Month: January 2019

Chrome-plated decorative panels with 3D lettering in two different matt finishes that also glow in different colors at night have only been available in series production from a German OEM for a few weeks. The changing day-night design – the haptics above the 3D lettering by day, the illuminated color selected by the driver at night – is an eyecatching feature, at a time when customisable interior ambience is currently a trend among OEMs. Dr Carsten Brockmann, KTB’s Managing Director, is enthusiastic about the new design: “This greatly increases the value of the interior design. This day-night design also allows further customisation of the car’s interior. The panel’s surface and contour lighting gives us a new design element that appeals to the senses.” Using a multi-component injection moulding process, KTB manufactures components of polycarbonate (PC) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and finishes them in…

Noise exposure is also Australia’s most common preventable cause of occupational hearing loss, with Worksafe Australia estimating that a million employees in this country may be exposed to hazardous levels of noise at work. Damage to hearing can occur when noise levels are higher than 85 decibels, which is about the loudness of heavy traffic. “One highly effective way in which the noise problem can be addressed at its root cause (rather than through hearing protective devices, valuable though they are) is in the substitution of engineering plastics in application areas where quiet running, low weight and low friction are advantageous,” says Pat Flood, NSW Manager for engineering plastics specialists Cut To Size. Flood has more than 30 years’ experience in tailoring light, tough and quiet industrial engineering plastics to individual application needs. He says one of the most versatile materials increasingly substituting for more expensive metals is Wearlon.…

The question businesses need to ask is whether they are ready for digital transformation, and whether they’ll find themselves forging ahead, or falling behind? It’s time discuss how manufacturers can better prepare themselves for Industry 4.0 and take that all important step of digitising their manufacturing facilities. Kevin Dherman, SYSPRO’s Chief Innovation Officer, believes the best way to prepare your business for Industry 4.0 is to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that can pave the way for digitisation by providing real, working solutions that will enable manufacturers and distributors to leverage on new technologies and trends that are shaping and redefining the competitive landscape. For this reason the SYSPRO team has worked hard to ensure that they have embedded the most pragmatic and useful features and functionality of Industry 4.0 into their latest ERP release.…

AMT: Firstly tell us about the UTS Tech Lab facility Ray Kirby: UTS Tech Lab is an entirely new facility in Botany in Sydney that we built to focus on research and to bring companies to work with us on research in this space. It will house post-graduate students mostly, post-doctoral students and PhD students, and it will also be a place for academics to come and work on their research and work on collaborative projects with companies. The place was formally finished in September. UTS has spent $60m on this facility; that includes the fit-out as well as the new equipment that we’ve put in. What we tried to do is put in equipment that is as high-tech and as state-of-the-art as we can in particular areas, and then we’ve drawn together the different sides of engineering and technology. For example we’re bringing together the civil engineers and mechanical engineers, we’re bringing them together with computer scientists and electrical engineers, so…

The size of the Australian continent, its geographically dispersed population base and the importance of major commodities to its economic output means that freight transport sector performance has a significant influence on national productivity and efficiency. Figures surrounding the industry are significant. Trucking handles more cargo than trains, ships or planes, carrying more than 2,100 million tons. Moreover, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the trucking industry is worth over $40bn and employs 140,00 Australians. Trucks are an essential part of our economy. Without trucks, goods would never get from suppliers to manufacturers and into the hands of consumers. Just as the economy depends on the trucking industry, the trucking industry depends on high-quality equipment. Kenworth Australia has built a reputation around superior-quality, custom-engineered trucks with proven reliability over 47 years of local manufacturing. It manufactures around 2,200 trucks every year for delivery, and has the largest amount of 2015 models on the market. So, when Kenworth was faced with a late design change that threatened the production timeline of…

I found myself sitting down to talk to Jacob Harpaz in the cafeteria at Iscar’s head office in Tefen, Israel. Chatting with Harpaz, you would never think you were talking to a man responsible for more than 12,000 employees in 140 subsidiaries and 61 countries. He’s perfectly pleasant and charismatic, with achievements to his name few in Israel can match; yet he isn’t a spotlight-seeker. Nevertheless, he has shaped his company like no other since joining in 1972, 20 years after its foundation by Stef Wertheimer, who had the foresight and vision to challenge an established industry. Iscar’s humble beginnings in an old shack in Nahariya, Israel, along with intense, hard work and commitment to continued innovation, have led Iscar to become an industry leader today. Since 1982, Harpaz and Wertheimer’s son, Eitan Wertheimer, have run the company from one of the most rural and remote corners of the country, far from the commercial capital Tel Aviv. Harpaz’s office offers a commanding view…

Elmass founder Martin Forrer had to write a business plan for his final MBA capstone unit. He needed to find a market niche and formulate a business strategy, defining the resources, the nature of the business, as well as financial and organisational matters. Having studied engineering in Germany, it goes without saying the business plan was written for a company that matched Martin’s technical background. Martin understood that to be successful, a balance had to be found between financial, competitive and human resources aspects of the business. Research had shown that a contract broaching service could be successful if the elmass technology, a highly efficient broaching process hardly known in Australia, was used. After graduating, Forrer took the business plan to local banks, but s the concept was ahead of its time, no bank was prepared to  finance the start up. Determined to establish his contract broaching service, Martin contacted Elmass…

