Manufacturer ANCA believes government manufacturing plan is missing the point

Pat Boland, a co-founder of ANCA, which sells automated machine tools to Apple, Samsung and Boeing suppliers, has said the Abbott government's plan to kickstart the manufacturing sector loses sight of drivers of success like designing better products and updating obsolete equipment.

He said the government's focus on advanced manufacturing misses the point and its cooperative research centres are bureaucratic and wasteful.

The government pledged $731 million to CRCs this year and Canberra has spent $4 billion on 209 CRCs since 1991, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane said in May. There are CRCs for innovative manufacturing and automotive industry.

"Everybody wants advanced manufacturing but that's a service not a driver. The driver is design and marketing for the products that people want to buy," said Boland. "There's a lot of talk about additive manufacturing, 3D printing and so on, and to me that's a solution looking for a problem," he said. "I don't want to knock it but it's not a driver.

"One of the issues facing Australia now is its stock of machine tools and manufacturing equipment is probably obsolete."

It needs to be upgraded to machines that can with run with robots at high productivity, he said, but the latest machines are very costly.

ANCA, based in Bayswater in Melbourne's outer east, exports 98% of its production and has been doing the things experts say Australian manufacturers need to do to prosper in the 21st century for more than three decades.

Their competitors are from Germany and Japan. About half of privately owned ANCA's 950 workers are overseas, but Australia still supplies more than half the annual sales of about $200 million.

The Abbott government has set up an advanced manufacturing 'growth centre' chaired by former IBM Australia chief executive Andrew Stevens at the urging of the Business Council of Australia.

Stevens said last week that Australia needed a new approach to succeed in the sector because it was "moving apace". He told the committee for economic development of Australia that the priority for manufacturers was to break into global supply chains for multinationals such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

He said successes such as ANCA and Sutton Tools, which sells drilling machines to Apple's supply chain, were "problem solvers for international supply chains", but 3D printing will "change fundamentally" the way these supply chains work.

Boland zeroed in on practical things. He said ANCA had benefited from a 50% research and development grant in the early 1980s, which it won in a competitive process.

"To me that was one of the most effective forms of assistance," he said — a low-cost way to support product development.

Source: AFR