Long-time, no see!

2019 has been a busy year for United Machinists, so here’s an update to let you know about the changes that have allowed us to develop our team and build a more scalable and sustainable workplace.

We are thrilled to announce the allocation of $520,000 from the Provincial Growth Fund. It’s a contribution towards our investment in two new automated milling and mill-turn machining centres. This will significantly increase our capacity and allow United to achieve true 24/7 lights out production.

Whilst many worry that automation leads to fewer jobs, at United we expect the new machines to create approximately 9 new roles across programming, setting, operating, quality, production support and apprentices.

In order to accommodate the new machines, we are excited to announce the building of a new facility which will extend onto our current workshop. This will be a state-of-the-art temperature-controlled workshop environment that will be particularly useful for high precision micro-components, such as those that we make for TASKA. We estimate that construction will be finished by mid-February 2020, with the first machine being installed in March and the following one in May.

Additionally, United have had a lot of changes happening on the staff and business improvements front. We are very excited to announce that after joining the business earlier this year, Sarah will be staying on full time as Chief Executive Officer with Alex as Chief Technical Officer. Our new organisational structure is focused on better resourcing production processes, new roles include a Production Officer, Manufacturing Manager, Quality Officer and Business Improvements Manager.

At the same time, in October Alex was in Singapore for a week with Callaghan Innovation for their Industry 4.0 Trek. He was one of a small contingent of 20 NZ manufacturing businesses and was blown away by the opportunities technology presents for the engineering industry. In Alex's new role as CTO he will have an R&D focus, researching, developing and overseeing United’s investment in technology so that we can realise our vision of becoming the machine shop of the future.

Lastly, we are very excited and proud to be leading the renaissance of engineering in the region, through Sarah’s recent announcement as director of Southern Otago Regional Engineering Collective, SOREC. Established to ensure the sustainability of engineering in the Otago Region, SOREC seeks to maintain industry collaboration, increase capacity and competitiveness and improve the calibre and number of regional apprentices through youth-trade pathways. Sarah has been part of the steering committee which founded SOREC and has received $495,000 in funding to establish this new industry body, with their first order of business being to provide business development support for companies looking to invest in new capital expenditure. You can check out SOREC's website here.

At United, our values around people are core to our vision, with the recent injection of activity seeing more smiles around the workshop and greater job satisfaction. With all the changes going on here at United, we appreciate all our loyal customer's patience as we grow and improve our systems and processes.

Cheers,
Team United.

Check out what else we've been up to this year below.
Click the images to find out more on our website.

A trip to Texas earlier this year saw our Commercial Director, Sarah Ramsay return to United with some major software upgrades.

United won a place within Deloitte's annual Fast 50 Awards, being awarded the Rising Star, One to Watch award.

United are delighted to announce our new partnership with Canterbury-based and world-leading prosthetics firm, TASKA Prosthetics.

We sponsored the inaugural Otago Export Awards by manufacturing the awards themselves, a globe.