» It's a 'can do' attitude, our team are always confident of finding a solution. I've seen some truly pioneering advances in the design and manufacture of automated production and process machinery come from that approach over many years.

Our vision is to be 'the global innovator in automation.' Our company is really good at recognising the importance of the right people and the training needed to do that and achieve technical excellence.

We have people on the ground who are skilled at recognising and pursuing new opportunities in automation. But we also know it's one thing to have a clever idea for a client, it's another to turn it into a business activity and see it through to delivery. So its crucial to have the whole team thinking the same way. We are made up of people good at what they do, who take pride in working together across the different areas of expertise to see the product through to being market ready.

I see that as a genuine team approach, one that allows our design and build experts to collaborate really well on difficult problems. And if we don't have the expertise needed for a particular project, we'll get it - finding the solution is the goal.

When you're confident you have the people behind you, you are then confident to commit to taking on any technical challenges - that's our way. «

It started in the 2000's - we were keen to expand markets during a global downturn in the traditional appliance industry. Diversification into the meat industry began with a meeting between Scott and PPCS, made memorable by PPCS manually cutting up a lamb carcass in a demonstration in Scott's Dunedin boardroom (subsequently becoming known as the "blood on the boardroom table" moment). The result was a proposal to PPCS to automate the boning room of one of its plants. They liked the idea, and this eventually led to us forming a joint venture company with Silver Fern Farms (formerly PPCS) to deliver an automated lamb boning room.

When we started there were some areas of the automating lamb boning we had no idea how to go about; luckily all of us thrive on a good technical challenge.

Our solution was to break the development into modules and work through each stage of the process, working out how it should look, discussing the concept with our development team, doing trial work to prove it, then taking the learning's to work up the required outcome. That even meant introducing completely new concepts like X-ray into our areas of capability. We also found that working directly with Silver Fern Farms gave us invaluable meat processing knowledge into the particulars of what was required in boning carcasses.

We now have three plants operational in New Zealand, and another one in Australia.

Our results totally turned the concept of lamb boning upside down. We can see so many benefits coming from our venture - the fully automated boning room will remove meat processing staff from hazardous bandsaws, address labour shortages within the industry, and improve cut accuracy to be more precise on high value animals, giving the farmer and the processor better returns. I predict huge potential and opportunities from this. «

So the obvious move was for us to work with X-ray hardware providers, work out how to configure a system, and design one for ourselves, and that's just what we did, successfully developing in-house expertise as we went. Very precise analysis of the X-ray image now determines the position of bones and the exact cut point required to maximise the value from each animal. It's exciting for us now to see it recognised as leading edge technology.

Not only that, we are putting our newly found X-ray and image analysis capability to other good uses within our business. Already, our experts have used their skills to solve difficult problems on some of our robotic projects. «