May 13, 2016
For more than 40 years, Prysm has manufactured containers such as garden pots and ice cream containers for companies across Australia. For businesses like Prysm, providing a high-quality product while keeping costs down can be a challenge. With many of the items produced at Prysm headed for some of Australia’s largest retailers, consistency and accuracy are paramount. “Many of our products require an adhesive label,” said Matthew Murphy, Production Manager at Prysm. “Previously, skilled operators would stand in one spot for hours at a time and apply labels to products every six or seven seconds. We decided to automate this repetitive task in order to reduce costs and to free up our staff for more varied and engaging activities.” During the search for an automation solution, Prysm was introduced to Universal’s technology by Sensorplex, a Universal distributor for Australia. “We helped Prysm select the UR5…
March 25, 2016
Many attacks target email systems that operate as a primary communication tool for manufacturing businesses – but can also be a potential point of vulnerability. These attacks may disrupt the email systems themselves, potentially annoying employees and customers and raising questions in the minds of customers, suppliers and partners about the targeted manufacturers’ resilience and performance. In fact, a recent Mimecast/Galaxy Research survey of IT managers across a range of industries put the financial losses from an email outage anywhere from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, despite the potential cost, only about half of IT managers believed their systems (including email), were highly prepared for outages. Yet the damage caused by email disruption pales beside the damage that email can cause as a vehicle for more sophisticated and nefarious attacks. Viruses and other malware can disrupt core business systems, steal resources and data, and…
March 25, 2016
Debuting in March 2010 as the flagship facility of Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF)-Victoria, the MCN is a joint venture between six Victorian Universities and the CSIRO and is backed by $50m worth of investment in micro/nanotechnology infrastructure. Located in Clayton, in the heart of the South-East Melbourne Innovation Precinct, the Centre is openly accessible to both academic and industry clientele. In the six years since its launch, the MCN has been involved in a growing array of projects and ground-breaking innovations in areas ranging from renewable energy sources to life-saving medical device breakthroughs. A look at some of the Centre’s more recent projects shows that the business of innovation is in no danger of slowing down. Rapid prototyping to understand particle diffusion A team of researchers from Melbourne University have applied laser-based microscopy techniques to understand the processes that control the diffusion of particles during advanced self-assembly and transport from examples like carbon nanotubes settling…
February 26, 2016
Manufacturing is becoming one of the most sophisticated sectors in the world. With advances like robotics, cloud services, increased mobility, more connected devices and 3D printing, technological change presents a formidable challenge – even if the change is for the better. Thanks to such modernised manufacturing processes and continual digitisation, today’s manufacturing company is exploding with critical data. Not only is the volume of data growing, it’s also becoming more dynamic and instant. IT departments have data from traditional sources (structured data) and new streams of digital data (unstructured data) to manage. Your organisation is also presented with the challenge of mining and analysing this data to help the company gain insight and drive action. Struggling with these big data challenges alongside the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and IT team is, perhaps surprisingly, the CFO. It is common to retool a machine for greater…
February 26, 2016
Electric car drivers love the summer, because in the winter, the vehicle’s range declines markedly due to the additional energy demanded by the heating system. Electric cars generate next to no heat compared with conventional passenger vehicles, which produce more than enough engine heat to warm the interior. Electric cars therefore require an additional electric heater, powered by the same battery that provides the engine with energy. “In the most unfavourable case, you can only drive half the usual distance with the car”, says Serhat Sahakalkan, Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, Germany. Researchers at the IPA have now developed a film-based panel heater, which quickly provides a comfortable warmth in electric cars more effectively than electric heaters – particularly on short journeys. The heating concept is based on a film that is coated with conductive carbon nanotubes…
February 12, 2016
The ‘I’ word is being bandied about a lot these days. In my role as an IT specialist I like to consider how IT systems can affect a company’s ability to innovate in a positive way. Specifically, can operational software such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system help a company to innovate? Often the definition of innovation seems to change depending on what is being discussed or even who is discussing it, so for the purposes of this article I will use Roger LaSalle’s definition: Innovation is change that adds value. So how can software help to make change that adds value? Many companies are using software systems that are fragmented and the processes have evolved to closely parallel the processes of the business, or indeed in some cases create them. These systems work well for day-to-day operational management but typically lack flexibility to change if needed and, due to the disparate nature of the systems, have a moderate overhead to access timely information…
