Techlink :: Tech Practice :: Hard Materials

Globalisation has opened the country's doors to a flood of cheap imports, which New Zealand manufacturers simply can't compete with. Not head on anyway. Instead, local manufacturers are having to change the way they go about their business. The last few years has seen the "business" side of business tightened up in the name of efficiency. Business practices have been well honed and buffed, but it seems the limits are being approached. Efficiencies gained from here on in are likely to be incremental ones.

Now attention has turned to the technological practices that drive these manufacturing. While it may have been true a decade or so ago that low cost-producers offshore produced low cost products, times have changed. Our manufacturers are now facing off against competitors who produce high quality goods, very efficiently, and in very large quantities. It's no longer good enough to say "feel the quality". Quality is a given. The clever application of computing to manufacturing has upped the ante. Faced with this competition, some manufacturers are taking a close look at what they produce and how they produce it.

A good example is Auckland metal fittings manufacturer Miles Nelson Manufacturing. Established in 1928, the company has produced quality hardware for decades and is one of the few New Zealand-owned hardware manufacturers still in business. The company's products are sold in New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific and in Europe.

Surviving against the surge of cheap imports has been a challenge, says the company's managing director Brenton Lee. Lee's grandfather founded the company. The key to continuing the tradition, Lee believes, will be innovation. Constant movement on the product front. Continuous development of products nobody else has thought to make. In a word: ideas.

"Developing something different is the only way a New Zealand manufacturer has any chance of survival. Anyone can go to China, source a product and put it on their shelf back in New Zealand - we need to be developing and establishing our own products."

The company recently launched a staircase handrail bracket; both here and in Australia. There's nothing new in that, but what differentiates the "Lumos" bracket from the welter of other brackets on the market is that it comes with a built-in LED lamp. Concealing lights in the railing brackets removes the need for low level stairwell lights and, because the lamps can be wired to run on battery supply during a power failure, they can serve as emergency lighting.

"We wanted a radical product that would provide enhanced benefits. For building developers, the two-in-one product cuts down on installation and labour costs as it is pre-wired. For homeowners, the LED system is very efficient and costs virtually nothing to run."

The target market is private homes and commercial buildings, such as rest homes. Lee hopes the bracket will sell well here and offshore. Feedback from the architects and designers the company consulted during product development had been positive, but Lee cautions it will take some months for the new staircase system to take off because it needs to be included in the design stage of a building project rather than being added as a finishing touch.

The idea for the new bracket came from a desire to produce a new product that added value to the company's existing range, Lee says.

"We are always asking ourselves: 'How do we build a better paper clip?' 'A better mousetrap?' We encourage ideas; it's part of our philosophy of improvement."

It's one thing to have an idea and accurately guage its value, but it's another thing entirely to attend to all the details and address the myriad challenges, big and small, that must be overcome before that idea can be turned into a product. Once the decision had been made to pursue an idea, the company commits to the project fully, Lee says.

Development began by listing all the building codes and safety standards that applied to staircase brackets. These clearly defined the parameters, such as size and strength, for the proposed product, which the designers had to work within.

Design is not about styling, or about taking a technology and making it look good. It isn't an add-on, a way of dollying things up, or a cosmetic addendum to the "real" process of product development. Increasingly, design is being recognised as an integral part of the whole development process. Well-designed products have three characteristics: they are useful, they are useable, and they are desirable. The team at Miles Nelson set about satisfying all three criteria.

"I believe that quality level is determined primarily by the actual design of the product itself, not by quality control in the production process."

Hideo Sugiura, chairperson (retired), Honda Motor Company

Having outlined the bracket's form, the team then asked themselves what was the best way of adding illumination. From the top? From the bottom? Or come in through the side? What sort of light? Lee says it was a new experience for the team as none of the company's other products had involved the use of electricity. A number of challenges quickly became apparent. Heat was one of them. Conventional bulbs waste a lot of energy by generating heat, and this would have been a problem as the metal bracket would have acted as a heat sink and absorbed this energy and become dangerously hot. For this reason, a 12V narrow spectrum LED system was chosen as the light source. LED lights waste little energy as heat, which makes them not only safe but economical as well. A supply system had to be designed that would provide a steady flow of power and protect the system from voltage fluctuations.

A number of rough functional models were milled out of solid zinc to give the team a feel for the developing product. When a form was finally resolved, CAD files of the shape were sent to a rapid prototyping bureau where a full-scale prototype was produced using thermosetting plastic and a laser.

Just as no car maker would dream about releasing a new model without getting input from the market first, Miles Nelson sought the opinion of architects and designers about the bracket before committing to an expensive production run. An independent market research company was engaged to gauge reactions and record responses to the prototype. The feedback, Lee says, was extremely valuable.

"They all said 'fantastic concept...but why don't you do this... or this... ?' "

As a result of this, several modifications were made to the model.

Usefulness, desirability and useability; meeting the last criterion involved proactively anticipating problems and finding solutions to them. For example, inserts were designed that would allow clients to use the brackets to bear a flat-section handrail, rather than a conventional round-section one. Care was taken to make the mounting system simple and easy to use; fasteners were selected that could be worked with standard tools. Mock-ups were used to check the illumination produced by different configurations of the brackets.

Product innovation that allows a company to offer clients new or improved products can come about in a number of ways. It may come about as the result of new or recent developments in science and technology or result from new combinations of existing technologies. Innovation can also involve the way things are made. In the case of the Lumos Bracket, a combination of these approaches was taken.

Sometimes a project may require outside expertise be called in. Miles Nelson worked with the Light Metals Research Centre at the University of Auckland to develop good casting and coating methods and an efficient production system. The collaboration was supported by research and development investment of almost $150,000 from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology through its Technology for Business Growth (TBG) scheme.

The whole development took about 12 months, Lee says, and was a resource hungry process that had to be fitted around the normal day-to-day operations of the company. Was it worth it? In dollar terms that remains to be seen, but Lee says his company has benefited in intangible terms in that it learnt a lot about the process of innovation, which will stand it in good stead for the future.

"We learnt a lot about adding technical advantages to our products. Innovation results from a marriage of practical skills and the design process. We are not afraid of looking at radical products."