How do you perceive the international dimension and role of cooperation between women across different continents today?
The ability of a company’s capacity to grow must be to introduce exporting their goods into the conversation.
By Diane Tompson, CEO, Novaris / IWEC Foundation Past Awardee & IWEC Foundation Advisory Council Member
International is a word that conjures many thoughts and responses for me personally. I will try and sum up the ideas that immediately come to my mind when we speak of international dimensions.
Firstly, for a company this can mean a variety of things. One of the most valuable aspects of a business can be its R&D department, (research and development), and for an electronics manufacturing and engineering company like mine, this has been a major factor in keeping ahead of our competitors. In other words, keeping abreast of international trends, following international standards, and finding suitable components abroad, are merely a small part of how we undertake research for new products. To do this, our engineers must immerse themselves in website searches and then follow up with emails and phone calls to the relevant personnel, who in turn will send us samples or provide designs in order for us to determine whether they would be suitable for our new products. The engineers need to sight the actual component to see if they meet relevant specifications and we will also probably do a round of tests on their samples to prove whether they are indeed suitable. Without new technologies it would be impossible to be as responsive and quick to design product. Working in this way is only made possible by the internet and modern telecommunications. However, for every positive there is a negative. Because of all the new technology and the way we communicate, the world is growing smaller and we are competing in the same markets and often sourcing the same material as our competitors. Maintaining our competitive edge by continuously improving the performance of our products, is the only way that we keep ahead of all our competitors.
The ability of a company’s capacity to grow must then be to introduce exporting their goods into the conversation. If you take my company for example, we began our manufacturing of lightning and surge protection products in the island state of Tasmania in Australia. I believe that Iceland and Tierra del Fuego are more remote than Tasmania and of course Antarctica, but possibly no other country is as far from major cities as we are. That meant that if we wanted to grow our company’s sales and revenue, we had to send product to the mainland of Australia and once having achieved success in doing that, we decided it was in our best interests to export internationally. We now manufacture in Malaysia and Tasmania and sell our product globally. For the owners of the business it was a leap of faith and added quite a bit more labour to our workload, not to mention travel, but the rewards of adding this international dimension have been enormous. I doubt that I would ever have met and worked with people from all over the world if we had decided to limit the sales of our products to Australian markets. How fortunate for us that we have done so, I consider that my life has been blessed as a result of that decision.
