the heart of its business. HERA spoke to Managing Director, Wayne Carson, about the future of the steel and construction sectors and the opportunity and challenges they face. How are you finding current business conditions? We are enormously thankful to have full order books and our facilities are working 24/6 to keep up with demand. The Auckland market is still very buoyant, and I do not foresee this changing as demand for apartments, office space, and large infrastructure projects continue. The regions are also benefitting both from an increase in government spending and ironically the growth of Auckland as a world city. Auckland is simply becoming too expensive for some industries that are moving to the regions to grow and develop. We are working on several large regional projects including the building of hospitals and large industrial warehousing. Has the pandemic affected your business? Our market share is still strong, but the pandemic has certainly affected our business. Lockdowns, managing close contact staff isolation, skyrocketing labour costs, increases in the cost of materials, and supply chain disruption have been the cause of some very challenging conditions. We are fortunate to be of a size to be more resilient to change but I suspect many smaller manufacturers, are less able to […]

What gets measured gets managed

Ian Walsh, Managing Director, Intent Group I have recently visited a couple of companies and was surprised to see little, if any, data collection in real time. What’s more surprising is that many SMEs don’t even have good in-process data collection. “Oh, that old chestnut”, I hear you say. It is fundamental to any improvement program to have a good understanding of what is going on in your process. Yet here we are nearly in 2022 with a significant number of companies having little-to-no structured data collection to manage their processes. What’s even more criminal is that in this new technology-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT), industry 4.0 stage, that there really is no excuse. There are many off-the-shelf systems that can be installed, connected up and set going in just an afternoon! These aren’t expensive either – compared to the cost of manual collection, they pay for themselves many times over in a year, not only in the time saved, but also in the quality of information provided. The critical thing with many processes is that many of the “losses” (time, quality defects, lost product and other wastes) are not easily visible as you move further and further from the process. The quality of the data available therefore becomes more and more critical to driving improvement efforts and maximising the best use of your critical resources. The best manual systems can achieve up to 95% accuracy, but most are operating in the 70-90% range and this require overhead to maintain. The issue with these systems is that the data that is usually not captured is the high-frequency short-duration stops. Of course, the low-frequency long-duration stops (like mechanical breakdowns) everyone knows about because everything has stopped. The short duration, high frequency stops however, is more like death by a thousand cuts. It seems […]

Sustainable ways of working = business innovation

-thinkstep – nz In a tough year for many manufacturers, it’s heartening to see innovation continuing to show up through more sustainable ways of working. In this article, we bring you three local people and businesses who’ve used Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and responsible procurement to build ‘new’ into their packaging, their manufacturing processes, and their products. The business benefits? Opportunities to gain market share, build reputation, strengthen relationships with suppliers, manage supply chain risk, and reduce the costs of materials and disposing of waste. Lorde: making a zero-carbon album Quote Early in making this album, I wanted to look closely at the environmental impact of its manufacture and distribution. Working to achieve zero-carbon status for Solar Power was an eye-opening experience. Lorde Grammy Award-winner Lorde is determined to reduce her carbon footprint. That’s why one of the formats of her long-awaited third album, Solar Power, released in August, is zero-carbon. (Even the name is environmentally apt!) How has Lorde achieved this? By releasing a discless album in a ‘Greenbox’. A Greenbox is an innovative, discless album package made of cardboard. Now, we have a few Lorde fans in our thinkstep-anz team and there were plenty of technical experts eager to help our Kiwi songstress meet her zero-carbon goals. So, we set to calculating the packaging’s carbon footprint using a sustainability tool known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA measures a product’s carbon footprint over its life. In this case, this involved calculating the carbon in the raw materials used to make the Greenbox (including paper, inks, and glue), to transport the Greenbox to music retailers, and to landfill the Greenbox at the end of its life. (We hope Lorde’s many fans are ardent recyclers, but we assumed a worst-case scenario, landfilling. In any case, we suspect they’re unlikely to […]

Key business players back thriving Manawatū business confidence

Manawatū has emerged as one of New Zealand’s most resilient regions to come out of COVID-19, with some of the country’s leading companies heavily investing in the region. Strong business investment and an annual GDP growth of 4.6 per cent, coupled with the burgeoning Central New Zealand Distribution Hub (CNZDH) development, Manawatū is primed for unprecedented levels of growth. This investment is backed by annual commercial building consents for the region growing by 91 per cent between 2019 and 2021, compared with just two per cent nationally. CEDA spokesperson Ray Mudgway says the growing attractiveness of Manawatū for New Zealand and international companies has been aided by the CNZDH development, which will see the region become New Zealand’s central distribution hub. “COVID-19 and the latest lockdown in Auckland have highlighted the vulnerability of global supply chains along with the pressure on the efficient delivery of goods in New Zealand,” says Mudgway. “Businesses are recognising the advantages we have in Manawatū and the work being done to develop the regions strengths as a multi-modal logistics hub.” Mudgway says more than $8 billion of transport and infrastructure investment is planned and already under way in Palmerston North city and Manawatū in the next 10 years, fuelled by significant public and private investment. New Zealand food giant, Countdown is backing the region, opening their new $100 million distribution centre three weeks early to cope with demand in their supply chain. Countdown’s National Non-Retail Property & Development Manager, Bruce Waite, says their newly expanded distribution hub has already helped to relieve pressure on their network, exacerbated by the Auckland lockdown. “We’ve been able to supply many of our Waikato stores from our expanded central hub, which we weren’t previously able to do, giving us more flexibility and allowing us to be locationally reactive.” Waite believes Manawatū is ideally located to service the lower North Island, not only because of its central geographical location, but for […]

