Bluenote's contributor Briar McCormack takes a look at  'that worldly beer from Kingsland,' Auckland. That’s the concept behind Urbanaut Brewing Company - and it’s one hitting the mark with craft-beer enthusiasts.

When directors Thomas Rowe, Simon Watson and Bruce Turner embarked on their craft-beer dream they wanted to celebrate big cities around the world and use them as inspiration for the beers they brewed.

“We started with Kingsland Pilsner as our flagship beer, next came Brixton Pale Ale - paying homage to the home of pale ale,” says head brewer Turner.

" “[Craft beer] will continue to see growth but brewers need to be smart." John Bennett, General Manager for Central Region, ANZ NZ.

“We have Gastown Red IPA, inspired by Vancouver, Williamsburg IPA inspired by New York. Each of these cities has a place in our heart or a story behind the beer.”

Urbanaut are certainly in a growth industry: When the brewery opened earlier this year it joined a thriving, but increasingly crowded, craft beer industry in New Zealand.

The latest ANZ Craft Beer Industry Insights Report showed in 2016 growth was down from 28 percent to 22 per cent by volume and 39 per cent by value down to 32 per cent.

There are 194 craft beer breweries producing more than 1600 unique beers and small breweries accounted for 5.8 per cent of total beer consumed by volume – up from 4.9 per cent in 2015.

The question is when will the market reach saturation and how will it sustain its difference, the key marketing edge?

At Urbanaut, the founders were clear from the start on the business strategy. They thought hard about where they wanted to set up, how they were going to brand their product and what markets they were looking to target.

Producing beer for the general New Zealand market was important but the main goal was to sell to people in their inner-city Auckland neighbourhood.

“Engaging with our customers is really important so we talk to them about the philosophy behind our beer, how we make it and the merits . . .

Continue to read the full article here

| An ANZ Bluenote release  ||  August 21,  2017   |||

 August 17 Edition Click here to open

Stephen Hooper, Autodesk’s senior director of Manufacturing Business Strategy and Marketing was on the phone writes Roopider Hara for Engineering.com.

Autodesk will be throwing simulation and CAM into Inventor—not just any simulation, but NASTRAN, which was previously trying to sell for $3,500. And Autodesk is not charging a penny more than what it was already charging for Inventor. HSMworks will also be included. 

From the speed of an online demo, it’s hard to tell how it will all work together but the potential of all this functionality in the box is enormous. The CAD, CAM and CAE, all working inside a single interface of Inventor, not only elevates the mainstream MCAD modeler Inventor back to star status at Autodesk, it raises it a level above ordinary MCAD from the competition. The mechanical designer or engineer is now empowered to do simulation and to send models to the CNC machine. They don’t have to purchase a CAM application, learn a whole new interface or be at the mercy of a machinist.

Don’t let on yet, Stephen says during the call last week. Autodesk is going to make a surprise announcement. And a surprise it will be. Many Inventor users have been bemoaning the lack of new capability in Inventor for a few years. Autodesk itself has been forecasting a cessation of the Inventor product line, with the idea that a tired desktop app would give way to cloud-based Fusion. They have been feeling left out and left behind, as a modern, cloud-based, mobile-device-friendly Fusion products have taken the spotlight.

This changes everything.

Pricing and Other Details

It's not a pricing story, says Stephen, but he still recognizes the importance of pricing.

Incredulous at what appears to be a grand giveaway, in which the products are included with an Inventor subscription, I have to press.

“Stephen, I can’t believe you are selling Inventor for the same price as ever, but, now, also adding NASTRAN and HSM. Really? No additional cost?”

“Believe it,” says Stephen.

Also announced is a change in the name of the “collections,” or what was previously called “product suites.”

Continue to read the full article here

|  An engineering.com release  ||  August 9,  2017   |||

Rod Oram goes under the covers of Fletcher Building's results for Newsroom and finds the source of its financial problems with project cost blowouts: corporate governance.

The table below from Fletcher Building’s results presentation on Wednesday clearly shows the company’s incompetent corporate governance.

