Nov 7, 2017  - Fiji  - A local manufacturing company hopes to harness the growth in the construction sector with their recent venture into standardised steel production for local and soon export supply.  Gurbachan Singh's Steel Mills Ltd, a steel manufacturing company, has made a lucrative investment in constructing its new major production plant at Lakena in Nausori.  The new facility will see the production of thermo-mechanically-treated steel bars or in short TMT bars among many other steel products for construction use.

According to the company's managing director, Jagjeet Singh, fondly known as Jack, the concept behind the new production facility is to produce quality construction rods out of scrap steel metal.

"We will be processing scrap steel to be processed into construction rods. And these are not just any construction rods but TMT deformed steel bars which have high yield strength," Mr Singh said in an interview with this newspaper.

These bars will be made varying in size from 6mm to 25mm.

"We will also make plain rods, angles and strips from this new plant to be recycled from old scrap steel that we will buy locally."

Mr Singh, however, highlighted should the scrap metal not be sufficient in supply, the company will be complementing with billets, which are ready-made steel blocks that are purchased overseas.

But the process of producing such high quality steel bars requires sophisticated technology and equipment.

Mr Singh said the investment included the purchase of equipment and machinery required for steel production from overseas.

This brings the total investment to about $5 million, he said.

"We will cut the scrap steel into pieces which will be put into an induction furnace.

"This will then be heated up to 1200 degrees Celsius which will make it molten," Mr Singh said.

"This will then be poured and made as moulds to make billets or slabs. It is then again re-heated in the furnace to make it hot again which is later rolled as steel bars."

While the company has eyed supplying the local commercial market, particularly the construction sector, it also has ambitious plan to commence exporting to highly competitive international markets.

"The construction of the steel factory has been completed and we are currently in the processing of trial testing the new machinery and equipment," Mr Singh said.

"The reason why we are doing trial tests is to ensure that we meet standards and qualities that is met overseas."

The 2000sqm steel production plant, which sits on three acre land, was fully boosted last week as electricity supply has finally been installed at the site.

This, Mr Singh said, had been a delaying factor to the project which initially commenced in early 2015.

The new venture will also see more than 100 new and existing staff members being employed including specialists who will be coming in from India and Phillipines to operate the steel plant.

"We are expected to run trials on the November 15 and start full production by mid of December," Mr Singh said.

While the company has set its target of 15,000 tonnes of steel for its annual production capacity, Mr Singh added that this would gradually rise as business advances.

"Our Prime Minister has been emphasising a lot on the environment and the importance of recycling. We see a lot of scrap steel like bulky derelict ships that are lying on the harbour," Mr Singh said.

"With this, we are now ready to buy scrap metal and we will pay them according to the quantity. We intend to buy old ships, fresh cans, car bodies, car chassis and industrial scrap."

The production plant is also expected to officially open in January next year given that trial production and tests run smoothly.

Mr Singh, a businessman from Labasa, has been mainly involved in the manufacturing industry for a number of years with his company specialising in several areas and products.

Apart from his recent steel venture, Gurbachan Singh's Steel Mills Ltd, the company also manufactures PVC pipes, trading tyres, garden hose, water tanks among many others.

|  A FijiTimesOnline release ||  November 7,  2017   |||

7 Nov  -  The latest New Zealand Diversity Survey revealed that 61 per cent of organisations are perceived to value the most senior members of their staff, and a third offer flexible or reduced hours and the opportunity to be a mentor to their aging workers.

The survey is conducted twice a year by Diversity Works New Zealand and Chief Executive Bev Cassidy-Mackenzie says it’s also encouraging to see that the number of organisations with no specific strategy for engaging with aging workers dropped from more than 70 per cent a year ago to just 32 per cent last month.

Government figures predict that by 2020, a quarter of the New Zealand workforce will be aged 55 or older, and these wisdom workers can offer a solution to the skills and labour shortage many industry sectors are facing. Businesses need to capitalise on the experience and loyalty they bring to the workforce and the New Zealand economy,” she says.

However, only a quarter of organisations surveyed have a formal policy or initiative in place to deal with the issue of an aging workforce, something Cassidy-Mackenzie expects to change within the next 12 months.

“We saw some great initiatives to maximise the benefits of older workers at the 2017 Diversity Awards NZ™ – the supreme winner, tourism operator Real Journeys, has introduced a scheme that uses its experienced skippers nearing retirement to train younger workers, creating new career opportunities for staff at both ends of the age spectrum.”

Michael Barnett, a director of the New Zealand Chambers of Commerce, agrees.

