Marley New Zealand is a plastics manufacturing company, producing extruded and injection moulded PVC and polyethylene products for the New Zealand rainwater, building, plumbing, civil and infrastructure, electrical and rural markets.
The product development team at Marley identified the need to partner with an organisation in Auckland to do their manufacturing of conduit bends and downpipe transitions. This need came about because we had no space to carry out this work and we did not have the dedicated resource available at the time. Marley had done some work with Altus in the past and, impressed with the service they offered, formed a partnership to do this part of the production at Altus’ Mangere site. Since then the Altus team have produced over 100,000 components for Marley.
In April 2011 we identified the need for further expansion of the production line to cope with increasing demand and in partnership with Altus we installed a second cooling tank, a larger oil bath and better material handling equipment. This has resulted in a 50 % increase in our throughput which the Altus team has handled without any issues.
It was more efficient for an external team to focus on this as the production process is different from most of our other product lines and therefore requires different skills and equipment.
By working in partnership and using Altus’ experience in the production of conduit and downpipe components we were able to significantly increase productivity – resulting in real efficiencies for Marley and allowing us to focus on our core capabilities in manufacturing.
By outsourcing to Altus we have increased the range and volume of products we can supply to our customers as well as freeing up resource in our own manufacturing plant to develop and produce new core range products. The fact that we doubled the capacity of the line in 2011 to keep pace with rapidly increasing customer demand is a real testament to Altus’ ability to deliver.
Damien Shalloe, March 2012