Five years into the biggest, longest construction boom this country has ever seen our largest construction company has lost almost $300m on its $2.65bn order book for commercial buildings.

Two big projects – the Justice Precinct in Christchurch and the Sky City convention centre in Auckland totalling $737m of work -- account for the bulk of the losses.

This, though, is not a simple story of two bad projects.

Fletcher has written down the value of the rest of the order book of Building + Interiors, the commercial building business in its construction division. Breakeven is the best it hopes for on this $1.49bn of business, it announced at its results briefing.

Nor is this bad news a bolt out of the blue. B+I eked out EBIT of only $16m a year over the 12 years to fiscal 2016. Add in the infrastructure business, the other main part of the construction division, and Fletcher’s EBIT on all construction averaged only $32m a year over the 12 years.

That insight is on slide 30 of Fletcher’s results’ presentation to analysts. Anyone wondering how Fletcher could achieve only a 6.76% total return to shareholders over the past six years of booming construction and stock markets will find the 1hour 24 minutes’ briefing revealing.

Continue to read the full article here

| A Newsroom release by Rod Oram  ||  August 20,  2017   |||

Require a Recessed Countersunk Hole?

The Hole Tool in Inventor 2018 has received a new option, that new option is the “Extend Start” tool.

Neil Markham writes, if you have created holes that are not perpendicular to the start plane, you will have noticed a fragment of material left behind in the hole.

Continue tread the full article here

| A CADPROSystems release  ||  Friday August 19 2017   |||

It’s called "wrong thinking", or reverse thinking. Learn about how this experiment in reverse thinking — the leader as the sidekick, the intern as the superhero — encouraged innovation and discovery.​

| A CADPROSYSTEMS Facebook share ||  August 18, 2017   |||

Auckland Airport has welcomed the announcement by Philippine Airlines that it will introduce a direct flight on its Manila to Auckland route.

From December 2017 Philippine Airlines will be the first airline to fly non-stop from Manila to Auckland using a 254-seat Airbus A340 aircraft. The direct flight will replace the current Manila to Auckland via Cairns service.

Scott Tasker, Auckland Airport’s general manager aeronautical commercial, says the new non-stop service will add more than 14,000 seats to the route, increasing seat capacity by 22%, and inject $13.6 million annually into the New Zealand economy.

“With more than 7,000 tropical islands, the Philippines is a popular destination and last year nearly 30,000 New Zealanders travelled there.

“The direct flight will also enable New Zealanders to connect to the 73 destinations on the Philippine Airlines network including the United Kingdom, Asia, North America and the Middle East,” says Mr Tasker.

“More than 40,000 Filipinos live in New Zealand and will now be able to fly non-stop to and from the Philippines. It will also accommodate the growing number of Filipino visitors who are holidaying or visiting friends and family in New Zealand.”

Introducing a larger aircraft on the route will also allow for an additional 14 tonnes of cargo capacity per flight. In the year ended March 2017, New Zealand exported $468m of dairy products to the Philippines, making it the eighth largest market for dairy exports.

| An Auckland Airport release  ||  August 17,  2017   |||

In an article published on Newsroom this morningCatriona MacLennan challenges the Government's mantra that work lifts families out of poverty, arguing that the spread of labour hire work at the expense of permanent employment exacerbates the problem

Hard-won employment protections achieved over more than a century are being eroded by the emergence of labour hire companies in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere.

These companies operate as intermediaries between workers and the organisations for which work is carried out. Examples are cleaning, airline catering and airport baggage safety officers.

Instead of being employed by the business for which they are working, workers are contracted to that company through labour hire and temping firms. The aim is to cut costs for businesses. Firms do not have to provide full-time or a regular number of work hours. Nor do they need to pay holiday pay, sick pay or superannuation contributions. Workers might be required to pay for their own equipment and safety boots, as well as ACC levies. And there is no obligation to promote staff and pay higher wages as employees become more senior.