“Hoping that an ageing workforce will be someone else’s problem is not a strategy. The survey clearly shows that older workers are valued and depended on and that we should have a plan to retain and re-educate if we are to keep them as a resource,” he says.

Smaller businesses might consider a strategy that engages older workers who are loyal and will bring knowledge and stability to their work places, he says.

The NZ Diversity Survey, which was initiated in 2013 to create a better understanding of the key diversity challenges facing New Zealand organisations, is carried out twice a year by Diversity Works New Zealand, in partnership with the New Zealand Chambers of Commerce and supported by Massey University.

| A Diversity New Zealand release  ||  November 7,  2017   |||

7 Nov  -  Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Reserve Bank Governor Grant Spencer today signed an unchanged Policy Targets Agreement (PTA), which sets out specific targets for maintaining price stability. The Minister also released today the Terms of Reference for a Review of the Reserve Bank Act.  The Policy Targets Agreement, effective immediately, is the same as that signed by Mr Spencer and the previous Finance Minister Steven Joyce, which has been in effect since Mr Spencer’s six-month term as Governor began on 27 September. The PTA requires the Reserve Bank to keep future CPI inflation outcomes between 1 per cent and 3 per cent on average over the medium term, with a focus on keeping future average inflation near the 2 percent target midpoint. “The renewed PTA will continue to provide continuity, consistency and stability for the monetary policy target during the period of review of the monetary policy provisions of the Reserve Bank Act, and ahead of the appointment of a new Governor,” Mr Spencer said Mr Spencer said that the Bank welcomes the Review of the Reserve Bank Act and will work with the Treasury on the Review. “The Reserve Bank has been subject to several reviews in the past. The Terms of Reference state that the operational independence of the Reserve Bank remains paramount and will be protected,” he said.

| A RBNZ release  ||  November 7,  2017   |||

7 Nov  -  When it comes to designing a washdown-friendly facility, it really starts before a company even begins to build the factory.  That’s according to Elis Owens, director of technical services at Birko, which offers integrated food safety solutions provided by highly trained and experienced professionals.  The company should ask itself if the actual structure of the facility has been designed in such a way that will make it amenable to effective cleaning, and if the equipment has been designed and built following the principles of sanitary design, he explains.

“It should be designed in a way that can be easily cleaned and with materials that are compatible with common cleaning chemicals,” he says. “The way the equipment is put together into the various production lines and the way those production lines are put into the facility [are important].”

So, for example, making sure there is enough space all the way around the equipment for people to access it for cleaning, including catwalks for cleaning in high areas and making sure the floors in the facility are sloped toward the drains and that the equipment is not installed over the top of the drains, all come into play.

“There’s a whole host of factors that need to be taken into consideration,” Owens says, “foot traffic, product flow, forklifts’ movement around the facility.”

Scott L. Burnett, director of food safety and quality, global food and beverage at Ecolab, says factories should include procedures and structures for hygienic zoning, which complement their food safety plan. The use of hygienic zoning creates a “tortuous path” to reduce the risks of food safety hazards entering the product stream by protecting the critical processing areas.

Continue here to read the full article on FoodEngineering ||  November 7,  2017   |||

7 Nov  -  Oracle is diving headlong into its quest to get more traction in the Australian and New Zealand small to mid-market with the launch of its digital hub in Sydney.  The new hub, the first to be opened in Australia, is one of five digital hubs the software vendor is establishing up in the broader Asia Pacific region.  It is part of a global network of best practice centres for small and medium-sized business (SMB) and is set to serve smaller clients on both sides of the Tasman.

The tech giant first announced in November last year its plans to create hundreds of new jobs focused on cloud technologies, through the opening of a digital sales hub in Sydney.

The software vendor said it would house a new team of over 200 digital sales professionals, designed to help mid-sized organisations transition to the cloud.

“Cloud is changing the heart of business in Australia, and at an unprecedented pace,” Oracle Australia and New Zealand managing director, Rob Willis, said at the time.

“We are seeing companies selecting and starting to use their new platforms in less than six weeks in some cases,” he said.

Now, the Sydney hub has finally arrived, and is set to house Oracle’s new digital sales team, which will be squarely focused on helping mid-sized organisations transition to the cloud, and to “transform the buying experience”.

With the arrival of the new centre, end customers that want to buy Oracle products entirely online can use the vendor’s click-to-buy Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience platform.

The digital hubs will also provide a complete suite of cloud applications, platform and infrastructure services, as both standalone offerings and as bundles.

