86th Cold Storage Conference – We had a blast

Brent Filleul and Andrew Suckling attended the cold storage association conference last week on behalf of Ulti Group and found it very a beneficial networking opportunity with the industry. Our theme for the event was loading area safety (see below flyer we had at the event), to go along with the overall conference theme of Future Proofing the NZ Cold Store Industry.

Here’s some of the valuable takeaways from their interactions with members, presenters and fellow suppliers that we thought you’d find interesting…

The presentation on technology in the workplace was a bit of an eyeopener, regarding the level of available technology and the speed in which it is now being developed and implemented. Our learning from this was the need to stay at the front of the developments in the industry both in product and self/staff development to enable us to maximise the productivity that it offers us. The need to challenge the status quo was presented very well by one speaker in the following acronym.

OP + NT = EOP, this stands for – Old Process + New Technology = Expensive Old Process!

It was a general discussion point that labour is very hard to get and that it is also getting more expensive making it critical that existing staff are well looked after and kept safe as finding replacements can be a very costly exercise.
The topic of the GDP v Business confidence was very interesting. The fact that when business confidence drops the GDP doesn’t match the drop, meaning that in the big picture the economy is not effected a huge amount. It does however effect the spend of business owners which in the short term can cause a slowdown.
Our stand went well, the Safe-T-Signal was a big hit and drew a lot of interest from clients highlighting a need in the industry for staff protection in busy intersections. Check out the video here…