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The medical gas supplier for the hospital is BOC Healthcare, delivering hundreds of full medical gas cylinders each month to 49 hospital departments that support 359 beds across 12 floors. Christopher Collie, Facilities Coordinator at Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital, says: “Both previous hospitals had longstanding partnerships with BOC and this has continued at our new facility. Their team has been working with us to meet our gas needs including a new cylinder management solution that is already making a huge difference.” Bringing together medical professionals from two separate hospitals naturally meant staff had slightly different approaches for certain tasks. One area was in the way that clinicians and medical staff were projecting their gas usage. “After opening we noticed an over-projection of gas cylinders right across the hospital with some wards ordering up to three more medical cylinders than what they actually needed,” says Collie. “There didn’t seem to be an established confidence in ordering so the result was a…

Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is an exciting new technology whose benefits are already being embraced in real-life applications, and nowhere more so than in the field of medicine. Success stories involving 3D-printed titanium implants such as vertebral cages and heel joints have received widespread coverage in the popular media. However, in the dental arena, less ‘earth-shattering’ applications of 3D printing may not have found their way into the media. Nonetheless, they are already delivering significant reductions in costs and increases in the speed and accuracy of production of crowns, bridges and orthodontic appliances. Dutch medical design company Xilloc Medical is one business already making a name for itself through its medical breakthroughs. Already famed for printing a titanium jaw-bone using complex algorithms to create a design that gives blood vessels, nerves and muscles a better opportunity to grow into the implant, Xilloc is now pushing the envelope with its most recent development in the…

Using your business’ historical trends, manufacturing industry data or simply applying against budgeted comparisons, financial ratio analysis can be extremely useful in understanding business performance. While calculating the most commonly used ratios is relatively straightforward, to get ahead you should challenge your finance team to go beyond basic computation of data and uncover insights that lead to strategic action. A typical monthly trend analysis for a manufacturing organisation will include key ratios on liquidity, profitability, efficiency and solvency. But arriving at the figures is just the beginning; there are two further steps that every finance team should undertake to ensure they’re getting to the meaning behind the numbers. Measures that matter                                                                                                                                                            Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) assist businesses to define and measure progress towards management-agreed goals. Meaningful performance measurement is crucial to providing useful information to stakeholders, which include boards, investors, potential purchasers and lending institutions. Common financial KPIs to consider include: liquidity (quick asset ratio); inventory turnover; gross profit margin; accounts receivable days; net profit margin; accounts payable days;…

Case studies are emerging that provide compelling evidence that the surgeons embracing this technology over standard implants or traditionally manufactured implants are consistently delivering better and more predictable outcomes in terms of patient safety and satisfaction, and hospital efficiencies and economies. Hospitals in the UK, in their quest for better quality and efficiency, have used 3D-printed anatomical models, guides and implants to improve the predictability, accuracy, safety and speed of operations. Meanwhile, a hospital in Spain has proved that the technology can also be used across international borders in a classic example of global technology transfer with UK experts. Neurosurgeon Bartolomé Oliver, MD, PhD, practises at the Teknon Medical Center in Barcelona, Spain, and has trained internationally, including in Canada, the USA and Sweden. A 68-year-old female patient presented to his department with a benign growth from the left side of her cranium, caused by a meningioma, a tumour that arises from the meninges – the…

It is sometimes surprising when you stop and consider all of the places where compressed air is used. Typically we think about manufacturing, processing and engineering applications. However, compressed air serves a very important function in numerous other industry sectors, not least the veterinary industry where it is used to manufacture oxygen. From small veterinary clinics to large animal hospitals, oxygen generation plays a key role in healing pets and animals. And, with one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world and over 33m pets, Australia certainly has a demand for the lifesaving services they provide! The traditional method of obtaining the oxygen would be to purchase it in cylinders. However, this method is costly and comes with the added inconvenience of having to move and change heavy and dangerous oxygen cylinders. Mediquip offers the Australian veterinary industry with a highly economical, convenient, safe and compact alternative: oxygen supply plants. Powered by a compressor, an oxygen supply plant…

One of the key success factors of a successful business is its employees. For me, as the Managing Director of Headland Machinery, with a team of more than 25 service engineers operating throughout Australia, ensuring that their day runs as smoothly and productively as possible will not only benefit the company, but also our customers. We all know, pleasing a customer doesn’t end once you have sold them your product. The customer lifecycle is a continual process and field service is a part of that process. For the last five to 10 years, companies like Headland Machinery have been harnessing the power of mobile technology to improve efficiencies and the day-to-day running of the service team. But, what happens to those companies with field service staff who are still operating manually and continue to ignore the need for an automated solution? They get left behind. We have seen in…

When referring to medical industry machining, the term encompasses all machining related to surgical implants, orthopaedic devices and medical instruments. The expression also includes small-scale machining and micromachining, as today’s implanted devices often consist of or include minute components. Among other difficult to machine advanced materials, titanium is often used in medical devices, due to its non-reactivity characteristics associated with the human body. Small metalworking shops wishing to compete in the challenge of producing medical parts must develop a range of advanced capabilities to meet the specialised demands of the medical industry, especially when involved in small batches and prototype work. Mindful of the specific requirements of this challenging sector, the creative work and exhaustive field trials undertaken by Iscar’s advanced R&D department have resulted in the significant expansion of the company’s range of cutting tools associated with the medical industry. In addition to innovative new…