“There are more than two million SMBs in Australia, many of whom haven’t worked with Oracle or used cloud before,” Oracle’s A/NZ head of application for digital, Malcolm Ferguson, said.

“They now have access to the most modern solutions in the market, available online, direct via the hub and through our expanded end-to-end ecosystem, working with the vast network in A/NZ.

“The increased choice in cloud technology will help accelerate SMBs’ ability to innovate and grow more quickly, paving the way for the next big SMB revolution in the country. This solid investment reiterates our strong commitment to Australia,” he said.

While the launch of the new hub provides the facility for end clients to buy directly from Oracle, the vendor has stressed that it does not mean partners will be cut out of the picture when it comes to making a margin from deals in the potentially lucrative local mid-market.

“Our ecosystem is very, very important for us,” Ferguson told ARN. “We’re going to rely quite heavily on our partner community to provide the professional services to implement the products. That does not change.

“We will still be looking to our partner community to resell. So that doesn’t go away. In fact, we’re in the process at the moment of building that out….the reseller model and the service delivery model is very much a part of the Oracle digital strategy,” he said.

Not only will partners have the potential to provide services around the Oracle products end customers sign up for, according to Ferguson, they will also be able to either direct end clients to the click-to-buy portal or work through one of the vendor’s value-added distributors.

The move to open the hub locally is part of an effort by Oracle to look beyond its traditional top-end enterprise market and make a broader attack on the smaller end of the market, with a focus on organisations with turnovers of between $10 million and $250 million annually.

It is also part of a larger strategy by Oracle to push its cloud-based solutions and services to a market that may not have the infrastructure in place to handle the vendor’s offerings in an on-premises scenario.

The move follows multiple claims by Oracle co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison, that the software giant is closing in on undisputed public cloud vendor, Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud market stakes.

“Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward,” Ellison claimed during the Oracle OpenWorld 2016 event in San Francisco late last year. “And we're very proud of our second generation of infrastructure-as-a-service.”

| A ResellerNews release  ||  November 7,  2017   |||

#7 - This panic’s debut can be firmly dated to May 2002 when the BBC exhibited a drama, Fields of Gold which many still believe to have been a documentary on supposedly devastating diseases caused by what suddenly became known as GM. This BBC scare mongering concoction insisted that GM was zoonotic in that the contagion it triggered could jump from animals to humans. The contagion it was dramatized could also jump not only from fauna to humans but also from flora.

The position nowThe panic went through the political class like a prairie fire and cost New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark (pictured) the outright majority she was confident in obtaining in the general election she called for the end of July that year. The BBC drama was rushed onto television here just before the general election election. The timing of the exhibiting here during peak time viewing was underpinned by a sense of urgency and imminence and thus carried

| MSC Newswire Big Frights of Our Times Series #7  || Monday 6 November 2017   |||

New Zealand’s 52nd Parliament will meet on Wednesday 8 November to hear the Speech from the Throne by Governor General Dame Patsy Reddy, says Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

“We promised we would be a government of action so I’m pleased to announce the opening of Parliament next week.

“The Speech from the Throne will set out our vision for a fairer, better New Zealand and the measures we intend to introduce over the next three years to achieve that.

“Our priorities are to take action to reduce child poverty and inequality, help Kiwis to live in affordable, warm, dry homes, restore funding to our health system so all can access it, expand jobs and opportunities in our regions, make post-secondary school education more affordable, clean up our rivers and play our part in tackling climate change.

“The opening of Parliament means we will be able to start making progress on many of the key elements of our 100 Day Plan and start delivering real change to improve the lives of New Zealanders.”

Background

The opening of Parliament consists of two ceremonies – the Commission Opening on Tuesday 7 November and the State Opening on Wednesday 8 November.

The Commission Opening will take place at 11.00am on Tuesday 7 November. The Chief Justice, acting as a Royal Commissioner, will open Parliament so that members can be sworn in and a Speaker elected.

The formal State Opening will be on the next day, Wednesday 8 November at 10.30am.

The Speech from the Throne takes place at the State Opening when the Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy sets out the Labour-led Government’s intentions for the next three years.

The public can watch both ceremonies in Parliament grounds or live on Parliament TV and RNZ.

| A Beehive release  ||  October 30,  2017   |||

4 Nov _ As blockchain and IoT converge, the push to commercialize applications leveraging both technologies grows. The latest industry to embrace this confluence is the transportation and logistics industry. In late August, the Blockchain in Trucking Alliance (BITA) launched with 150 or so member organizations — including transportation management companies, brokers, carriers, shippers and technology vendors. BITA’s stated goal is to create standards and educate industry stakeholders about the promise of blockchain. And at last week’s Connected Fleets USA event in Atlanta, BITA co-founder Craig Fuller, CEO for TransRisk, stressed that the combination of IoT and blockchain in logistics and transportation will be a formidable one.

