DMTC team members participated in DST Group’s Partnerships Week for 2017. The event provided opportunities for DST Group partners and industry to understand the best ways to engage with DST Group in the rollout of new policy and program initiatives, particularly the Next Generation Technologies Fund.
Our Supply Chain Engagement manager, Charlotte Morris, was interviewed as part of the post-event video compile.
“Walk before you run” – A better approach to program design
An enhanced approach to program development in DMTC is resulting in smarter engagement with prospective industry and research partners, faster transition from development to implementation and more strategic deployment of resources. The more rigorous approach, outlined at DMTC’s annual conference in March, was successfully implemented in a project recently completed within DMTC’s Maritime Program. Research partner Swinburne University joined forces with Adelaide-based industry partner AirSpeed to conduct a scoping review on the effect of impact resistance on the durability of composite structures in the marine environment. The project team scrutinised existing academic literature along with existing technical solutions, and went on to benchmark current Australian industry capability and identify prospective industry and research partners that could be involved in follow-on projects. DMTC’s Maritime Program Leader, Associate Professor Stephen van Duin, is upbeat about the results. “Defence projects are often described as a long game, but it’s also true that the early phases of a program or project are often the most critical to long-term success,” he said. “In this case, we’ve spent five or six months making sure we have a really good understanding of the technical risks and opportunities, which will help us as we move forward.”
Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) Annual Conference
As DMTC’s Lead Program Manager Deepak Ganga explains, scoping and de-risking activities, like this one with Swinburne and AirSpeed, are all about helping the DMTC Management Team and Board to make better decisions. “There will be times when these early investigations lead us to decide not to pursue new projects. That’s actually a successful outcome in terms of avoiding wasted effort or mis-directed investments,” Deepak says. “Particularly in areas where the technical risk is higher, we can use a relatively quick project task to better understand the technical issues and to prove our assumption before making a more significant investment. “In this case it’s about answering questions like ‘What is the current state of the development of marine composites? What technical improvements can be made and what are the risks involved with moving along the TRL path? What would a new project, or suite of projects, look like?’.” “All of this knowledge helps us to make higher-confidence estimates about development of the technology and about hitting the milestones we set for capability, cost and time.”
DMTC is looking forward to engaging with a wide range of innovative businesses as well as local and international trade delegates at this year’s Pacific 2017 International Maritime Exposition in Sydney in the first week of October.
The DMTC team will be adjacent to the Defence Innovation Hub and CDIC personnel on the Department of Defence stand in Hall 2 Location R15.
PACIFIC 2017 is a global business event, attracting senior maritime and defence industry, military and government decision-makers from around the world. Read more here.
DMTC’s business model is firmly founded on a commitment to business excellence and improvement. This has recently been confirmed with DMTC achieving certification to the ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Standard. This is an important (and independent) verification of our approach to the business of collaboration with our industry and research partners, and a great credit to the whole DMTC community and particularly the head office team.