Walk into most any machine shop and there’s a good chance you’ll hear it: the high pitch whine of a deep boring operation, the chatter loud enough to have even the most hard of hearing among us scrambling for a pair of ear plugs. It’s a problem that has plagued machinists since the day that Henry Maudslay  (1771 – 1831), the inventor of the lathe, first chucked up a piece of steel and tried to bore a hole through it. And the problem has only become worse as metals have grown tougher and more challenging to machine. But not anymore, according to Kennametal. Its new boring system boasts the most effective anti-chatter mechanism that the company has ever developed, and it also offers an extensive range of indexable heads and shank sizes. Creating a vibration-free zone Someone who knows all about this is Sam Eichelberger, a Product Engineer for lathe systems engineering at Kennametal, and part of the team that developed the internal dampening mechanism. “Perhaps the most important thing to know…

Texas BBQ Foods - a New Zealand producer of Texas-inspired smoked meats, cheeses, butter, sauces and rubs - recently opted for a compact and user-friendly Kaeser Aircenter 6, to meet its requirement for a reliable supply of clean compressed air at its new state-of-the-art facility. Texas BBQ Foods is a family owned and operated company based in Inglewood in the Taranaki Region of New Zealand’s North Island. Here in a state-of-the-art facility the team produce a range of Texas-inspired smoked beef brisket, pork belly, cheeses and butter along with rubs and sauces. The family follows the traditional Texas BBQ style of preparing meat which has its beginnings in the European meat-smoking traditions originally brought to Texas by German and Czech settlers in the mid-19th century. Taking only the best NZ-grown beef and pork, a rub is first applied to the meat before it is smoked in one of the plants 4 big meat smokers using mesquite-chips for an authentic Texas BBQ flavour. Once the meat is cooked it goes straight into a blast chiller, before it is sliced, vacuum packed and chilled, ready to be despatched and enjoyed. The vacuum packing process is an important stage in ensuring the…

The Australian PMI slipped below the critical 50-points threshold (that separates expansion from contraction) in December, bringing to an end a 26-month period of expansion – the longest since 2005. Six of the seven activity indexes in the Australian PMI fell in December, indicating generally weaker industry conditions. “December 2018 saw the end of an extended period of manufacturing expansion after growth slowed in recent months,” said Ai Group Chief Executive Innes Willox. “The mild slowdown in manufacturing recorded in December adds to the picture of a softer closing quarter for 2018. Five of the eight manufacturing sectors expanded in December (according to trend data), with growth led by the large food & beverages sector (down 0.7 points to 57.3). Respondents across the large metals (down 1.4 points to 47.7), machinery & equipment (down 0.6 points to 49.6) and chemicals (down 1.3 points to 49.7) sectors have reported a gradual slowing of demand throughout the second half of…

Lasers can be used for a myriad of tasks and situations: attached to a robot arm, or on the side of a bottling line, or inside a protective chamber for 3D printing metal parts. This wide variation in applications requires expert installation, support and training to ensure effective incorporation of the laser system. Sometimes, Raymax is presented with the challenge of a ‘never done before’ solution: a new application or use for a laser system. “These are the challenges we love,” says John Grace, Managing Director of Raymax.“We not only get to apply our knowledge and skill, but we are giving the user an opportunity to do something they could never have done before, and that’s pretty satisfying for everyone.” Lasers provide the opportunity to innovate, change and improve processes. For example, materials-processing applications such as welding, cutting and cladding in fields as diverse as consumer electronics, automotive manufacturing and defence, are now dominated by industrial lasers. This uptake changes traditional processes, influenced by the…

NSW is the state for manufacturing, accounting for around 30% of Australia’s total manufacturing output. Manufacturing employs 7% of the NSW workforce, and Western Sydney is the key driver of the advanced manufacturing sector. Australian manufacturing is predominantly a SME market, with 24,319 firms having fewer than 19 employees, 1,663 with 20-199 employees, and only 164 with more than 200 employees. While the infrastructure boom currently sweeping NSW is set to enhance the state’s economy, the paradox is that the SME manufacturing sector is suffering a skills gap within both ‘blue collar’ and ‘new collar’ workers as a direct result. A survey conducted by Business Chambers found that 63.3% of participants who owned manufacturing businesses reported a perception of a skills shortage. Kevin Adler,…

GJS Managing Director John Rees has been at the helm throughout, and he and GJS’ software engineers have worked directly with businesses to be sure that their Job Commander solutions have been formed with the input of customers, answering the special needs of the engineering industry. Job Commander is a simple-to-use job costing system that produces quotes, schedules, purchase orders, job cards, delivery dockets and invoices, all personalised for the client. The quoting software allows faster, more accurate quotes by drawing on data from previous jobs and enabling storage of job-specific electronic documentation that is easily retrieved. Job Commander’s integration with MYOB, XERO and QuickBooks avoids double handling of data and reduces accounting costs. Job Commander has taken over a decade to develop with extensive industry research, testing and substantial investment by the company. Rees says: “This has resulted in a powerful, easy to use, and innovative suite of software tools that a client can install…