Excerpt from an article by Roeland van den Bergh, which first appeared in The Post on 12 April, 2025.
Dodson Group, the Auckland-based precision manufacturer, is top dog in the world of specialist dual clutch transmissions fitted to high-performance racing cars, and the US is a key market according to Managing Director David Sweas.
The EMA-member company is on the front foot, having recently implemented what’s known as Industry 4.0 – the new technologies and data that are revolutionising manufacturing and distribution – across its four business divisions.
A dual clutch is similar to a manual gearbox, but instead of pushing in a clutch pedal with your foot, a computer operates the clutch to make lightning-fast gear changes.
“If you were to buy a Porsche 911 and just drive it back and forth to the supermarket, you probably don’t need our product,” Sweas says.
But owners who want to go racing and increase engine power need specialist equipment to cope with that power. An off-the-shelf, high-performance sports car might produce 600 horsepower. To race competitively on a circuit an owner will need to soup-up their ride to 1000 horsepower, or up to 3000 horsepower if they want to send their precious down a quarter-mile drag strip in six seconds.
Dodson is one of the few specialists in the world that manufactures and supplies that equipment, distributing to a global network of 200 wholesalers. And while the brand is known for making high-tech gearboxes, the group also supplies and services gearboxes for a host of other applications, including wind turbines and big machinery used by the likes of steel mills and food processing plants that have gearboxes the size of a car.
Harry Dodson
The business was started in 2004 by Harry Dodson, who owned a used car parts business and liked to race cars on the side. Dodson, who is a director of the group, imported one of the first Nissan R35 GT-R racing cars into the country when the model was launched in 2007, and was one of the first street cars to be fitted with a dual clutch gearbox from the factory.
But he soon discovered the expensive gearbox was not up to the rigours of racing and it quickly wore out.
The only option was to send the gearbox back to Nissan for repair at huge expense, and so Dodson decided to start making his own parts.
A new business was born and quickly gained an international following from enthusiasts who would send their spent gearboxes to the North Shore workshop for repair.
But sending gearboxes to the bottom of the world is expensive, so Dodson turned to manufacturing the parts and selling them through distributors.
The success of the company attracted the attention of KiwiSaver fund Booster, which became the majority shareholder five years ago, and Sweas was given the job of taking the business to the next level.
The American has a background as a mechanical engineer and has worked for big US automotive parts suppliers. After gaining a master in business administration and master in engineering management, he worked for a large bank doing mergers and acquisitions, including automotive companies, before moving to New Zealand with his Kiwi wife.
Dodson’s export business has more than doubled in size and the company
also bought its two largest local suppliers, increasing the size of the group to 75 staff working at three locations in Auckland.
Today the group includes the original high-performance car service workshop, specialising in the likes of Lamborghinis, McLarens, Nissan GT-Rs and Toyota Supras, as well as manufacturing and distributing high-performance dual clutch transmission components around the world.
Industry 4.0
The Dodson Group is a graduate of a programme run by the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) and ASB on the impact of Industry 4.0. Its experience implementing the methodology has been fed back into the current round of ASB workshops, ‘The Impact of Industry 4.0 on Your Business’.
Industry 4.0 includes cloud computing and the Internet of Things (the networking capability that allows information to be sent to and received from objects and devices, such as fixtures and kitchen appliances, using the Internet), which are revolutionising manufacturing and distribution.
The workshops aim to demystify Industry 4.0, breaking it down to the nuts and bolts of what it means for businesses in a practical sense and how the system improves productivity.
“When I took over the business back in 2019, we were like a lot of small businesses. They built the business by being scrappy,” Sweas says.
“As we’ve grown, we’ve had to put systems and procedures in place to enable that growth.”
Many of the early efficiency gains were made using analogue systems. “I always like to tell people — you won’t straighten out your shop floor with the (Industry 4.0) system.”
The first four years were spent getting the most out of fixing the existing analogue tracking system and shop floor processes, he says.
With the integration of the group completed, it was time to streamline the systems and drive maximum efficiency by working together better, replacing systems and using data to drive change on the shop floor.
About a year ago the tipping point was reached, where the analogue systems were at maximum capacity and the shop floor was working well with accurate and usable data.
That means a worker assembling something at a workstation is reliably inputting information into the system, giving the manager a view of the parts inventory and can predict when a new order needs to be placed to ensure production is maintained.
“It’s almost like flying a plane with instruments, first not having the instruments,” Sweas says.
The investment hurdle can be tough for small businesses, he says. But the way to look at it is what my current systems are costing the business and what is a new system going to cost?
If the incremental difference is $50,000 a year, that is somewhere between 50% and 75% of someone’s effort across 75 staff, Sweas says.
“There has to be a half years’ worth of someone’s time that we won’t waste by having the better system. But it’s not about eliminating jobs. It’s about being able to redeploy that person’s time more productively.”
Most of the efficiency gains come from middle managers, with easier planning freeing them to focus on adding value, like driving initiatives on the shop floor, business development and bringing in more work.
The cost of implementing Industry 4.0 could be $200,000, but chances are a business is carrying enough inventory and work in progress that, with a bit of planning, it will pay for itself within a year, Sweas says.
“If we don’t do this, we won’t keep up. This moment in time is a huge opportunity for New Zealand, and for a renaissance of manufacturing in the Western world, because there was a huge disparity between wages and lower-cost countries and higher-cost countries for a period of time. Not only is that gap closed, but now, with these Industry 4.0 and digital tools, we all have the same tools.”
He says staying at the front of that technology curve is a huge opportunity for New Zealand manufacturing.
“There’s a reason why you see all this stuff about tariffs and protectionism flying around in the world. It’s because manufacturing jobs are very valuable. When a manufacturing company sells a part for a dollar, 90 cents of that is going back into the community,” he says.
“So that’s why it’s such an opportunity for our economy and for New Zealand.”
