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Why the circular economy must link up the whole supply chain

The long-discussed concept of the circular economy (CE) seems ready for takeoff. New information technologies like the internet of things (IoT), big data analytics or blockchain are the powerful means everybody is waiting for. The real door-opener is still to be found in the analog world: It’s about trustful collaboration. But only when all actors along the product life cycle find profitable ways to take resource scarcity into account, and only if they share both costs and benefits, will CE be able to unfold its full potential. So trustful collaboration is asking for a lot. It needs to convince decision-makers of the business opportunities they get once they trade their silo-oriented optimization rationale for a holistic-management approach that addresses the entire life cycle of the products and the materials involved. Making use of circular economy to prosper and differentiate products and services is suitable for business-to-business heavyweights, too. For example, ocean carrier Maersk created a digital twin of their latest container ships down to the smallest bolt. Through this, the company will ultimately know how much and what material is being used in their fleet. During routine overhauls or at the final disassembly, Maersk has a clear systemic view on which parts and materials can be reused, remanufactured, upcycled or continue to stay in the circular flow of shipbuilding. Executing supply chain power It’s not by chance that most CE case studies are when economically strong asset owners and service providers such as Caterpillar and Maersk are in the driving seat. The same applies to powerful vendors, for instance tech giants such as HP and Dell who have established highly efficient return systems for used products. Why is it that CE pioneers are often found among these kind of companies? The two most obvious reasons: on one hand, these players have […]

businessman is working on tablet and using smart phone in office

Accelerate your business by using your voice

Ask any business owner or board-level executive involved in manufacturing about the demands of growing a business, and they would probably readily agree that it’s tough. Apart from juggling various elements to keep the business on a growth trajectory, there are the endless administration tasks. Regularly producing reports, quotes, estimates, proposals, plans and invoices can be daunting, and may even negatively impact on productivity. However, the challenge no longer needs to be overwhelming thanks to technology. Speech recognition is now more accurate, more powerful, and more usable than ever before, and it can help facilitate the growth of a business. Adopting a desktop speech recognition solution – like Nuance Dragon Professional Individual for the PC – can improve a business’s everyday performance and productivity. Save time producing documents Dragon does the typing for you as you speak and, as we talk three times faster than we can type, the productivity implications are considerable. Dragon quickly and accurately turns your spoken words into text. It lets you put your voice to work to easily dictate and edit documents, proposals, reports and more. With Dragon you spend less time producing documents, and more time on activities that boost the bottom line. Plus, as Dragon works with all Microsoft Office applications, you can also create spreadsheets and presentations by simply using your voice. The solution also lets you speak to send emails, and as it’s compatible with popular web browsers, you can also deploy Dragon to search the web and use social media with unparalleled speed, ease and comfort. Dragon rewards the user by helping you gain precious time. Work that may have taken hours – typing a large document or clearing your inbox – can now be achieved faster and without the need to type, and the time saved can be allocated […]

Armoured wetsuit made of aluminium platelets

Australian global manufacturer Sevaan Group was handpicked by an innovative company to help create an armoured wetsuit for protecting commercial divers, Scuba divers, free divers and those into serious spear fishing. Known as ironskinn, the armoured wetsuit is made of extremely tough aluminium platelets held together by an elastic in-form setting. Sevaan Group was chosen for various reasons ahead of sizeable international competition, with one reason being its ability to interpret the requirements and set up CAD and manufacturing sequences to make the concept a physical reality. As ironskinn Managing Director Mr John Sundnes explains, Sevaan Group was very inquisitive about what was required and were excited about making a significant part of that product. “We are making the entire suit in NSW, so Sevaan’s Sydney base was a good start and ultimately as a company they showed patience as this was something that was never made before,” said Mr Sundnes. “A lot of finetuning was required and they were up for it; unlike other companies we approached whose attitude was ‘when you have a need for 100-offs then call us’. “It took probably 4-5 months because we had some tooling we needed made and Sevaan Group had good contacts to make that tooling a reality. “The platelets have a particular shape and particular curvature; thin metal can behave in unexpected ways so that part may come out a little differently compared to its CAD so we needed expertise to handle that.” The ironskinn protective dive suit is designed to protect divers from an unexpected shark bite, as well as to protect from other marine hazards such as oysters, mussels, barnacles and rotten metal from boats when working on them underwater, therefore offering a wide range of applications of material. Currently, the suit is on a pilot program with some […]

Smarter manufacturing in the age of convergence

-Joseph Sousa, President, Asia Pacific, Rockwell Automation Sometimes I wish I was ten years younger. Not out of vanity but because of what’s about to unfold in the manufacturing industry. We’ve arrived at a genuine inflection point in how we go about business. There’s an opportunity to produce more high-quality goods for more people while reducing costs and environmental impact. This opportunity is being driven in part by a significant increase in consumer wealth. We’re witnessing the most significant expansion of the middle class that we’ve ever seen. Forecasted in 2016, 160 million people will join the ranks during the next five years. More than 3.2 billion people already enjoy this status. We’ve also seen a shift from manual production to mass production, customised mass production and now personalised mass production. We’ve improved our capacity to measure what people want and our ability to link this knowledge with production resources to meet those demands. This is information is critical in an age where consumers are demanding more personalised products. Today, Millennials, in particular, place a high value on adding their personality to what they buy. More than half of consumers would prefer to shape the products and services they buy. This type of personalised mass production requires a lot of flexibility in manufacturing processes. In the modern factory, set-up time is a key variable determining the ability to tap into short-term opportunities. Merely being able to see a chance isn’t enough. Global business opportunities mean global competition, increasing the imperative to act quickly. Whereas this global competition, once reserved for large international enterprises, most businesses now have potential rivals in other countries. The convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) offers a smarter way to convert the business into opportunity. Data is helping many manufacturers to unleash the […]

Game changing Andrea Bubendorfer & Andrew Best -

Game-changing technology for 3D printing tiny structures revealed

A new type of 3D Printing technology enabling rapid prototyping of high-resolution microscale structures has been revealed. It all started after a kick-start from KiwiNet to commercialise the technology. New Zealand microfabrication researchers Andrea Bubendorfer and Andrew Best, the co-inventors of a new way of fabricating very small things with Laminated Resin Printing (LRP), are part of Callaghan Innovation’s MicroMaker3D team which launched the new patent pending technology in the US recently. The team are one of ten selected worldwide for IDTechEx’s Santa Clara Launchpad, an initiative showcasing new disruptive and state-of-the art technologies. Andrea, who leads the microfabrication team at Callaghan Innovation that has created the technology, says: “We’re very excited about the potential for this technology to be a game changer in a range of industries from medicine to wearable technology to aerospace. It will create the first opportunity to rapidly prototype a huge range of miniaturised structures from optical slits to miniaturised microwell plates, micromoulds and more. “Custom sensors are a great example of a niche area we’re keen to explore. One high value approach would be to use molecular sensing to functionalise microstructures, so we could rapid prototype devices for detecting insulin concentration, biomarkers, presence of toxic gases or pollutants. “There are endless possibilities to what we can print – and what is most exciting, though, will be when people start to print things we didn’t even know existed”, says Andrea. The MicroMaker3D project was kick-started when Andrea received KiwiNet Emerging Innovator Programme funding, commercialisation support and advice to explore ways to make microfabrication more accessible. “We ended up creating a new 3D printing technology that can build up tiny structures using specially engineered Laminated Resin Printing (LRP) materials. We can print structures with features as small as five microns. To put this in context, a […]

Future of Design: the Quadro RTX 4000

The Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card — the company’s first midrange professional GPU is powered by NVIDIA Turing architecture and NVIDIA RTX platform. Unveiled at the annual Autodesk University Conference in Las Vegas, the Quadro RTX 4000 puts real-time ray tracing within reach of a wider range of developers, designers and artists worldwide. Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field’s greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible. The Quadro RTX 4000 features a power-efficient, single-slot design that fits in variety of workstation chassis. Other benefits include: ● Significant performance improvements — 8GB of ultra-fast GDDR6 graphics memory technology provides over 40 percent more memory bandwidth than the previous generation Quadro P4000. ● 36 RT Cores — enable real-time ray tracing of objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections, refractions, and global illumination. ● 288 Turing Tensor Cores for 57 TFLOPS of deep learning performance — accelerate neural network training and inference, which are critical to powering AI-enhanced rendering, products and services. ● Hardware support for VirtualLink — new open industry standard meets the power, display and bandwidth demands of next-generation VR headsets through a single USB-C connector1. ● Improved performance of VR applications — new and enhanced technologies include Variable Rate Shading, Multi-View Rendering and VRWorks Audio. ● Video encode and decode engines — accelerate video creation and playback for multiple video streams with resolutions up to 8K. OEM support Leading OEMs have voiced their support for new Turing-based Quadro RTX 4000 GPUs: ● “AI and real-time ray tracing […]

Manufacturing the future: The next era of global growth and innovation

By James Manyika, Jeff Sinclair, Richard Dobbs, Gernot Strube, Louis Rassey, Jan Mischke, Jaana Remes, Charles Roxburgh, Katy George, David O’Halloran, and Sreenivas Ramaswamy. The global manufacturing sector has undergone a tumultuous decade: large developing economies leaped into the first tier of manufacturing nations, a severe recession choked off demand, and manufacturing employment fell at an accelerated rate in advanced economies. Still, manufacturing remains critically important to both the developing and the advanced world. In the former, it continues to provide a pathway from subsistence agriculture to rising incomes and living standards. In the latter, it remains a vital source of innovation and competitiveness, making outsized contributions to research and development, exports, and productivity growth. But the manufacturing sector has changed—bringing both opportunities and challenges—and neither business leaders nor policy makers can rely on old responses in the new manufacturing environment. • Manufacturing’s role is changing. The way it contributes to the economy shifts as nations mature: in today’s advanced economies, manufacturing promotes innovation, productivity, and trade more than growth and employment. In these countries, manufacturing also has begun to consume more services and to rely more heavily on them to operate. • Manufacturing is not monolithic. It is a diverse sector with five distinct groups of industries, each with specific drivers of success. • Manufacturing is entering a dynamic new phase. As a new global consuming class emerges in developing nations, and innovations spark additional demand, global manufacturers will have substantial new opportunities—but in a much more uncertain environment. Manufacturing’s role is changing Globally, manufacturing continues to grow. It now accounts for approximately 16 percent of global GDP and 14 percent of employment. But the manufacturing sector’s relative size in an economy varies with its stage of development. We find that when economies industrialize, manufacturing employment and output both […]

