Offering stepping stones to local manufacturing

A WALKING aid that helps children with physical disabilities to get moving is being manufactured by Co Antrim based SME Moorings Mediquip, which was given support through a project called InterTradeIreland Fusion.The scheme buddied-up the family business with a Trinity College academic and a design graduate and the result is that they are now exporting the Buddy Roamer.

If Ireland is serious about fostering a manufacturing base from which profits and jobs flow, and stay in the Irish economy, it’s a template that calls for replication on a grander scale.

“The project wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for that collaboration,” says Ali MacCorkell, operations manager of Moorings.

Founded by Ali’s father Girvan in 1991, Moorings Mediquip had, for 20 years, been a reseller of disability and mobility equipment manufactured elsewhere.

When a walking aid that the company resold became difficult to source in Europe, the MacCorkells spotted a gap in the market.

“We knew there was enough of a market locally for this product; we were dealing with the right clientele already,” says Mr MacCorkell. However with Moorings never having had anything more than “a very basic maintenance department”, moving into manufacturing was new territory.

AT A BUSINESSbreakfast arranged by Ballymena Borough Council, the MacCorkells heard about the InterTradeIreland Fusion project. Under the cross-Border scheme, SMEs north and south with an eye on expansion are partnered with a third-level institution and a science graduate for 18-months to help them innovate or improve their products, processes or services.

An annual investment of €33,150 funds half of the graduate’s salary and as well as the input of an academic for half a day a week.

Impressed by their walking-aid idea, Moorings was invited to submit a proposal and InterTradeIreland began the matchmaking process.

“They said ‘there’s a company in Northern Ireland that wants to develop a walking aid, is it something you can help then with?’” says Dr Ciaran Simms, a lecturer in the school of engineering, a principal investigator in the Centre for Bioengineering at Trinity College, and an expert on biomechanics.

“They could see a gap in the market and had a pretty good idea of what the product had to achieve functionally,” he says of Moorings, “but what they didn’t have was the ability to create a product that could pass CE marking and legislative test requirements, so the Trinity engineering input was strongly around the technical design aspect to make sure the device was strong enough to provide the right postural support.”

FROM APRIL 2009Moorings and Dr Simms collaborated on the InterTradeIreland funding application. Applying jointly meant they both had skin in the game.

Given the green light, the next task was to find a high calibre graduate to bring the Ballymena company’s idea to life. Mr MacCorkell says the process was greatly helped by InterTradeIreland.

“They were able to produce a much more attractive advertisement that drew in lots of graduates that we would not have been able to attract as a small company in Ballymena,” he says.

Sitting in on the interviews, Dr Simms says their success in hiring a great industrial design graduate was critical to the project.

On Moorings’ payroll, graduate Eamonn McKnight pretty quickly came up with a product design specification and then, supported by Dr Simms, a preliminary design.

“Ciaran’s commitment to us was about half a day a week,” says Mr MacCorkell. “It meant our graduate was in contact with him, could bounce things off him and use some of the university’s resources.

“From our point of view, to have a partnership with a well-established university, to have them involved with the testing for the standards certainly gives a credibility that is appreciated.

“Some of the testing facilities that the university has, we were able to make use of them at a good rate and that was certainly useful . . . and Ciaran’s calculations helped us choose the materials so we knew, in making this thing, it would be strong enough.”

Some 18 months after their first meeting, the Buddy Roamer was born. As well as selling in Ireland, it’s being exported to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and MacCorkells also have agreements in place to sell it throughout Europe.

The ripple effect for Moorings Mediquip and Co Antrim is starting to be felt.

“Probably 80 per cent of the parts for the product are being sourced in Co Antrim,” says Mr MacCorkell, “so we are very pleased about that. I suppose it is helping to sustain some of the small manufacturing companies locally.”

MOORINGS HAS ALSOhired a production manager, "and we have a few people helping" him, says Mr MacCorkell. "As things are still ramping up, some of that labour is still part time."

And Moorings has changed its view of itself too. “We now have an RD or a design department,” Mr MacCorkell says of Moorings’ transition from a supplier of goods predominantly imported to a producer of goods designed and manufactured in Ireland.

And while their graduate opted to travel when the project was complete, he has now come back and Moorings has taken him on, on a freelance basis, to do some more design work.

There were benefits to Trinity too says Dr Simms who now uses the example of the Buddy Roamer project in his teaching.

“It allows students to see that manufacturing can and does take place in Ireland and that design engineering can and does take place in Ireland. It doesn’t always have to be in high-tech business, it can also be reasonably fundamental work.”

MARGARET HEARTY, DIRECTORof programmes and business services with InterTradeIreland, says that the Fusion project, which has been running since 2001, has had 300 participant companies with the average benefit to each, after three years, being £1 million.

In addition, 70 per cent of the graduates are being employed, continuing to lead innovation in their host companies, often located in communities rather than multinational industrial estates.

But with the InterTradeIreland project helping about 50 SMEs in the Republic this year and always on the basis that they must be matched with an academic institution in Northern Ireland (companies in the north are always matched with institutions in the south), our jobs Minister might do well to amplify the proven benefits of this project with a purely Republic-focused scheme.

“I would like to say the project would have happened ,” says Mr MacCorkell, “but it probably would have taken an awful lot longer, probably at least twice the length of time and that would have made it a lot more expensive for us.”

While he says he will have to sell a lot of units before reaching a turnover of £1 million, he says the reasonably small investment from the governments, north and south, in his burgeoning manufacturing business has been hugely beneficial.

“I don’t know how it would compare with the huge amounts of money they are spending on the multinationals but certainly, in Ireland, we have the skills and the graduates and the expertise to do all this ourselves.”