Australia is about to lose its car manufacturing - regardless of what side of the political spectrum you support this is a sad thing - but it simply was not standing on its own two feet and was over reliant on taxpayer support to survive.
While all that sad news was breaking I read a very interesting article which showed how Volkswagen make incredibly high margins from their prestige brands - for every Porsche they make around $23,000 profit (18%) with Bentley similar and Audi (including Lamborghini) about $5000 profit or an average of about 10% - compared with only $800 or 2.7% for their mainstream like Golfs and Passats
This made me wonder if Australian car plants might have stood a better chance of survival if they had lifted out of "mainstream vanilla" car production where, lets face it, the Australian domestic market is not big enough and production not large enough to really compete with the mega plants in Korea, Japan and Europe.
There was a glimpse of what could be done when Holden designed and made the Monaro in Australia- (about 10 years ago I think) - a true muscle car but generated a lot of sales overseas - maybe if Holden had seen the niche they could have went on to be a specialist Aston Martin /Porsche/Ferrari/Lotus type manufacturer. Mass market car manufacturing was always doomed in Australia unless supported by government - but specialist, high specification, top range, low volume with very high margins vehicle manufacturing may very well have succeeded. Wouldn't it have been great to have an iconic world beating Australian car marque?
NOTE: The article was in Business Week and can be seen here: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-13/volkswagen-pockets-23-000-when-you-buy-that-new-porsche
Monday 24 March 2014
Friday 7 March 2014
Saturday 8 February 2014
The Wireless and mobile site build industry and its race to the bottom....
I am saddened that, every day, people are dying in my industry - even sadder when the majority of these deaths could have been prevented. This week three riggers lost their lives in the US in a preventable accident.
What we are seeing with financial and time pressures on jobs is a (now literally deadly) race to the bottom - cheapest equipment, cheapest labour rates, fastest schedule for roll-out (seldom achieved - right??). And why is this?
I see several reasons but the main is a flow of price chains being driven downwards in a farcical arrangements where even major vendors are holding reverse auctions to get the cheapest prices for components (even for towers) - and the same with labour rates with continual downward pressure. THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO BUILD A QUALITY NETWORK - EVER!!!!!
What is wrong with this, as we are seeing now, is this race to the bottom has casualties - in a network terms its long term quality of service from build shortcuts, in human terms its peoples lives and safety - and the irony is the carriers/ operators are the ones who will suffer customer complaints and churn when their network quality problems come home to roost. Worldwide there are countless examples of this. Their network coverage, data speeds and even deployment speeds and overall site costs would all be better with a change of approach.
The network operators (and their equipment vendors in turnkey roll-outs) need instead to change the focus from COST and onto that of VALUE - big difference -in fact its a huge difference but when innovation comes in, when contractors are making reasonable money and ways of delivering value are used then you see productivity going up, you see safety improving and also the quality of the network and hence its reliability statistics improve out of sight. Operators need to look more closely at the value they are getting in network builds and upgrades - taking a whole of network life cost look not a "cheap and nasty " now look.
And when you run projects like that they are more cost effective than disasters where every cent is squeezed out of the supply chain. This cost cutting and time focused approach means that there is a lot of dud project managers, dud logistics people and even duds in the guys at the industry front-line - but you pay peanuts you get monkeys - and other than throwing poo around (and isn't it usually their own...), monkeys have a limited use on a telco project!!! In the end the quality of the delivered site or network will be compromised as short-cuts are taken and the cheap work fails.
When you look at sports teams you don't see many champion winning outfits that try and get the very cheapest of cheap players and then get them to work with the very cheapest equipment they can find for them.
I dont have the answers on how we need to implement this everywhere but it needs action pretty much worldwide to get out of the crazy ruts major projects always seem to go through. I do see some glaring areas in Australia that could be improved straight away though.
As Benjamin Franklin famously stated: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”
Apologies if this is a bit of a rant - but I am saddened than every week I seem to read of a climber somewhere in the world not going home to their family at night because of the above.
What we are seeing with financial and time pressures on jobs is a (now literally deadly) race to the bottom - cheapest equipment, cheapest labour rates, fastest schedule for roll-out (seldom achieved - right??). And why is this?
I see several reasons but the main is a flow of price chains being driven downwards in a farcical arrangements where even major vendors are holding reverse auctions to get the cheapest prices for components (even for towers) - and the same with labour rates with continual downward pressure. THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO BUILD A QUALITY NETWORK - EVER!!!!!
 |
| (A balanced Time/Cost/Quality triangle) |
The network operators (and their equipment vendors in turnkey roll-outs) need instead to change the focus from COST and onto that of VALUE - big difference -in fact its a huge difference but when innovation comes in, when contractors are making reasonable money and ways of delivering value are used then you see productivity going up, you see safety improving and also the quality of the network and hence its reliability statistics improve out of sight. Operators need to look more closely at the value they are getting in network builds and upgrades - taking a whole of network life cost look not a "cheap and nasty " now look.
 |
| (When you cut costs and time - guess what goes out the window - network quality, build quality, including safety) |
And when you run projects like that they are more cost effective than disasters where every cent is squeezed out of the supply chain. This cost cutting and time focused approach means that there is a lot of dud project managers, dud logistics people and even duds in the guys at the industry front-line - but you pay peanuts you get monkeys - and other than throwing poo around (and isn't it usually their own...), monkeys have a limited use on a telco project!!! In the end the quality of the delivered site or network will be compromised as short-cuts are taken and the cheap work fails.
When you look at sports teams you don't see many champion winning outfits that try and get the very cheapest of cheap players and then get them to work with the very cheapest equipment they can find for them.
I dont have the answers on how we need to implement this everywhere but it needs action pretty much worldwide to get out of the crazy ruts major projects always seem to go through. I do see some glaring areas in Australia that could be improved straight away though.
As Benjamin Franklin famously stated: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten”
Apologies if this is a bit of a rant - but I am saddened than every week I seem to read of a climber somewhere in the world not going home to their family at night because of the above.
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