This is the big day at the big show. Don’t miss the spectacle. AMW is massive and almost over
Today, the AMW halls were open from 10am to 7pm, so there’s plenty of space in the day if someone wanted to carve out some hours in the halls. Impress your manager with your initiative by coming across to AMW for the final day tomorrow, Friday, 10am to 4pm.
Thad Roos from KAESER compressors was in early Thursday, hoping for the predicted bump that exhibitors experience on the Thursday of these shows. I think everyone is feeling the same anticipation at this time of the morning. He was pleased with the quality of the visitors and that they were at that stage of ordering compressors.
Grahame Aston, son Matthew and the others in the PPC Moulding services crew were setting up, ready for the day. They had a Liquid Silicone 3D printer release a couple years ago which uses injection-grade LSR. Front and very much centre was their extremely new Freeformer 750-3X 3D polymer printer. These and other printers take carbon fibre re-enforced Nylon, ABS, PC, TPU, PLA, PP with more materials available including glass filled polymers.
3D Systems had some good leads from Wednesday, and salesman Bob Bentley was hoping for more of the same today and Friday, then of course a very big week next week following everyone up. Chris Bilby was also upbeat. He said Bilby3D was ready for another big day and very hopeful for the market to change from looking, to buying.
Once again, further down the aisle, I spoke to Mark Wall at Orbimax, feeling the same sentiment. There’s a more focused crowd coming through, and they arent the DIY customer. Instead they are serious business to business deals being written up on the day.
Back in the Future Solutions Speakers Hall, Bradley Lewin from Bosch was doing some plain speaking about the critical steps of Design for Manufacturing, using one of the projects taken on by Bosch (image above). You really have to be strong about what you do and when to pivot. His was some vital advice:
“What’s important with design for manufacture is acknowledging the fact that your team has blinkers on, they know everything they know, they don’t know everything they can’t see. So take the chance to bring in collaboration from other people to give you feedback about your design, whether that’s material vendors, subcontractors, automation partners, it doesn’t matter, get as much input as you can because that is where you make your money.
“Where you save your costs in manufacturing is by making sure that your design is suitable for manufacturer in material costs, quality costs, but also reject costs, return costs, all of that comes back to your design for manufacturer. And what’s important design for manufacturer, design is subservient to manufacturing, not the other way around. Now design’s gotta let go and let manufacturing take over. Stop designing, get it to market. If you let a designer go, they will keep designing and designing and designing, yeah? You’ve got to set that barrier and say that is good enough. Let’s get it out there.
“Understand what your core business is and focus on that. Where do you add value? Do not distract yourself with anything else. Collaborate, vendors, partners outsourcing, whatever it takes to let you focus on that core business proposition.”
It’s at this point, I went and asked a few selected visitors of video testimonials of what they thought of the show. Unanimously, each visitor was, “gobsmacked”, “amazed”, “so impressed”. They said, “whoever said manufacturing was dead is just plain wrong”, and, “completely unprepared to see what technology was available and what manufacturing was happening in Australia.”
The crowds didn’t let up, right up through until I left the venue mid afternoon. Some of the exhibitors were understandably frazzled and hoping for some light relief at the end of the day. But not until after 7pm of course. Today, Friday, is the last day of the biggest manufacturing tradeshow ever staged in Melbourne. Come on down.