2022 Thought Leaders: Stephen Millar

What opportunities do you predict for the growth of your industry in 2023?

Given our deep understanding and experience serving the Australian and NZ market, GME is uniquely positioned to deliver a locally engineered and manufactured communication solution. This solution will be tailored to address specific local commercial customer requirements.

In line with our channel partner requests to address local customer requirements, this may include the development of a new communications platform. We anticipate that this important initiative will generate increased demand and growth for the GME brand across the local region.

How are you making your company more resilient to ongoing global supply chain issues?

As an end-to-end designer and Australian manufacturer of radio frequency communication equipment, GME recognises that resilience requires a multifaceted approach. Procurement and supplier management is a key consideration of the initial engineering design process and GME has a highly experienced Australian supply chain team, with long-term and strategic supplier–partner relationships.

Furthermore, we also have a dedicated product life cycle engineering team. This means that we still have the capability to maintain our products, even in the event of component availability shortages.

This, combined with our Australian manufacturing capabilities, ensures that GME can provide our valued partners and their customers a high degree of confidence of supply continuity throughout these unprecedented times.

What are the biggest challenges or threats facing your industry in 2023?

Supply chain component shortages continue to present GME with a series of major challenges. The continuity of supply to our valued partners and their customers requires a strategic whole-of-business approach. As mentioned earlier, GME is exercising extreme vigilance, which includes reviewing communication practices and process improvements, whilst leveraging our collective expertise to help mitigate impacts to our channel partners.

Another major challenge is the extreme volatility of the USD against the AUD, which significantly impacts the material cost of key components. Coupled with sharply increasing labour costs, these two factors add an additional layer of complexity, as we endeavour to maintain pricing stability.

What’s on your wish list from governments, innovators and the wider industry in 2023?

Ongoing support of Australian manufacturing is high on our wish list. At GME we have over 60 years of experience in developing product for our market and manufacturing it here. Supply chain insecurity has been highlighted over the last few years and sovereign capability is something we hear about much more frequently. Government and industry can encourage further development of Australia’s sovereign capability by buying products made by it. There is also the opportunity for investment at a state or federal level in building some upstream component supply capability that can be leveraged across industry, once again to support Australian sovereign capability and improve our supply chain security.

Stephen Millar joined the GME board of directors in 2019 and became Managing Director in 2021. He is committed to Australian manufacturing and the development of locally engineered communication solutions.