48 | MANUFACTURING South Fence Machinery T T Richard Loader Technology and newmachinery key To remove bottle necks and speed up the machine delivery time, South Fence Machinery invested $4.5 million in new technology. 03 477 8565 8 Strathallan Street, South Dunedin Suppliers of quality engineering components to industry • Bearings • Consumables • Conveyor • Hose & Fittings • Power Transmission • Pumps & Valves • Seals • Support motion.co.nz Providing Tool Management Solutions for South Fence Machinery Responding to market changes and customer needs with agility; staff development; embracing innovation; and investment in state-of-the-art machinery have been the cornerstones of success for South Fence Machinery, says Co-Director Ben Byers. “We have tried to be smart about training. We couldn’t get staff and so we have put a lot of emphasis on training young people. “Since we started this initiative we have trained twelve engineering apprentices and are now training a further seven apprentices in the team. We’ve grown the team to forty-two staff, including three contractors. “There is a mix of qualified tradesmen, welder fabricators, planning / purchasing staff, and university qualified design engineers. We have a big R&D team including three core designers, with another seven team members with hands on manufacturing experience involved on a part time basis to provide balance and a good sounding board. The three contractors are in electrical and programming roles.” The introduction of new CNC machinery is designed to remove production bottlenecks, and streamline the manufacturing processes. “If you called us pre-covid and ordered a fence machine it would go into a queue with a lead time of twenty-four months, which is ridiculous. “We identified that we needed to make ourselves more productive manufacturing wise and the only way to do that was to increase manufacturing real-estate by investing in new technology and new machinery. “We looked at our existing machinery and broke it down into square metres. For example, we had these huge machines which have a machine table of five metres by two metres, machining a part that was 400mm square. I thought, I only have one spindle cutting head and I’m using a huge machine to cut this tiny part, and all the big parts are sitting there waiting to be machined.” To remove the bottle neck and speed up the machine delivery time, South Fence Machinery invested $4.5 million in new technology including new CNC machinery specifically designed around the size of the task. “The old machinery is still there but complements the new machinery, creating a lot of operational efficiency. “The new machinery is used for the smaller work it is designed to do, while the old machinery is doing the larger work it should have been doing in the first place. That was an interesting journey for us and now we have a turnaround time of about nine months, depending on the machine and specs required. We have also bought automated machinery that operates autonomously. There are parts that we can machine a lot more efficiently, because we’re not paying labour for the twelve hours the machines are running unmanned. Our new equipment is all Japanese Okuma machinery. South Fence has always bought Okuma machinery. It’s excellent machinery; they are a bit like the Bentleys of the CNC world — we rely on them and trust them to accurately produce the great fence machines we are known for.” Ben says another key focus for the company’s R&D team is the development of some new wire making machinery projects. “These machines are twelve months away from completion and testing. Once tested and released our team will again challenge what’s possible in the wire manufacturing industry. The future is all pretty exciting, to be honest.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=