Blockchain “has the power to transform almost every element of this industry,” said Fuller, whose company develops products to help stakeholders in the transportation industry manage price risk. In the future, blockchain systems will work in tandem with data from IoT devices used in transportation and logistics. Business transactions surrounding the shipment of freight will be automated using blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which improve upon traditional contracts by enforcing the rules controlling the transfer of currency or assets under specific conditions. In simplified terms, blockchain systems use a chain of cryptographically protected records to expose the details of transactions to all participants and distribute records across the network of participating “nodes,” or computers, thereby eliminating the need for a central authority to maintain records, which makes processes more efficient and cuts costs.

The benefits according to Sandeep Kar, chief strategy officer for Fleet Complete, include:

• Accelerated payment, better security and reduction of fraud.
• Simplified claims settlement.
• Improved traceability and trackability.
• Elimination of the middleman, which cuts costs, reduces paperwork and shortens the supply chain.
• Reduction in the cost of regulations and compliance.
• Increased transparency of price, ownership and the entire process.

But there are, of course, challenges to blockchain in logistics and transportation, which Kar summarized as:

• Lack of initial knowledge, skills, expertise and trust in the technology.
• Limited easy availability of cryptocurrencies, which may or may not be coupled with a blockchain system.
• A bias toward the established infrastructure.
• Lack of a central authority to mitigate risk.
• Potential cryptocurrency volatility because no central authority governs cryptocurrencies.

To help the industry get past the obstacles and reap the rewards of blockchain, BITA is attempting to address the education gap, as well as help develop standards that are specific to the transport industry. Education is critical, Fuller said: “People don’t understand the use cases for it. They know the buzzwords, but they don’t know how it’s actually used in the market.” Fuller said he’s been on the receiving end of a number of questions about how to create commercial uses of blockchain in logistics and trucking. Questions like those are what led to the formation of BITA. “We’re bringing disparate, sometimes competitive parties together to create a common framework to solve problems. … We’re trying to bring together the folks [who] can actually have an impact,” he said.

Performance history records. Potential use cases for blockchain in trucking include maintaining accurate performance history records. When a truck enters the secondary market (that is, gets sold as a used vehicle), questions come up around how the vehicle was maintained. “In a blockchain environment, you can have a trustless record” of that maintenance, Fuller said. Because blockchain transaction records are considered immutable and transparent, parties in a transaction don’t need to have established trust with one another beforehand. “The beautiful part is, I don’t have to trust the other party, the seller or an intermediary. The data is flawless.”

“The analog [to the performance history use case] in the consumer car industry is Carfax,” Fuller said. “Except [with blockchain], there’s no reporting agency. [The records] are distributed [across the nodes in the blockchain system built for this purpose].” All records pertaining to the truck would be recorded to the blockchain, from the moment it rolled off the assembly line until it entered the market as a used vehicle — using IoT sensor data as well as other transactional data related to the vehicle. A potential buyer of the truck therefore would be able to make a purchase decision with full knowledge of the vehicle’s history.

[Blockchain360, co-located with IoT Security Summit and Cloud Security Summit, investigates how blockchain can scale to meet the IoT's needs across industry and enterprise, accelerating widespread adoption. Get your ticket now.]

Capacity monitoring. Another potential use of blockchain in the trucking industry is capacity monitoring. One of the factors determining the cost of shipping freight relates to cargo volume. IoT sensors can be used to detect the amount of space a particular party uses; that info is used in determining cost associated with shipment. In the future, pouring that data into a blockchain-based system, enabled by a smart contract, will mean self-executing payments against the amount of space used by the freight, as measured by the IoT sensors. In other words, a much more efficient process than what exists today.

Gray trailers. Blockchain also could level the playing field between truck owners and third-party logistics companies when it comes to “gray trailer pools.” Today, Fuller said, truck owners have an advantage over third-party logistics companies because they own access to freight trailers. Blockchain could enable a business model whereby “the trailers will be owned by a third-party entity and shared collectively with fleets. … You can have a fleet of gray trailers and use blockchain to not only know who had access to that equipment but also charge for it. And you can tie a contract to it and settle it in real time so there is no collection process,” Fuller said.

