Sim & Bek's Place

I visited Schiavello today for a site visit with my Uni.
What a building! It was an amazing experience... They are a manufacturing company that can take a product from design stage right through to production, assembly and delivery.
They've just moved into a new factory/plant that i wouldn't want to put a price on, but i'm guessing in the region of $500+m especially with the machines they got in there...normally averaging a couple million each.

The tour took over 2hrs and covered 1.6km! That gives you a sense of how big this place is. In the main building we had a tour through their research and development section, then on to the design areas. After that we went outside and over to the start of the factory...
We started in the metal fabrication area and moved through all aspects of metal production into prototyping facilities and on into plastics and injection moulding, then into the corner of the triangular shaped building (where everything meets) and back out into wood-working and on through to powdercoating.

It is a genious of logistics and automation, with each sector being their own "business" with stock orders, employees and unique requirements, while all organised to co-incide with the other departments.
Some of the machines were incredible! One machine (one of only 3 in the world) took a 3m x 2m x 6cm block of equivalent mdf, carved out a really nice desk shape, and then wrapped edging all the way round it - in the one machine! In about 2min!!
Anyway, I'm very pleased i was able to experience that kind of company and see a factory with that quality, cleanliness and ability. They are also a 5star rated "green-building" and factory. Even the dust that's extracted is collected, blocked, and used elsewhere in the plant!

The pic shows the whole plant. The far end of the "long-arm" is the metal area, heads down to distribution and heads back up to wood etc. Then their HQ is nestled in the middle...1.6km!!
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