Welcome to our quarterly newsletter and an update on our latest developments at Milspec. So far it has been a busy and fruitful year featuring some great milestones such as rolling off the 200th Nulka canister from our production line and being rewarded for our training excellence.
Looking ahead, we have got plenty of exciting opportunities including our new relationship with Southern Cross Mining, which will see more Milspec products applied in the mining industry, and we are also attending the Land Warfare Conference in Brisbane for the first time.
Milspec is more committed than ever to delivering its customers high-quality, precision work with ultimate efficiency and traceability. We are continuing our lean journey and look forward to sharing more benefits and efficiencies with you and our growing global client base.
Training excellence rewarded
We were very proud to be recognised for our excellence in training at the 2010 NSW Training Awards, where Milspec was awarded runner-up in the NSW Employer of the Year category.
Being an employer of choice, which offers staff-rewarding career paths and personal development opportunities, is very important to us and to achieve this we have encouraged all our employees to complete the Certificate IV in Competitive Manufacturing. So far 45 people have completed the course and another ten are due to finish shortly.
We support and congratulate our employees who are also actively learning and training via apprenticeships and traineeships, undergoing supervisor training and completing a Bachelor of Business and an Advanced Diploma of Electronics by distance education.
From everyone at Milspec, our warmest congratulations to the Employer of the Year category winner, O-I, the Asia-Pacific's leader in glass-packaging manufacturing. We are now looking forward to the judging of our nomination for the NSW Business Chamber Annual Award on 26 November.
New partnership with Southern Cross Group
We are very excited about our new partnership with one of Australia's largest auto-electrical companies, the Southern Cross Group.
Based at Mackay in Queensland, the company has selected our 300A alternator, the smallest of its kind in the world, for the use in their equipment, in particular their low-voltage high-output lighting system for harsh environments.
This LED-based system runs on 28V, instead of the usual 240V, providing a safer, more accessible system, which does not require high-voltage electricians to work on. Combined with our brush-less alternator, designed for the most hostile of environments, this LED lighting product is now one of the safest, most reliable and effective lighting systems available.
The potential for our alternator is enormous as it not only suits the requirements of Southern Cross but will fit into almost any vehicle where high-output and high-reliability charging is a requirement. If you consider the downtime costs for a vehicle worth millions of dollars, which can run into thousands of dollars per hour, the long-term savings of not having to consider alternators, for years rather than months, is easy to understand.
NULKA milestone – 200th canister
It hass been a great year for milestones and this year we have celebrated two with our long-term, valued client BAE Systems Australia. Milspec is the only company in the world certified to make and refurbish the hermetically-sealed NULKA canister, an Australian-designed missile decoy that seduces anti-ship missiles away from their targets.
On 4 August, Milspec staff celebrated making their 200th canister. BAE's NULKA production and TLS program manager, Bob Cranage, was on site to congratulate Milspec on its achievements and present the managing director, David Cooper, with a glass-etched NULKA canister to show BAE's appreciation of our successful, ongoing relationship.
Milspec has been refurbishing the canisters for BAE Systems Australia for the past seven years and congratulates the company on rolling out its 1000th canister late last month. The event was celebrated at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and BAE is now looking forward to the decoy's increased application in the US Navy.
Land Warfare Conference 2010
For the first time Milspec will be exhibiting at the Land Warfare Conference in Brisbane, on 16-19 November. The event, organised by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, will provide us with the unique opportunity to demonstrate our products and capabilities directly to the defence industries.
This year's theme is full spectrum threats: adaptive responses and we believe our 300A alternator and power distribution units, which will be on display, have great potential for further applications, particularly in military vehicles where rugged reliability is essential for mission success.
Being a small, niche-development company, with highly skilled engineers, designers and tradesmen, Milspec is uniquely positioned to offer an integrated approach to your requirements from research and development and prototyping, through to full production and testing and we look forward to discussing your ideas. Tim Stewart, Brad Hewitt and David Cooper will be attending the conference and look forward to seeing you on stand#120.
On the couch with Kylie King
It's not often one gets the chance to bare all so it was with some trepidation commercial director Wendy Cooper approached 'the couch' to be interviewed by Kylie King at last month's Border Business Chicks dinner. The session was well received with Wendy sharing the family company's humble beginnings and her own personal growth from learning to operate a fax machine to running a company with more than 120 clients from around the globe.
"We thought we'd have a small engineering firm with about 20 employees but 8.5 years later the business has more than trebled in staff numbers and turnover," she said.
Getting Lean in Canada
Milspec is continuing its adoption of Lean principles to deliver further efficiencies and savings to our customers. This month we have two senior managers heading to Canada for a benchmarking tour of the manufacturing belt west of Toronto. Canada is about ten years more advanced than Australia in adopting Lean principles so we look forward to learning a great deal from this experience and being able to apply further efficiencies in 2011. The tour also coincides with the AME Conference in Baltimore, US, which our managers will be attending.
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