Packserv Australia has placed the emphasis on supplying locally manufactured and easy to use technologies to the food and beverage industry, which significantly cuts down on lead times. Adam McCleery writes.
For the past 16 years Packserv Australia has built a reputation as the country’s leading rental and technical service providers for the food and beverage industry, particularly SME’s.
Nathan Wardell, Packserv Australia managing director, said the company started out as a rental and technical service provider before continually diversifying its offerings.
“We began importing, distributing, and reselling other people’s machinery about six years ago and then three years ago we started designing and building our own machinery, so now we are a full-service manufacturer. Which means we can supply complete production lines and turnkey solutions.
It has been a long journey, we now have in-house CAD and CNC capabilities where we can take a client’s problem, draw a solution, and be holding the finished part ready to install in very little time.”
Wardell said one of the key driving factors behind the evolution of Packserv Australia was the notion that if parts can be manufactured locally, then they should be. Not just to cut back on lead times, but making your own parts also allows rapid updates around design, which is a prerequisite for innovation, and without the inherent risks to IP that have proved so painful in the past.
He adds, “If you’re still not convinced, then the environmental implications surely serve to win any argument. Leaving aside for a moment the very real and obvious environmental cost of shipping manufactured goods from one side of the world to the other, adopting, or even aspiring to, a carbon neutral model for manufacturing can only ever be disingenuous if we continue to offshore responsibility for manufacturing the things that can and should be made here in Australia.”
Possibly the only positive to come out of the Covid pandemic was the stark realisation of how much we did rely on imported goods. International supply chains that previously appeared so strong were revealed to be more akin to international paper chains, and wet ones at that.
In practical terms, it’s possibly the lead times on imported technology and machinery that creates the biggest headaches for local food and beverage manufacturers. Making these things locally whenever possible, is one of the best ways to allow local businesses to keep up with the ever-increasing rate of changes in food and beverage manufacturing processes.
Packserv has several technology partnerships running in parallel with its own internal product development.
One such partnership is with UTS, where a digital platform is currently being developed that will sit beneath the machinery with massive potential for efficiency and reliability gains. Another partnership with the University of Sydney’s new Advanced Manufacturing Hub, where additive manufacturing technology is being utilised to develop parts and components using new materials and 3D printing technology.
“The technology must evolve with the materials. That is something we are conscious of and from time to time we do have to engineer machinery to suit special packaging,” said Wardell.
One of the best ways to get the message out there for companies like Packserv Australia is with trade shows, which made a successful comeback this year.
“We exhibited at Auspack earlier in the year, our first big trade show. It was just terrific being face to face, in amongst the industry,” said Wardell.
“We had a lot of machinery on the stand and the result we got was amazing. I just could not believe the number of businesses looking for new machinery for their production facilities. The level of interest in our product range was twice our annual turnover, just from that one trade show.”
Future proofing is another area of focus for Packserv Australia, as it is for the industry, Ken Seddon, chief operating officer explains, “You only have to look at how far the industry has come in recent decades to see the value of future proofing. If you go back to the late 90s and even the 80s a company would design or develop a product and take it to an overseas manufacturer and the machine built to suit that packaging and product.”
“But if you wanted to make a change to any aspect of the process you had to send the equipment to be re-engineered by the manufacturer.
“I think the marketplace is moving so quickly now and manufacturers don’t really have the luxury of waiting six months for any amendments to be carried out.”
Future proofing is another key area of focus for the experts at Packserv.
When a client sees an opportunity in the marketplace, they are usually looking to capitalise as quickly as possible, especially in the competitive SME space where Packserv operates.
“That’s the space that we play in, customers can call us with a requirement and often, because we have stock inhouse, we can have machinery on-site the same day,” said Wardell.
“We also focus on versatility and adaptability so that when you do change from one type of packaging to another type you don’t have to reengineer everything or wait months for parts.”
Wardell said the company takes great pride in being an Australian manufacturer and with it comes the advantage of being able to engineer solutions in house which over the course of the last 16 years has helped the company develop a huge suite of offerings on top of its ability to provide tailor made solutions.
“It wasn’t an easy process to get to this point. We’ve had time to perfect the process and we’ve had the time to become established.”
The technical support Packserv Australia provides its clients is another jewel in an already impressive crown.
“Due to the sheer number of products in our suite, around 250 different pieces of machinery, that cross over pneumatics, electronics, hydraulics and mechanical, it can take up to 12 to 24 months to get a new technician trained and up to speed to be able to carry out the required works”.
Packserv also make the time to train the client’s operational team members to get them up to speed which also cuts on-costs significantly.
“We can put the technology into any SME manufacturing space and with some basic training the on site operators are able to operate, strip down, wash, and put the machine back together again,” said Wardell.
Cutting lead times is clearly just a small part of the overall picture. As successive Australian governments allowed a once vibrant manufacturing industry to dissolve overseas there are huge imperatives to drive it back to our shores and Packserv’s latest endeavours are, to say the least, forward looking.
At a recent visit to the Packserv Marrickville factory, the Minister for Industry and Science, Ed Husic, saw the unveiling of the steps being taken to gather data to be used as a framework for the implementation of AI technology. This will be harnessed to enable, amongst other things, predictive servicing requirements for the machines they make from scratch, in Australia.
Wardell explained further, “The visit left a positive impression on the Minister who, later the same day, in a speech he made to The Australian Institute, stated, “It’s not just a technology for big business (AI), Packserv, who’ve teamed up with UTS to use AI to reimagine the way they scale up their production lines, crucial to their longer-term viability, staving off competition.”
UTS Centre for Advanced Manufacturing’s Dr Nick Bennett explained, “Packserv have identified that AI can play an important role in their next generation of products and crucially that this is not just a technology for large, multi-nationals”