However, for the workers, this means low wages, no job security and insecure hours of work – and hence income – from week to week.

Labour hire firms receive “sign on” bonuses of several thousand dollars from the business. The labour hire firm also charges the business an hourly rate for each worker which is significantly higher than the rates paid to workers – perhaps $3 above the minimum wage.

As a result, in New Zealand, people now work alongside each other doing exactly the same tasks, but under vastly different conditions. Employees have regular hours and ongoing work, while the labour hire workers have no security and are generally paid several dollars an hour less than their colleagues.

Many labour hire workers are migrants, who have little bargaining power and often are not aware of New Zealand employment law.

A legal challenge to labour hire work began in the Employment Court at Auckland on 14 August 2017.

The case is brought by E Tū union in the names of two workers. The defendant is LSG Sky Chefs New Zealand Ltd, which is owned by German airline Lufthansa and runs airline catering kitchens in Queenstown, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland.

Two labour hire firms, Solutions Personnel Ltd and Blue Collar Ltd, are named as third parties in the case.

Approximately 200 temporary workers are contracted to LSG Sky Chefs through the third parties. Many are paid only the minimum wage and do not have security of employment.

The workers are seeking a declaration under section 6(5) of the Employment Relations Act 2000 that they are in fact employees of LSG Sky Chefs. They claim that, although they signed a contract with Solutions Personnel which was expressed to be a contract for services, they were in fact employed by LSG Sky Chefs.

The hearing is expected to finish on August 18.

Many parents work two or three jobs to try and support their families but the minimum wage of $15.75 an hour is simply not enough to live on. The spread of labour hire work at the expense of permanent employment is exacerbating this precarious existence for some families.

There are also attempts in other countries to deal with the erosion of pay and other workers’ rights linked to the use of labour hire companies.

These have been prompted by alarm at the spread of labour hire. In 2012, there were estimated to be 36 million temporary workers worldwide, with 11.5 million of them employed daily as agency workers. The United States had 11.5 million agency workers, while Europe had 8.2 million and Brazil 7.1 million.

The European Union in 2008 issued Directive 2008/104/EC on temporary agency work. This was designed to provide protection to agency workers: it states that the basic work and employment conditions of agency workers should be at least those of employees.

However, the way in which courts in different European Union nations have interpreted the directive has largely undermined its effectiveness. Instead of focusing on its purpose, courts have concentrated on the word “temporary” and held that the directive applies only to short-term work.

One example of this is a court case in the United Kingdom in 2013, which aimed to provide rights to agency cleaners who had worked for a firm for between six and 25 years without ever obtaining the security of permanent employment.

The court held that regulations made under the European Union directive applied only to workers placed for a fixed period with a firm. If they were there indefinitely, they did not come within the ambit of the law.

One lawyer described the decision as driving a “coach and horses” through the protection intended to be given to agency workers.

In Canada’s Ontario, there was a 33 percent increase in temporary workers in the decade to 2014. That growth was double the rise in the number of permanent employees in that time and the wages of the temporary workers were significantly lower. In 2015, the median wage of a temporary worker in Toronto was C$15 an hour, while permanent employees were paid $22.40.

Ontario passed the Stronger Workplaces for a Stronger Economy Act 2014, aiming to provide legal protection to agency workers. Earlier this year, Bradford City Council voted to end its use of temporary staffing agencies, with councillors blaming the businesses for trapping workers in a cycle of poverty and insecurity.

In South Africa, labour hire is known as “labour broking” and has caused concern for many years.

A law which took effect in 2015 aimed to curb temporary employment services and give additional protections to vulnerable workers. It has been challenged by labour brokers.

New Zealand has seen a fall in real wages in recent decades and increasing insecurity of employment for workers.

Despite a growing economy, real average private sector wages in this country dropped by 0.5 percent in the 12 months to June 2017.

The Government’s mantra is that work lifts families out of poverty.

Sadly, that is no longer the case in New Zealand. Many parents work two or three jobs to try and support their families but the minimum wage of $15.75 an hour is simply not enough to live on.

