How working together helps manufacturers make the right changes for their businesses.
There’s no shortage of innovators in Australian manufacturing – but industry collaboration is the key to driving those innovations forward. That was the consensus of a panel discussion held at Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions’ (BAMS) campus in Clayton, Melbourne.
Held in commemoration of the company’s 70 years of manufacturing innovation in Australia, the company brought together business leaders for a panel discussion: “The Ecosystem of Success: Fostering Innovation and Collaboration for Australian Global Competitiveness.”
Among them was David McLaughlin, the co-founder of bodd – a full body 3D scanner machine that captures rich biometric data across the entire human body, with applications in health and wellness. The company originally planned to use the scanner for 3D printing life-size replicas of individuals for custom clothing.
“That was an idea we had. It was an example of a willingness to try, put it into market, test it, and then basically say ‘You know what? This is not the product. The product is actually our scanner.’”
Once the company reached that conclusion, bodd turned to BAMS to manufacture, distribute and provide in-field technical support for all its hardware units, helping to scale the product into Australian and global markets.
Speaking on the panel, McLaughlin said securing an “ecosystem of support” early on had been important for the company’s success.
“For us as an early-stage company or a startup, it’s impossible to do it all, so you really need to lean on experts in their domain partnerships. You need as much support as you possibly can to make it and survive.”
“Having the support network, whether it’s for export marketing or R&D funding… all those elements play a big role in helping companies take a little bit more of a risk and starting to think globally,” he said.
“From day one in our business, we said this has to be a global business, because the runway in Australia is not big enough. If you’re thinking globally, all of a sudden, those things start to become economical, because the market size is just so significant.”
It was a statement echoed by BAMS head of sales Bradley Trewin, who noted the importance of partnerships.
“When I look at the people I have dealt with over the years, the ones that have tried to do it all themselves haven’t been able to be successful because fundamentally, they haven’t understood the importance of having consistent partnership.”
AMTIL CEO Lorraine Maxwell said that while collaboration between companies was important, it was industry organisations that kept the industry together.
“So, you can organise your connections within that, or you can look to the network or the coordinators that are there to help businesses grow and connect,” she said.
A dedication to innovation was also important, she added, regardless of the size of the company involved.
The manufacturing line Bosch Australia Manufacturing Solutions produced for RayGen. “It is the companies who are looking to change, to horizon scan, and respond to what’s going on in the world, as well as how to adapt and evolve their technology, that will be successful in the future,” she said.
“I think that some of the biggest opportunities for us to move the dialogue in the future will be not only about embracing new technologies and implementing them but also making sure that we’ve got it right in terms of processes and people.”
Digital transformation
Panellists also broadly agreed that digitalisation and the adoption of advanced technologies such as AI, digital twins and even data-driven automation are becoming non-negotiable for future competitiveness.
Bosch Rexroth business development manager Igor Kabakov explained how his company is integrating technical advancement with products to enable advanced manufacturing. “It’s a modular system, which helps manufacturers start small and expand over\ time without having any larger scale platforms and upfront capacity,” he said.
RayGen product development manager Derek Scott shared how his company uses new technologies to run its solar energy farms and storage solutions. “We have a digital twin, but it’s coupled into what we call a techno economic model, because electricity prices are dynamic, and you need to be predicting what’s happening in the future to electricity prices,” he said.
The company also uses data tracking to check on the lifecycle of their solar modules, providing valuable feedback for continuous improvement.
“Tracing product all the way from built materials through construction or fabrication in its life, and then even where it goes at the end is all tracked through that. That kind of feedback loop is critical for us.”
Trewin advised companies to start their digital transformation journeys by focusing on solving specific problems, proving a return on the investment and then getting a buy-in to scale up, rather than attempting to overhaul everything at once.
“You’ve got to understand what your problem is, what it is you’re trying to solve,” he said.
Scott added to this in saying there’s a balancing act to be respected in getting the product right before trying to scale up production.
“You can’t completely finish your product and then hand it over to manufacturing, because there are probably manufacturing efficiencies you can achieve by doing it collaboratively,” he said.
Instead, RayGen’s approach with one heliostat product was to engage Bosch before it was fully finalised, allowing for iterative improvements and smoother scaling.
“We could learn a lot, we could improve, we could make a robust product. Then we engaged Bosch, not when we were completely finished, but when it was getting there, when they knew what product we were trying to make, but there was still time to make minor tooling changes and that sort of thing to make the manufacturing easier,” he said.
“So, finding that balance around when to scale automation that kind of locks you in and makes changes more difficult, but your product has to be mature enough… if you’ve gone too far, then you’ve lost some opportunities to build an efficient product.”
For McLaughlin, creating a support framework to encourage and celebrate businesses that are taking risks is important for the future of Australian innovation.
“We’ve spent the last 10 years telling all the kids they need to go and be software developers, and AI has basically come along and said, actually, don’t worry about that, we’ve got this,” he said.
“But I think the skills that are going to be really valuable are those skills that blend software with the physical. So, mechatronics, systems, level design…
“What AI and new software technologies cannot do is they cannot come up with new problems and the solutions to those new problems. So, we need to teach people. We need to teach people skills on how to be critical thinkers.”
Scott highlighted the importance of maintaining a “critical mass” of manufacturing capability and expertise in Australia, warning that losing this base could have long-term consequences for the sector’s resilience and innovation capacity.
“Having a critical mass of that capability here, whether it’s machine shops, fabrication, automation specialists, and that sort of thing, is critical for us to be able to go and have a range of other businesses to support what we’re doing, as a start,” he said.
“So, making sure that we have this critical mass and it continues to be encouraged, is critical, because there is a bit of a risk that you start to lose capability and snowball… there’s got to be that availability.”