LARGE-SCALE TECHNOLOGY ASSISTANCE PLANNED FOR CORE INDUSTRIES

       The rice-milling, rubber-production and chicken-raising industries are being targeted for new-technology assistance by the Technology Management Centre's Industrial Technology Assistance Programme (iTAP).
       Under what is called the iTAP Big Impact scheme, TMC plans to offer its services and funding subsidies to help greater numbers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the three flagship industries.
       TMC's director Chatchanart Theptharanon said the ambitious move was aimed at helping the many SMEs involved in the three vitally important industries to adopt technologies to improve their productivity and save energy.
       The industries were chosen because they generated Thailand's core revenue.
       The concept of the programme is to use TMC's existing services to help a mass of SMEs rather than providing tailor-made technology assistance for individual organisations.
       "iTAP's approach has been continously developed. We began by offering technology assistance on a one-to-one basis, and then with a group-to-group approach and a cluster approacg, until now we think we should scale up this body of knowledge to help core-industry SMEs on a mass scale, with the goal of making a big impact on the country," Chatchanart said.
       In the rice-production industry, iTAP will improve the rice-milling process by providing consultancy to farmers on technique. At a pilot plant, the productivity of a rice mill has been increased 20 per cent, along with savings in energy use.
       "For rice mills with a capacity of 60 to 120 tonnes per day, we can help them save up to Bt500,000 a year in energy costs. If we can implement our services in all of Thailand's 43,000 rice mills, we can reduce energy costs by up to Bt21 billion a year," Chatchanart said.
       Initially, TMC will deploy its rice-milling service through its partner, Khon Kaen University, which will take care of 50 rice mills in the north-eastern region. Then, the programme's coverage will be scaled up through TMC's university networks throughout the country.
       In the rubber industry, Chatchanart said iTAP's service was aimed at raising the productivity of the rubber fumigation operation and saving energy costs by improving rubber ovens.
       Rubber fumigation with tradition soild ovens can fumigate 1,200 pieces of rubber. Using three ovens, each fumigation operation takes four or five days to complete, usually producing rubber pieces of varying quality and creating the risk of fire.
       A new oven designed and developed by TMC reduces the time taken by fumigation to only three days and produces rubber pieces of uniform quality. The risk of fire is eliminated, she said.
       In Thailand, there are 660 rubber-fumigation plants, each of them normally requiring three ovens. If all of them adopted the locally developed ovens - about 2,000 ovens for 660 plants - they would save Bt200 million a year in energy costs.
       Chatchanart said the beauty of the plan was it would enable 6 million rubber farmers with trees covering 4 million rai to keep their fresh rubber until they had orders or until the price of rubber pieces was high enough for them to sell.
       "If we reduce time spent in rubber fumigation, we save up to 40 per cent of the energy used in the process, and the higher quality of the fumigated rubber will help to improve the price.
       "From our research, each new oven will raise profits by up to Bt165,000 a year. Importantly, it will also lift revenue from the export of piece-rubber, which is now about Bt70 billion a year, out of the Bt220-billion value of rubber exports," Chatchanart said.
       TMC is working with partners, including Walailak University and King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, to pilot the project with the Rubber Plantation Cooperative and Industrial Office in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, by deploying the newly developed oven in a rubber fumigation plant there.
       In the chicken-raising industry, the programme plans to install locally made air-control fans in chicken-feeding houses. The 50-inch fans are cheaper than imported models and produce no noise.
       Chatchanart said working with King's Mongkut's University of Technology Thon Buri and the Betagro Group, iTAP had developed 50-inch air-control fans that were half the cost of imported models and achieved a 23-per-cent energy saving.
       "Normally, each chicken-feeding house requires 10 air-control fans. If all of the 64,000 chiecken-feeding houses in Thailand deployed this technology, the country would save up to Bt1.3 billion a year," Chatchanart said.
       The locally made fans will also relieve tension and stress among the chickens because they produce no noise, she said.
       "In all these programs, iTAP will provide up to 50 per cent of the total cost of technology deployment but not more than Bt500,000. Up to now, we've helped about 300 SNEs, but we plan to significantly increase those numbers through iTAP Big Impact," she said.