It looks like we may have a CO2 tax mid next year. Which is fair enough, there is a cost attached to pumping out CO2 which has to be paid for. Raise the cost of anything like water and power and we will reduce our use of them. Steel prices have risen quite a bit this year already partly I am sure in anticipation of the Carbon tax. This is making the future of timber look stronger which is part of our long term plan to help build a sustainable society based on wood. We have at long last started the process of applying for an R&D tax concession as 90% of what we do is R&D which we hope works for the long term benefit of Australia.
15 Jul 2010
Try and deliver more in your machine than you promised. Try and hold back a bit on your promises and then make sure you deliver more than you promised and show the customer. Extra features, easier to use, faster than spec., higher quality, less setup.
I am more and more impressed by adhesives every day - from gluing sprockets to shafts to plywood to pine - why don’t we use them more.
My work life balance is better than last year but still needs a lot of work, committing to coaching a kids basketball team has helped.
I am still not good at accurate R&D machine end date prediction but we are making good progress on reducing the number of concurrent projects at any time which should help.
I need to work much harder at what I said on keeping the customer informed good and bad. Thanks Jackie for the feedback on this point. I have passed this thought on to James a Solidworks 3D CAD designer friend at SFDesigns. Lets see how we go.
Julia Gillard appears scared to commit to $23/tonne for CO2. I think the public now really want someone to make some tough decisions on the environment. I predict the Greens will do very well at the next election. Personally I am committed to anyone prepared to do something towards sustainable anything.
I don’t care as much about global warming as I do care about sustainability.
24 June 2010
Julia Gillard is now the PM.
After 10 years of building R&D machines I still find it very hard to accurately forecast the end time for a new machine build.
Have reduced the size of the order book with the aim of less machines in progress but with much faster build times.
18 May 2010
Try hard to keep your customer informed - good or bad - let them know where you are at and what you are thinking. They have all the problems you have and they probably won’t be used to their supplier communicating with them proactively.
Try and find a work/life balance! Closest I have yet come is by studying the 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch - best management book I have ever read. In essence “... only do what you are best at and enjoy doing most”.
17 May 2010
Automation is vital for Australia to retain any manufacturing capability. We all have to embrace automation - Just In Time. Long runs of a the same product are a past dream. The modern reality is very short runs or even one product after the other. This can be easily achieved by automating set ups. Read “Shigeo Shingo” SMED. A good machine will produce a variety of operations at any length on a wide range of material one after the other. MZ3 examples;
3D Plasma profiler
Rollformer controller
Timber Raptor Saw
Splay beam assembler
Steel Raptor saw
Auto timber butt joiner
We should all consider using adhesives a lot more. We use them every day to glue on machine sprockets and timing pulleys - much better than keys and key ways - grub screws don’t come loose, key ways don’t flog out and pulleys and sprockets are easily removed by heating them with a hair dryer. Prevents corrosion between pulley and shaft. Very high capacity. We also use Resorcinol adhesive to make composite timber floor panels without any metal fasteners at all.
