The German production facility of Australian-owned MantaMESH is one of only 18 new sites admitted to the World Economic Forum’s prestigious Global Lighthouse Network.
The Global Lighthouse Network is a community of manufacturers showing leadership in the use of Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) technologies to drive impact in productivity, workforce engagement, sustainability, and supply chain resilience.
MantaMESH operates an advanced online manufacturing system with facilities in Germany and Australia for the production of its MantaMESH wire decking and backing systems.
The Global Lighthouse Network award was presented to MantaMESH CEO Stephen Eddowes at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
“This is a great honour and a privilege – There has been a lot of hard work over a long period of time, but in our case, there have been three key success factors – We have a focus and a strategic intent to ‘Find a BETTER way’ of doing everything that we,” Eddowes said.
We have also invested heavily in a data-first digital platform. But the key for us has been the engagement and empowerment of our people – everyone in our team has a voice – they can see that everything they do makes a massive contribution.”
“Our Australian and German facilities are agile ‘smart’ factories producing personalised, customised products – made to order / just in time – the impact for us is leveraged into cost leadership with better pricing and very fast lead times to help our customers win more business,” Eddowes added.
The World Economic Forums recognition of MantaMESH as a world leader in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies demonstrates frontrunner leadership in scaling advanced technologies across production networks and beyond to concurrently drive productivity, resilience, and sustainability.
“By integrating 4IR technologies into their operations, Lighthouse companies are achieving double-digit impact on throughput, costs, and lead times,” said Francisco Betti, head of advanced manufacturing and value chains, World Economic Forum.
“Lighthouses are setting the pace across industries, demonstrating how to scale advanced technologies across entire manufacturing networks and beyond towards suppliers and customers or new functions, such as procurement, logistics, and research and development.”
For MantaMESH, cost leadership is critical to compete as an SME in a highly competitive commodity market.
MantaMESH has pioneered the self-development of a sustainable ‘online manufacturing’ business model that connects customers to an automated fulfilment system. All customer interactions are automatically processed online with real time connection to smart manufacturing plants in Germany and Australia.
The result is a 261 per cent increase in customer activity and 73 per cent increase in production volumes while energy consumption per kg produced has reduced by 32 per cent.