Each year APAC insider magazine look at which businesses impress them in a range of industry sectors. The Australian Made Awards focus on businesses that make products in Australia. The high mix of electronic product types we design and make coupled with the level of technical complexity involved got us the win this year.
We are also pretty pleased with this recognition for products that are Made in Australia. Complex Electronic Products is our space and this is what makes them profitable and commercially defensible to manufacture in Australia.
The trophy is already here and we will update this post once the official web page updates come through at APAC insider.
Apac Insider
Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 40 years.
The COVID-19 has been very disruptive and now that vaccination rates are higher it is now mostly about managing our way forward. Testing is still a key strategy and Australia has led the way in Rapid Antigen Testing.
Unfortunately the federal governments has been reluctant to invest in practical local manufacturing capabilities in this area and that has seen the businesses moving to off shore manufacture.
Policy 101 shows us that if you want businesses to direct investment and effort in a particular direction, you need to put in place favourable conditions to encourage that. This isn’t always financial co-investment. But somehow we seem to be failing this topic badly.
Currently locally made Rapid Antigen Tests are exported but that is going to change. We led the way in this technology area and the rest of the world gets it.
OK, that is quite a lot of coverage. Which shows how important this initiative is.
I’m looking forward to this project going into full scale manufacture. We have learned several important lessons from this pandemic and I hope we don’t forget them:
you need to be able to make essential supplies locally
local jobs matter to the whole economy, not just the employed person
insecure work arrangements are a risk, not a business benefit
robust modern economies make things
Our congratulations again to Lumos Diagnostics and Planet Innovation for bringing the technology to the table and to the Victorian State Government for understanding the opportunity to invest in the future of Victoria.
Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 30 years.
This is a classic startup tale where a small team do incredibly good work to get an idea into a demonstrable form and then build a team who can complete the package.
A Melbourne based business came to us with a mechanical prototype operated using three Arduino modules and hand wired actuators and drivers that had allowed them to prove the operating principle of their cell processing system. The system was managed by an Excel spreadsheet that allowed them to code the interactions they needed in the spreadsheet itself. This is one of the most impressive uses of Excel as a process controller I’ve seen.
Now they needed us to take that and make it into a robust version that could be transported.
This is a very good example of solving the problems you need to in order to take your next step. This minimise cost now, reduces time to the next step and reduces technical risk.
What we did was to create a set of PCBs that acted as custom shields for the Arduino modules and also provided mechanical support for the drivers, sensors and indicators. The hand soldered wires were replaced by crimped connectors and the whole assembly was now robust enough to put on a plane and allow them to demonstrate to industry experts and potential customers. This they did very successfully.
From Concept Prototype to Production
The next stage was to ditch the Arduino modules and create a more capable embedded system. But they also needed to put together a Control Interface for managing the instrument including in a GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) environment with laboratory automation, and an editor for creating the programs (recipes) that defined the cell processing steps.
And lastly they also needs to get the manufacturing systems in place and the service support software.
To manage the risks they divided these tasks between three different businesses.
Product in action
Another Melbourne developer did the control interface and also took control of the manufacturing processes. These processes require ISO 13485 Quality Management Systems which they had in place but we do not.
Successful Endeavours did the electronics, embedded software and the communications interfaces that ran on the tablet used for the Control Interface and the Service and Production Support software.
Contactpoint took on the Centrifuge Protocol Builder which is a web based tool that allowed creation of protocols and also simulation of them in use in order to refine them off the machine. This is very important because we are talking about processing human cells and if you mess up a batch you have to get more. Which could involve surgery. Contactpoint have an excellent Centrifuge Protocol Builder case study on their site which I recommend you also check out.
Protocol Builder
And getting to market
The final step of course is how you sell, distribute and support a product like this which is international in scope. Another great thing they did right was to aim global from day one. So they negotiated and closed a deal with an international distributor who already had the global presence in that market and were able to handle the logistics and presence to support the instrument. The product was launched at the Melbourne ISCT 2019 conference in May 2019.
Market Launch at ISCT 2019
We wish them every success with this Designed in Australia, Made in Australia, world first technology product. For us, this one just ticks every box we care about.
Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 30 years.
We will have some new Made in Australia products to shows and I’ll be doing presentations on how to design an ultra-low-power IoT device and on the Innovation process.
Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development, focusing on products that are intended to be Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 30 years.
We will be there. We think the arcHUB is a revolutionary device and are pleased the judges selected it as one of the Smart 100 finalists 2018.
arcHUB trial at Fitzroy Gardens
And an update. The Smart 100 2018 have been revealed in judges order with the arcHUB Smart Cities Sensor Suite developed for The Active Reactor Company coming in just outside the top 20.