Managing Skills Shortages – The Construction Sector Example

-Dieter Adam, Chief Executive, The Manufacturers Network Skills shortages remain one of the key areas holding back manufacturers from further growth – this challenge is not new and is likely to need continued efforts into the future, both to address current shortages in experienced trades workers as well as the changing skills requirements due to rapidly changing technology. Today, however, I want to talk about the Government’s recently announced plan to address skills shortages in the construction sector, in particular, looking at measures around government procurement. The Construction Skills Action Plan covers six specific areas: expanding skills for industry, leveraging government procurement, establishing additional jobs and skills hubs, growing construction careers and credentials, Mana in Mahi – Strength in Work, and further changes to immigration settings. The Mana in Mahi – Strength in Work programme will provide support payment equivalent to the person’s benefit to employers taking on apprentices aged 18 to 24 years who have been on a benefit for six or more months. This policy has some potential to help somewhat, but we will need to see how the initial implementation works and wait for the policy to widen to include the manufacturing sector. The ‘leveraging government procurement’ element is an area in which construction and manufacturing often intersect, and manufacturers frequently face many of the same issues in trying to be part of the supply chain of government projects. Procurement is an issue we have been actively engaging with Government on recently, arguing that procurement policy needs to give more consideration to local suppliers, who in turn employ local workers, contribute to the local economy and critically, build a skills base by training their staff through apprenticeships. While some parts of the current policy state that such benefits of using local suppliers should be considered, this principle […]

From the back streets of Petone to the highways of the world

Sanpro Industries Ltd Petone.They supply the world from their Petone base and the Sanderson name has become the industry standard to all the big names in the exhaust system industry. Sanpro: 100% Export; 100% Petone Sanpro Industries Ltd Managing director and Founder Malcolm Sanderson loves getting up and coming to work each day, especially when there is a new engineering challenge to be solved. “We are constantly improving and re-innovating our products,” says Malcolm. “That is our policy. Through constant testing, development and re-design we ensure we remain at the forefront of tube perforation technology.” My favourite quote is “Failure is the road to success”. If you don’t try, how do you know if you will succeed? The key to their success is being able to change direction quickly to keep up with market changes: “We focus on quality and support not price; to stay ahead of the competition and build up repeat business.” Their main customers are the five major manufacturers who make and supply parts to 95 per cent of car companies in the world – from Mercedes and Porsche to Skoda and Kia, they all have a bit of Petone in them. Starting in the late 70s making mufflers in his parent’s garage at his home, Malcolm dreamed of a better and faster way to make the exhaust baffles rather than use the conventional method of rolling and welding perforated sheet – sparking the idea for the Sanderson perforating louvering machine range. With their first machine built for a Malaysian client over 20 years ago still in operation today, they have now sold over 200 machines worldwide and export to more than 30 countries. The Sanderson range has become the industry standard to all the biggest names in the industry and they are the preferred suppliers […]

Democratising carbon fibre

If you think about Auckland and carbon fibre technology, scenes of the America’s Cup and the industries that surround it spring to mind. Ventilation tubes in dusty Australian coal mines are probably not your first mental image. Yet this less than glamorous gear represents the start of a promising new trade, thanks to the ingenuity of Graeme Rivers, founder of North Shore-based Rivers Carbon Technologies, and a Callaghan Innovation Project Grant. All sorts have come out of Rivers Carbon’s Albany workshop – from the foils for elite America’s Cup yachts to replica chassis for E-Type Jaguars. But while money may be no object in these high-end industries, the wonders of carbon fibre are generally outside the budget of ordinary businesses. Until now. Rivers Carbon has come up with a lower cost way of making carbon fibre products for everyday sectors such as construction and mining. After months of researching cores, cloth types, resins, hardeners and trihydrate mixes, Graeme Rivers developed a ‘cold cure’ method of setting carbon fibre, rather than pressurising and cooking it in an autoclave. Rivers Carbon settled on ventilation tubing for underground mining as its first application for the new carbon fibre. Currently the fibreglass tubes used in the mines are heavy and tend to crack and break. Both factors create health and safety issues. In contrast, Rivers’ Premium High Carbon Fibre tubes are light, durable, and can be easily lifted above the shoulder making them far easier to install. The company exported its first shipment of ventilation tubing to Australia in March and has been producing consistently ever since. Staff at BHP Billiton Illawarra Coal’s West Cliff mine in New South Wales say they’ve had no injuries to people or breakages since they started using carbon fibre tubing, and the company is now looking at other […]

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