70 | MARINE Makaira Boats throughout New Zealand, Resene Automotive and Light Industrial are the coating experts at your door. Do you need Industrial Protective Coatings? customers. Our team of specialists aim to provide you with the best customer service and expert product support. Coatings Experts at Your Door 0800 108 008 www.reseneauto.co.nz • STEEL • STAINLESS • ENGINEERING STEELS • PLATE PROCESSING • COIL PROCESSING • ALUMINIUM - SHEET & EXTRUSION AVAILABLE VULCAN IS PROUD TO SUPPORT MAKAIRA BOATS WWW.VULCAN.CO Aluminium Sales 09 4387380 Steel Sales 09 4388526 Alloy plate boats in full swing Makaira Boats is the only boat-building company in the world doing alloy plate aluminium boat builds on a full production line. T T Virginia Wright “We’ve cut down our manufacturing time and improved the company structure and staff morale. It’s helped our lead times, it’s helped us secure work, it’s helped everything,” Allan Shaw is a marine systems engineer with an abiding love of being out on the water who was working for Alloy Yachts company when he decided to build a boat for himself. That marked the start of Makaira Boats in 2012, based in Northland since 2014, and the only boat-building company in the world doing alloy plate aluminium boat builds on a full production line. To put that in perspective it’s the equivalent of a Toyota production line and Makaira Boats combines that with the Toyota Production System (TPS), also known as Lean manufacturing, which is seen as a defining feature of Toyota’s success, explains Allan. “It’s basically how Toyota got to the quality and production speed they have and it’s what we do here. In a nutshell it’s the elimination of waste through continuous improvement that leads to more value added for our customers. But Lean is really about growing people, so we train our staff for half an hour every day, and they have a 3S half hour every day, to Sort, Sweep, Standardise what they’re doing. It seems simple but it’s not very common.” Rather than a more typical top-down approach Allan understands that staff are at the centre of his business, and this system allows the people that are doing the work to come up with the ideas that will improve the process. Allan wants productivity at Makaira Boats to be more in line with Japanese standards than the comparatively less efficient Western standards and the TPS is paving the way. “We’ve cut down our manufacturing time and improved the company structure and staff morale. It’s helped our lead times, it’s helped us secure work, it’s helped everything,” says Allan. It was 2023 when Makaira Boats moved into their bespoke factory with the scaleable rolling production line which allows them to raise or lower their production levels without affecting their build time. Having scalability takes the pressure off needing to always run at capacity to be efficient. Rolling off that production line are the boats with the distinctive Carolina Flare that has singled Makaira out from the rest since they came up with it four years ago. “Everyone said it was impossible to give aluminium curvature in both directions, but we’ve developed a way to do it. Flare in your topside creates a drier, softer riding boat with a better performing hull and we’re the only builder in the world doing it in aluminium,” says Allan. Makaira Boats’ staff of 25 tend to be long serving. Staff retention’s very important to Makaira, they invest heavily in their training, and in what may well be another world first they’re now also developing a staff subdivision on land they weren’t using. Offering staff sections at below market value and holding them while they come up with a deposit is powerful motivation for young families to get on the pathway to property ownership knowing it won’t be pulled out from under them. For Makaira Boats it means that while they work towards expanding their share of the offshore aluminium boat market, they’re less likely to see their most valuable resources disappearing down the road. Around a third of Makaira Boats’ sales are domestic, a third go to Australia and a third to the U.S. As Allan is well aware 240,000 boats are sold a year in America. “If we got 20 of them, we’d have a great business,” he says. Some would argue that they’re already a great business given their investment in staff, their focus on improving every day, their innovation and their efficiency. It all combines to give them a unique position in the international market for aluminium boats.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=