Yoke Har Lee: Taking journey from idea to product

MetalForm has developed and made products ranging from a high-tech wheelchair to its latest offering, a fertiliser spreader for farmers. Photo / Supplied

Fresh from the successful development and marketing of a revolutionary electric wheelchair, sheet metal engineering company MetalForm Industries has launched another product aimed at a very different market.

The Tow and Fert is a system that mixes and sprays fertilisers at the same time, giving farmers the freedom to control how, where and when they fertilise.

Necessity drives innovation, and MetalForm director Geoff Easton says farmers' need to save costs has encouraged the use of smaller amounts of spray, more precisely delivered.

"This is going to be huge for the dairy industry," Easton says.

The product was on the drawing board about five years ago, he says, but was shelved. Eighteen months ago, the plans were dusted off when the company saw the need for it in the market.

The Dannevirke company's general manager, Allan Benbow, says one of the most difficult problems developers had to solve was finding a way to make sure the fine particles remained in suspension once the fertiliser was mixed.

"We had to keep the fertiliser in suspension and can't allow it to sink to the bottom," Benbow says. The answer was an agitation mechanism to create constant turbulence in the machine.

Metalform wasn't always so high tech. Easton's father Bryce started the company in 1961, and the son took over the business in 1981 and began shifting the shape of the company. At one stage it was focused on roll-forming products for roofing, a business he later sold.

Realising that skilled labour was becoming hard to find, Easton bought Metalform's first Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine to give the company an edge. A robotic welder, for example, can do in 12 minutes what it takes four man-hours to complete. Metalform now has two CNC robot welders.

Today the company relies heavily on its automated machinery to bend, punch, cut and weld, while its designers are adept at using software in development work.

As well as developing its own products in-house, the company also works closely with customers, including Howard Wright (maker of hospital beds) and Fisher and Paykel Healthcare.

The CNC acquisition supported the company when Metalform manufactured its high-tech electronic wheelchair, the Ezi-Riser (now called the Permobil K450). The chair was the brainchild of Samuel Gibson, who was born with a brittle bone condition rendering him only 80cm tall. Gibson jointly developed the "perfect" wheelchair with his childhood friend, Campbell Easton, a design engineer and son of Geoff Easton.

The wheelchair has patented suspension technology, can be raised and tilted, handles bumpy terrain and gives the user much more freedom that a normal wheelchair.

Benbow says the wheelchair is a specialist niche product. "We think the world has a market potential of about 1000 units per year and if we ship more than 250 more year, we consider that very good."

The Permobil K450 is licensed globally to a Swiss company which has the rights to distribute the wheelchair, priced at around US$20,000 ($25,700) each. Metalform has shipped about 570 chairs since it started building them in 2008. In its first export year, the wheelchair accounted for about 5 per cent of turnover but this grew to 35 per cent last year, and now accounts for about 20 per cent of overall turnover.

One of the challenges is to pick a path to market that suits its array of products, Benbow says. "We are constantly thinking about different marketing models for our products. In the case of the wheelchair, we have a worldwide distribution deal with Permobil - we are in their hands and that's the risk," he says.

Besides selling its products online, Metalform also has to consider whether it needs more specific channels of distribution for different markets.

Metalform is doing its own marketing for the Tow and Fert, because of the amount of demonstration and support customers need. With its Tow and Collect (a system to collect manure), the company found it was better to use a network of dealers, after not getting much traction selling directly.

The core strength of the company, which has 45 staff, is its design capability, says Benbow.

Easton says few companies can take a product from concept to completion. "That's what we are aiming to do. Development work is extremely expensive but as a company you need to decide whether it [research and development] can provide a good return or is wasting time."

His business motto is "get on and do what you do best". He now prefers to leave the best to others rather than trying to do everything himself.

Metalform, Easton says, "employs attitude", not only skill.