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.”
The Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) and the Welding Technology Institute of Australia (WTIA) have signed an agreement to extend their collaboration and to support Australian firms, particularly small to medium enterprises.
The Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) commits the two organisations to work together to develop a broader understanding of existing technology footprints and to build a program of benchmarking, capacity building, training and certification activities.
The MoA comes at a time of policy and practical challenges in terms of growing industrial capacity and broadening defence supply chains.
The agreement builds on DMTC project work already underway, supported by WTIA, to build industry capacity in areas of Defence priority such as welding of high-strength steels. More information
DMTC’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Mark Hodge, and his WTIA counterpart Geoff Crittenden signed the MoA into effect at the National Manufacturing Week and AusTech expo in Melbourne.
“Our work continues to focus on delivering a beneficial outcome first for our Defence customer, and for our industry partners. In that context, DMTC has already helped many Australian suppliers to embrace new technologies and better understand Defence requirements,” Dr Hodge said.
“Formalising our relationship with WTIA will help us to share information on technology development.”
Under the MoA, the two organisations will also seek to work closely with the Centre for Defence Industry Capability (CDIC), the establishment of which was one of the key announcements in the 2016 Defence Industry Policy Statement.
DMTC has teamed up with a number of Australian Government and innovation partner organisations to provide advice and information to manufacturers looking to grow and transform their business at National Manufacturing Week and Austech 2017.
National Manufacturing Week is the largest gathering of Australian manufacturers under one roof and Austech is the only show specifically targeted at the metalworking, machine tool and ancillary market in Australia.
Experts from the following Government agencies and innovation partners will come together to form an Advanced Manufacturing team:
