Doug Green

GMP Dairy Limited has launched ‘Ogni’ organic dairy product range and announced that they have gained a significant organic export order to China.  GMP is a leading manufacturing company specialising in a wide range of natural health and dairy products of Australian and New Zealand origin. In the Picture  from the left: Ravinesh Kumaran – Acting General Manager – GMP Dairy Limited; Mr. Chen Feihua – Vice General Manager of Salt Bureau of Guangdong Province; Mr. Peng Haibin – Chairman of Guangdong Salt Bureau of Guangdong Province; Minesh Patel – General Manager – GMP Pharmaceuticals Limited;Stuart Gray – General Manager, Fonterra Global Sales New Zealand; Jami-Lee Ross – National MP for Botany and Eion Jansen – National Sales Manager – Fonterra New Zealand The company is playing a pioneer role in New Zealand’s organic dairy programme utilising their expertise to realise high value, market ready products for export, especially into Asia. The potential for high quality organic products is huge as nations around the world look to enhance dairy products for their consumers. Organic products are highly sought after and fast becoming more the market standard than is necessarily realised. Fonterra is also an important player in this development, supplying to GMP a substantial quantity of their organic milk powder since 2012.  And it gets better…GMP has reached an agreement with a significant State Owned Enterprise as its exclusive distributor in China.  GMP is the recipient of significant business and export awards both in Australia and New Zealand for its successful business model and innovative solutions to international trade. The company’s business model is based on identifying, processing and transforming food and nutritional ingredients into high value finished products, especially for the Asia markets, where there is high demand for those products for cultural or nutritional benefits. The company started […]

Most business owners and general managers recognise just how critically important proper equipment maintenance is, particularly in an asset-oriented work environment. Simply put, poorly maintained equipment leads to production downtime, lost revenue, dissatisfied customers, and low morale. Yet, in the context of lean initiatives, debates crop up regarding the role of preventive and predictive maintenance versus Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). Are preventive and predictive maintenance tactics sufficient? Isn’t TPM a separate initiative, a secondary consideration, or just plain extraneous to a primary lean implementation? Or, should lean and TPM be interconnected? In too many companies, equipment initiatives stop with preventive and predictive maintenance. TPM is a capability built on total asset reliability – and total employee involvement. More than traditional preventive maintenance, it is a systematic, data-driven process that fosters an efficient partnership between production, maintenance, and engineering, and that engages those closest to the work. It results in an organization’s ability to transition from reactive to proactive maintenance and to create low cost, even free capacity.  More importantly, TPM has a dramatic impact on your organisational culture, overall operations – and your bottom line. It frees up valuable production capacity without the drain of capital investment.  The direct and measureable results are better performance, increased capacity, improved quality, decreased scrap and waste, and increased reliability and efficiency. Without TPM, achieving lean flow is not possible; therefore TPM should be an integral part of any lean transformation.  TPM in a Nutshell In essence, TPM is a strategy that empowers employees by enlisting equipment operators to participate actively in the design, selection, correction, and maintenance of equipment. The objective: to ensure that every machine or production process is always able to perform its required tasks without interrupting or slowing down defect-free production. Operators share. ‘Ownership’ for the equipment with which they work.  TPM is viewed as  ‘beginning-to-end maintenance’ that is critically important to business success. Downtime […]

With the MapleSim Hydraulics Library, engineers can seamlessly incorporate industry-tested hydraulics components while continuing to take full advantage of all the modelling, analysis, and simulation abilities of MapleSim. MapleSim offers a modern approach to physical modelling and simulation, dramatically reducing model development and analysis time while producing fast, high-fidelity simulations. MapleSim enables modelling at the system level, so engineers can combine hydraulic subsystems with other domains and analyse their interactions. The MapleSim Hydraulics Library includes over 200 components for modelling pumps, motors, cylinders, restrictions, valves, hydraulic lines, lumped volumes, and sensors. It enables engineers to produce very high-fidelity models by accounting for compressible oil and cavitation effects, resulting in an extremely accurate view of system dynamics. Hydraulics systems are notoriously difficult to model with high accuracy, but so important to understanding system-level behaviour. The Hydraulics Library demonstrates the power of the Modelica standard platform for the systems engineering community.