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Press Release: December 2000
NAVMAN - Previously Talon Technology - Sailing past world competition.
When you manufacture high tech equipment in a competitive international marketplace and your sales double each year, you must be doing things right!
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Auckland, the City of Sails situated on the Hauraki Gulf and one of the world's most attractive harbours and sailing venues. A prized destination for the great Polynesian navigators who first discovered and explored it many generations ago. More recently the training ground of many great international competition sailors. Home to Team New Zealand and their boat Black Magic, the current winners and successful defenders of the America's Cup. |
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Here we also find NAVMAN, a world leader in the design and manufacture of sophisticated marine instrumentation, navigation and mapping products, branded NAVMAN. Talon was founded in 1988 by Peter Maire, a backyard innovator and electronics enthusiast who had a vision that future success would require volume manufacturing. Their growth has been phenomenal and a bigger factory has been required almost annually for the last five years. |
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Success for NAVMAN has come by an in-depth understanding of the international marketplace and getting attractively priced innovative products to market very quickly by creative design and low cost manufacturing. Communication, effective people and a culture of strong teamwork have always been the key ingredient in their success. Their challenge was to find a way of retaining this edge when their size, technical capability and number of new products was growing well ahead of their capacity to manage them using their more informal methods of the past.
In late 1999 Tony Price was employed as Projects Manager and tasked to get more structure into the company's Development processes. Their aim was to find a way of widening the management skills of their team and to establish innovative, fast and robust product-to-market development processes. To help them they chose the "Managing Projects and Innovation in your Organisation" workshops developed at the Auckland University of Technology.
Over a period of eight months they held four in-house workshops, each containing a mixture of Marketing, Development, Production and Administrative people. Each workshop started with two days covering the principals of project management, including the dynamics of teams, leadership and organisational innovation practices. After a week to reflect, a further application day allowed each team to apply these as a team to a particular project of their own.
Peter Goldsbury who facilitated this programme observed: "They were a fantastic team to work with, a strong customer focus, flexible structure, great teamwork, very open communication and a strong sense of urgency and fun - all the classic entrepreneurial attributes. It was great to see their project culture, structures, processes, and personal skills develop from one workshop to the next. It was a privilege for AUT to share in their successes".
Visit the NAVMAN website or see other corporate or international clients that have chosen AUT to help them build their capability.
To find out how AUT can help your organisation move faster visit http://www.aut.ac.nz/shortcourses/business/projman or contact Corrie Cook, Industry Projects Manager, AUT Faculty of Business. Phone (09) 719 9835. e-mail: corrie.cook@aut.ac.nz
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