The spread of labour hire work at the expense of permanent employment is exacerbating this precarious existence for some families.

The test case brought by E Tū will demonstrate how much protection current laws can provide to agency workers, or whether law reform is needed.

* Catriona MacLennan is a barrister and journalist and carried out research for the plaintiffs in this case.

| A Newsroom release  ||  August 17,  2017   |||

Two prominent New Zealand wineries have been acquired by a newly-established fine wine company co-founded by the man who launched Craggy Range and a US-based wildlife conservationist.

Pyramid Valley Vineyards in Waikari, North Canterbury, and Lowburn Ferry Wines, Central Otago, have both become the first purchases of Aotearoa New Zealand Fine Wine Estates Limited Partnership (ANZFWE) – a new venture between Brian Sheth, sole director of US-based Sangreal Wines LLC, and Steve Smith MW, sole director of LandbaseWineNZ Ltd.

Mr Sheth is an investor and wildlife conservationist from Austin, Texas, while Steve Smith, is well-known for having led the development of Craggy Range, based in Hawkes Bay and Martinborough, having co-founded the brand with owner Terry Peabody in 1998.

Pyramid Valley Wines is one of the frontrunners of New Zealand’s growing biodynamic movement, founded by Claudia Weersing and her husband Mike in 2000. Their 2.2 hectare biodynamic vineyard is planted with four separate blocks of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with the aim of replicating the Burgundian model, which produces four wines; Earth Smoke Pinot Noir, Angel Flower Pinot Noir, Lion’s Tooth Chardonnay and Field of Fire Chardonnay.

It is a further sign of the growing confidence in the winemaking region of North Canterbury, which encompasses the Waipara and Waitaki Valley, located on the south island north of Christchurch. The region accounts for just 1,419 hectares of vineyards and is home to dozens of boutique producers who together produce just 3% of New Zealand’s annual production.

Lowburn Ferry meanwhile, based in Central Otago, was founded by Roger and Jean Gibson in 2000 with a focus on Pinot Noir. Jean holds a degree in Horticultural Science while Roger, who holds a Masters degree in Applied Science, also works part-time as a tutor in the viticulture/horticulture department of the Otago Polytechnic, specialising in soils and plant science. The couple’s wines are made under the direction of chief winemaker Peter Bartle.

“We are delighted that the Gibsons will remain living on this great Central Otago Pinot Noir vineyard as we create new vineyards and establish a winery on the property and have access to Roger’s science and natural ecology background on our estates,” said Smith.

ANZFWE has also secured the purchase of a small piece of land in the Gimblett Gravels Wine Growing District in Hawke’s Bay.

Leading ANZFWE as its chief executive will be Michael Henley, who has spent the past five years as CEO of Hawke’s Bay winery Trinity Hill.

“It will simply be fantastic to have Mike on board as a partner and to work alongside him again following the almost 10 years we spent together at Craggy Range,” added Smith.

The sale of the two wineries are subject to the approval of the New Zealand Government’s Overseas Investment Office, with each business continuing to operate under the direction of their existing owners until this process is completed.

| A The DrinksBusiness release  ||  August 16,  2017   |||

It appears Japanese factories, companies are looking beyond the IOT and or IOE; aiming to connect a variety of assets, e.g., machines, data, technologies, people, and organizations, as well as the existing industries and digital technologies, thereby bringing about the creation of new added value and the solutions to societal problems, bringing “Connected Industries” to fruition.

Industrial sensors,data and communications are becoming the core topic among factories, companies that foresee themselves in advanced industrial automation. IOT, smart solutions are at surge for individual customer; where as for factories it seems the challenges are more especially getting the machines to communicate in safer environment.

No wonder Japan introduced “Just in time Manufacturing” , Kaizen ,TQM, TQC concepts in the past; In response to fierce international competition resulting from increased globalization, as well as labor shortages and a reduced number of skilled workers due to falling birthrates and aging populations, the companies in Japan have come up with new concept called as “Flexible Factory Partner Alliance” .

