DEVELOPING a product here made by Singaporeans and sold under a local brand name is the goal of Mr Chew Thye Chuan, director of Field Catering Supplies.
Mr Chew has been distributing imported beverages since he started the company back in 1986, but he has also been harbouring plans to create his own product.
'I wanted to develop something that was truly our own product - something that was 100 per cent made in Singapore,' he said.
It was a similar story at AMS System Services, a company that develops production systems for the garment industry.
'We were distributing Swedish production systems and sewing machines, but in 1999, they terminated our distributorship,' said founder Peter Fung.
After the break-up with his Swedish principal, Mr Fung, a 35-year veteran in the business, suffered another setback that made him decide he had enough of selling imported production systems.
'We also did OEM work for a company in China and produced another production system, but their system was not so good,' he recounted. OEM refers to original equipment manufacturing.
'So four years ago, we started our own research and development (R&D), and last month, completed work on our own system that is now being marketed in Mauritius.'
The AMS E3000 is a cutting-edge production system that uses radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.
'There is a lot of work-in-progress fatigue for operators and a lot of disorganisation in the business. But, with the RFID tag on the hanger, garments can be identified and tracked by the client, even via the Internet,' said Mr Fung.
The AMS E3000 - which Mr Fung claims can increase production efficiency by up to 200 per cent - was developed with the help of the Technology Innovation Programme (TIP).
Aside from a TIP subsidy of $130,000, Mr Fung also managed to tap the expertise of staff at TIP-funded Centres of Innovation (COIs).
'We ran into some difficulties when developing the Web-based component of the AMS E3000, but SIMTech helped us develop the Internet program we needed,' said Mr Fung.
SIMTech, or the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, is the research arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
Like Mr Fung, Mr Chew also tapped the expertise of one of the five COIs here to produce Nutri-water, a new beverage with nutraceutical ingredients.
Nutri-water, which completed its final testing phase last month, was developed by experts at the Food Innovation and Resource Centre (FIRC).
The FIRC is housed in Singapore Polytechnic and was set up by Spring Singapore to help small and medium-sized enterprises in the food and beverage sector create and test new products using the latest technologies available.
'We gave FIRC our requirements and it developed the formula. But the TIP grant also covers a lot of other parts of the process such as development and testing costs, actual production and also salaries,' explained Mr Chew.
'Without the programme, it would have been more difficult for us.'