Starting as a small boutique laboratory servicing a limited number of podiatrists in and around Melbourne, the reputation of Footwork Podiatric Laboratory was soon recognised by others in the profession. Today the company is recognised as one of the leading suppliers of orthotics not only in Australia but around the world. “One of the keys to our success is our heavy investment in technology and in the design and development of our very own software,” says Maliszewski. “We support podiatrists in optimising their clients’ health outcomes by creating the highest-quality orthotics engineered to precise specifications each and every time using only the finest of materials. “Orthotics are inserts placed into the shoe to control or correct abnormal lower limb gait and alignment. The aim of a correctly prescribed orthotic is to modify how a client’s foot makes contact with the ground, thereby reducing stress…

The AMT Media Kit lays out all the opportunities available for companies wishing to promote their businesses via advertising in the magazine. Advertising rates for next year have been held at 2016 levels, with prices having only risen by 5% since 2011. “AMT remains the number-one industry-trusted magazine for manufacturing in Australia,” says Anne Samuelsson, AMTIL Sales Manager. “It’s still the most reliable, effective way to promote your products and services and reach the key decision-makers in our industry. I’m very proud to be able to say we offer the industry’s lowest rates for advertising, offering the best value for your marketing dollars.” In addition to advertising options, the AMT Media Kit also details our editorial plans for 2017, with a full list of our upcoming features for each issue. While many of the regular product and industry features will be making their return as expected, the year to come will also see several new categories of coverage. “We took a long hard look at our coverage for next year and…

Cook Medical Australia was founded in 1979 to manufacture and distribute medical products for customers in markets located around the Pacific Rim and South-East Asia. Originally focused on angiographic and interventional devices, Cook Medical Australia is at the forefront of the development of technology needed to perform in-vitro fertilisation and assisted reproduction procedures. Cook Medical Australia is the only manufacturing site in the world that produces custom-made stent grafts for the treatment of abdominal aortic aneurysms. The Brisbane-based manufacturing facility is Cook Medical’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, employing over 500 people locally and over 1,200 across the Asia Pacific region with approximately 12,000 personnel globally. Recently Cook Medical undertook a project to improve processing efficiency, accuracy and repeatability and to ensure raw material components continued to meet the requirements for the finished medical devices. The goal was to automate the process for measurement of raw material and in process components. Without a new method, components would continue to be measured and checked by hand (using rulers, micrometers and…

In a metal cutting operation, a tool deforms workpiece material and causes it to shear away in the form of chips. The deformation process requires a significant amount of force, and the tool endures a variety of mechanical, thermal, chemical and tribological loads. Over a period of time, these loads eventually cause the tool to wear to the point that it must be replaced. Accordingly, for more than a century, scientists and engineers have created and tested mathematical models that factor in the forces upon a tool to provide estimates of expected tool life. Many of these models focus on a specific tool’s performance in a certain material and operation, and simple formulas and repetitive testing produce valid tool wear projections. However, generalised models that can be applied across a wide range of workpiece materials and tools are more useful in industrial applications. Because these models take into account a variety…

Medical manufacturing is an innovative sector that continues to show positive growth against the backdrop of a turbulent global market. While some questions remain on the future of the Australian manufacturing industry due to recent high-profile changes in the market, evidence shows that innovative manufacturers are taking advantage of the opportunities in international markets and growing their businesses. Against this uncertain future, BJP Laboratories has experienced significant growth by exporting its products to new markets. The company specialises in manufacturing and packaging organic and non-organic complementary medicinal products, such as tablets and capsules. Among its extensive range of products, BJP specialises in the production of probiotics, which it undertakes in its purpose-built, humidity-controlled facility located in Yatala, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. BJP has experienced exponential business growth as a result of increasing demand for listed medicines in overseas markets. On the back of this success, one of its existing clients, Blackmores, required increased production capacity to meet the growing demand for glucosamine tablets…

Established in the 2014 restructuring of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), Airbus Defence and Space is responsible for the areas of defence and space as a subsidiary of the Airbus Group. With headquarters in Ottobrunn, Germany, the company focuses on the development and construction of engines for the Ariane 5 launch vehicle, among other activities. Airbus Defence and Space meets the high demands on quality with long-standing experience in machining and state-of-the-art CNC technology. Among its recent acquisitions are two DMU 70 eVo linear machines and one DMC 125 FD duoBLOCK. The company also uses the DMG MORI machines in an exact 1:1 simulation on the PC, in the form of the DMG MORI Virtual Machine. The software can be used in a preliminary PC simulation to safely check the complex machining of the highly expensive workpieces. This makes manufacturing completely safe and enables process optimisations already at a preliminary stage to increase efficiency in machining. A fully loaded Airbus A380, at a weight of approximately 590 tons, launches…