The formation of this alliance or this concept is pretty simple and straightforward, utilizing advanced automation technologies of ICT in manufacturing to improve productivity and to tackle to seamless communications among machines, factories , plants in an secured wireless network.

Japanese companies always stressed upon ‘visualization’ in production equipment and production status is the stepping stone to moving forward for improving productivity, and as product development cycles have shortened in recent years, there has been a demand for greater flexibility in the configuration of production facilities equipment and in modifying the production line construction. As a means of achieving greater flexibility, there are rising expectations for wireless communications among machines, different plants and factories.

A major issue in wireless communications in factories where various wireless systems coexist is communication instability due to interference between wireless systems and the impact that has on equipment operation. There had previously been few efforts, however, to resolve this sort of wireless communication issues in manufacturing facilities; To find solutions Alliance of 7 companies in Japan have been formed .

OMRON, ATR, Sanritz, NICT, NEC, Fujitsu, and Murata Machinery have been conducting trials of wireless communications and evaluating the wireless environment in factories. These companies and organizations have at academic conferences and other venues broadly proposed coordination control technology that would enable stability in communications. This would work by controlling independent wireless systems for each piece of equipment, with specific use cases in actual manufacturing facilities.

These companies have come together to form the Flexible Factory Partner Alliance to promote the formulation of standards for coordination control technology. This will thereby ensure stable communications in an environment where various wireless systems coexist, as well as promote their use and further accelerate the adoption of wireless systems in manufacturing facilities.

Through the initiatives of this alliance, the partners will work to meet expectations for a new industrial revolution 4.0; 5.0; accompanying the spread of the use of IoT in manufacturing facilities. Sensors, Data and Communication in safer Wireless communications in manufacturing factories that are expected to accelerate wireless-connected devices to increase productivity, and disseminate the standards.

Few companies were working on trial specifications; last month the first set of 7 companies announced the first alliance . OMRON Corporation, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Sanritz Automation Co., Ltd., National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), NEC Corporation, Fujitsu Limited, and Murata Machinery, Ltd., while Professor Andreas Dengel of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)) is appointed as Chairperson.

Experts say "Based on the traditional concepts safe manufacturing concepts; Japanese companies aims at IoE (Internet of Everything)" that connects people as well as machines and things; smart factory is one main part where people /humans take leading role.The use and communication of on-site data, ideas of people seamlessly are important.The data utilization evolves and impacts equipment and factory facilities, Many companies are working towards a thorough process Specifically, Connecting objects (connecting), Connect information (visualize), Improve (Collect and analyze information, create value) and Expanding the scope (sharing data).

Although the Implementation and utilization of IoT in many Japanese factories has been existing for many years now ; or being started, it is merely an extension of the traditional Kaizen effort for the purpose of "productivity improvement" to the last step of product manufacturing.

Few of the Japanese factories feel that to understand the magnitude of change that can be brought by connecting machines, factories and various things in manufacturing plant and to understand the ROI for the given product , line and market these things can not be taken only at the manufacturing site.

While Private companies are working at group factories alliances program; Recently, Japan Ministry for Economy, Trade and Industry [METI] proposed a Policy Concept Titled “Connected Industries” as a Goal that Japanese Industries Should Aim for an ideal approach that Japanese industries should strive for.

As one of the efforts for promoting the Connected Industries policy concept, a goal to create value through connecting a variety of industries,last month the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) held the first symposium for this policy concept, bringing together approximately 600 stakeholders.

It appears Japanese factories, companies are looking beyond the IOT and or IOE; aiming to connect a variety of assets, e.g., machines, data, technologies, people, and organizations, as well as the existing industries and digital technologies, thereby bringing about the creation of new added value and the solutions to societal problems, bringing “Connected Industries” to fruition. To this end, the Japanese government is advancing a wide variety of policy initiatives in cooperation with private sector parties.

| A Manufacturing Tomorrow release  ||  August 16,  2017   |||