Dispute resolution. Blockchain will also have a role resolving disputes, he said. “Every single day, there’s $140 billion tied up in disputes for payment,” Fuller said. “The shipper says, ‘You didn’t send me a proper bill. … Your rate is $1.90, but [the bill] says $1.89.” And guess what? The shipper … doesn’t pay it until that price is exact.” Such wrangling creates a strain on the trucking payments environment, he said. With a blockchain system and a smart contract, the transaction would be handled according to the smart contract terms and the contract would be executed and the transaction cleared at the same time, eliminating the current back and forth between parties as they hash out the finer points of their agreement. “In a blockchain environment, you have a transaction standardized and anonymized, and [it’s subject to] what we call smart arbitration,” in which disputes or controversy related to the contract are settled immediately according to the blockchain system’s arbitration rules. And because the facts of the transaction are viewable by all parties, fewer disputes are likely to occur.

Fraud detection. Blockchain will also be useful for fraud detection. The example Fuller cited was the practice of “factoring” in trucking, or assigning unpaid freight bills to a third-party company for less than — perhaps 60% to 90% of — the value of the bill. Trucking companies use factoring to improve their cash flow since it gives them access to the money right away, but it costs them a percentage of the bill. “One of the reasons factoring companies charge so much [is because a significant portion of] factoring receivables end up getting duplicated, [when trucking companies] send multiple bills of lading to multiple factoring companies, or [a company might] create a false bill of lading.” Factoring companies charge a very high rate because a portion, which Fuller said was likely low, of transactions it engages in is fraudulent. With blockchain, as long as the sensor data itself is not falsified, the transactions represent what actually happened as opposed to what someone says happened. But perhaps more importantly, factoring itself would become less necessary since a blockchain system with smart contracts would govern the payment for transactions in an automated way.

Making all these use cases a reality, of course, will require the various stakeholders in the process to work together. “True implementation of blockchain involves both the shipper and carrier using this platform and so far what we have seen is a few shipping companies using it,” Kar said. “The real market pull, not push, will start … once the shippers start demanding carriers to start using this platform.”

When will that happen? At this point, it seems too soon to tell. Kar said, “I believe we’re at least two to five years out, or maybe sooner.”

| A IOT release   ||  November 4,  2017   |||

3 Nov - For the first time, a comprehensive new guide that introduces young Kiwis to the many career opportunities in New Zealand’s booming service industry has been published by ServiceIQ, Industry Training Organisation (ITO) for tourism and travel, retail and retail supply chain, hospitality, aviation, and museums service sectors.

Service Career Kick-Starter was launched to the whole of the country via the Sunday Star Times at the end of October.

It’s packed full of helpful information, case studies, sector profiles, statistics, job and career paths, and real success stories with just a few of the thousands of talented young New Zealanders gaining an education and industry qualifications on the job, including up-and-coming pilots, aviation engineers, chefs, tour guides, retail managers, museum curators and more.

The well-established industry sectors offer serious opportunities in which to gain an education, real skills, national qualifications and a career, and achieving it all on the job, earning as you learn.

In fact, around 35 percent of all new job opportunities between 2017 and 2021 are in the sectors ServiceIQ serves.

ServiceIQ Chief Executive Dean Minchington says it’s an essential guide to discovering what’s possible and getting a career underway.

“The sectors we serve hold a huge range of possibilities for many young New Zealanders, including secondary school students considering what to do with their life. While university and polytechnic work for some people, for those people who excel at learning by doing, our sectors offer the chance to train

| A ServiceIQ release  ||  November 3,  2017   |||

3 Nov - The acquisition includes Convene in Auckland, Convene South in Christchurch, Convene Q in Brisbane and the Pacific Area Incentives and Conferences Expo (PAICE). It also covers Convene South East Region (SER), due for launch in 2019.  ProMag Publishing director Stu Freeman says the sale to Convene Group headed by Eastaugh ensures the future of the expo series will be delivered with continued vision and integrity.

“Ally has been with ProMag for over four years and during that time has successfully launched Convene South and Convene Q as well as building on the strengths of the existing shows – PAICE and Convene,’ said Freeman.

The change of ownership officially takes effect on November 17.

“This latest move will allow the events to grow and develop in the future,” said Eastaugh.

“Our first priority is our stakeholders, exhibitors, visitors and suppliers, to discuss new opportunities and ways forward, together.

“Convene Group looks forward to retaining a valuable working relationship with ProMag in the marketplace. There will remain a strong synergy between the two separate companies.”

| A CIM release  ||  November 3,  2017   |||