BusinessNZ says no

BusinessNZ has confirmed it is refusing to be the Government’s nominated partner in implementing unlawful compulsory national pay agreements known as Fair Pay Agreements (FPAs). BusinessNZ CEO Kirk Hope says New Zealand’s peak business organisation is not prepared to be part of a compulsory scheme that is unfair and out of touch with modern ways of working and has formally rejected the Government’s offer to be the default bargaining party for employers in the FPA scheme. “Compulsory FPAs are unlawful under both current domestic and international employment laws and are totally out of step with how we need to work in 2021. “They aren’t needed, they remove the flexibility and autonomy of modern workplaces and won’t improve pay and conditions for hardworking Kiwis. “We’ve told the Government from day one that FPAs are fundamentally flawed but they haven’t listened. MBIE officials sent us a letter during lockdown formally requesting we become the default bargaining party for businesses. That followed a Cabinet paper in May that wrote us into the proposed system without our agreement. “After thoroughly reviewing the latest proposal, we’ve formally refused the Government’s offer. It’s wrong for us to be part of a scheme that will do more harm than good to businesses and employees. “That also means we have turned down $250,000 in Government funding. The Government will fund the CTU the same amount to act for employees, but that also shuts out all non-affiliated unions, currently bargaining for their members, from the process, giving the CTU a monopoly on bargaining for all employees in New Zealand.” Mr Hope says the BusinessNZ Network, directly and indirectly, represents over 70,000 businesses across the country employing nearly 80% of New Zealand’s workforce, but that still didn’t give the organisation a mandate to represent all businesses. “Our role is to […]

Adoption of Industry 4.0 paves the way for growth in manufacturing

by Dr Troy Coyle, CEO, HERA Our world is changing. Climate change and pandemics have garnered much attention but there is another revolution underway. One that is likely to change the very fabric of the way we live and work. It is called Industry 4.0 and is the next stage of the industrial revolution. In 1794, the industrial revolution forever changed manufacturing with the introduction of the mechanical loom. Things changed fast. A mere hundred years later the first production line enabled mass production. Jump forward another hundred years and we witnessed the birth of industrial robots, that together with advances in electronics and IT have automated much of the manufacturing process. Today, we are entering a new age – Industry 4.0 – the age of cyber-physical systems; the marriage of physical production, and smart digital technology. It is not sci-fi. It is not the realm of filmmakers and futurists. Change is happening now and promises to transform industry as much, if not more so than, the introduction of water, steam, and electricity did in the past. What is Industry 4.0? In essence, Industry 4.0 enables companies to have better control and understanding of their business. The new technologies save time, boost productivity, and reduce waste. A panacea for considerable and sustainable growth. A quick search of the internet will provide you with a mountain of anachronisms – IoT, IIoT, CPS, AI, Big Data – to explain Industry 4.0. It is a catch-all term that encompasses all the technologies that enable businesses to collect and analyse data to help automate and streamline their systems and processes. It promises faster response times, increased efficiency and profits, and better quality products at a lower cost. Impact of new technology HERA’s latest report in collaboration with BERL, ‘Modelling the potential economic impacts of […]

What does a circular economy look like?

Part 2 of 2 of thinkstep-anz’s circular economy series By Dr. Jim Goddin In last month’s issue we introduced the circular economy’s inner and outer ‘loops’. Unlike the outermost loops, which focus on avoiding waste and recycling, the inner loops focus on recovering the significant value (manufacturing, intellectual property, branding, advertising, and services) that is lost when products are recycled. We called for greater ambition from New Zealand businesses and the Government to tackle these inner loops and set out the circular and economic advantages of doing this. Here we share local and international examples of companies tackling the inner loops – through their products, supply chains and business models. Designing products and systems with circularity in mind Reusabowl: circular products and systems Reusabowl provides a solution for waste created by single-use takeaway containers. The reusable food container goes far beyond recycling. The Wellington-based company has a reuse network that consists of many of the city’s eateries, making it easy for customers to pick up and drop off bowls at various locations. Reusabowl has also designed the systems around their product with circularity in mind. The Reusabowl container is made with a by-product of the rice-making process that would otherwise go to waste. At the end of their useful life, the bowls are collected and commercially composted. Lids for their containers are made of food-grade silicone and get recycled into headphones at the end of their life. XFrame: circular design tackling waste in the building industry Another example is XFrame, a structural wall framing system that allows walls to be deconstructed and reused many times. XFrame’s circular design tackles the source of New Zealand’s single largest contributor to landfills: the building industry. The Sustainable Business Network notes that construction projects using XFrame reduce the quantity of waste sent to landfills […]

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