As Kenyans bemoaned the financial stress associated with January, an engineer based in Makindu Township in Makueni County made Sh1.5 million from selling an automatic machine used to fill yoghurt into plastic cups and then sealing them using aluminium foil.
Maitha Manyala made the automatic cup filler and sealer from scratch, outpacing his Kenyan peers and drawing a lot of attention to his workshop, an unassuming shop tucked in a dusty street at the township along the Mombasa-Nairobi highway.
"Manufacturing the fully automatic rotary cup filler and sealer machine has taken us seven months. The designs, drawings and virtual simulations took three months, while cutting the various parts of the machine, assembling them, wiring and testing the machine took four months. We kept learning along the way," says Mr Manyala.
Manyala sold the machine to Victor Sila, a local entrepreneur who runs Eden Dairy Limited, a startup based at a different section of Makindu Town, which produces and markets Uzima Yoghurt, a popular yoghurt brand sold mainly in Kajiado, Machakos and Makueni counties.
"We had initially planned to import the automatic cup filler and sealer machine from either China or India - acquiring it locally has saved us around Sh500,000. It has revolutionised our work. Today, we serve huge orders without breaking our backs as the machine has significantly increased our production efficiency. It took us eight hours to package 600 litres of yoghurt before acquiring the machine, this has since reduced to two hours,” explains Mr Sila.
Watching the machine dispense cups into a rotating indexing table, strike them with UV light rays before dispensing yoghurt into them, then sealing and dispatching cup after cup onto a conveyor belt at the touch of a button is a sight to behold.
"Manufacturing a complex machine like the cup filler and sealer is delicate. It starts with listening to the client keenly to understand their requirements and translating the requirements to designs guided by basic engineering principles. This is then followed by virtual simulations to enhance the fidelity of the upcoming machine. At that stage, we embarked on cutting the various parts precisely and assembling them. To rotate the indexing table from one function to the other, we have employed Geneva wheel technique which converts continuous motion to intermittent rotary motion, and compressed air which moves the movable parts,” explains Manyala, a manufacturing engineer passionate about coding. He runs Opentembo Limited, a humble machining startup which is big in basic fabrication works.
Buoyed by the accomplishment, he has embarked on making variations of the cup filler and sealer machine.
“We want to make semi-automatic machines and smaller machines for small scale businesses. We are also eyeing the lucrative water packaging industry,” he says.
Manyala, now 40 years, started the machining enterprise in 2015, seven years after graduating from Egerton University. In between he designed computer applications for banks and other high-end clients. At some point he was employed at Equity Bank and charged with designing the bank’s main enterprise banking application. When everyone expected him to soar higher in the software development career, a restless Manyala said goodbye to formal employment citing a burning desire to be his own boss.
In addition to the freedom associated with self-employment, he was determined to revert to his passion - the mechanical engineering element of the manufacturing engineering and technology course that he had studied in college. However, the decision had far-reaching implications as it meant relocating his young family to the countryside and significantly scaling down on his lifestyle. Although he kept landing consultancy deals with Equity Bank and other companies, the jobs were far apart. He therefore set up the mechanical workshop.
A chaff cutter, a metal bender and a bespoke energy saving stove for roasting meat sit on top of his portfolio. He also cuts delicate floral designs on metal plates using plasma, the latest technology in cutting metal. As Kenyans battled the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a light bulb moment hit Manyala after his childhood friend, Mr Sila, sought his advice regarding importing a cup filler and sealer machine.
"He had reluctantly obliged when I discouraged him from importing the machine and instead offered to make him one. This experiment was an irresistible opportunity to test my capacity in making complex machines," he recalls.
With a team made up of a mechanical engineer, three artisans and a determination to succeed, Manyala embarked on the flagship project. Along the way he had to enrol for a short course on automating complex machines at Dedan Kimathi University, however, the training did not prepare him for the biggest challenge that lay ahead - the cost of stainless steel, the metal recommended for making machines that handle human food as it does not rust and it is easy to clean.
“A 10 millimetre plate of the metal goes for Sh96,000 in Nairobi. That notwithstanding, cutting the various parts of the machines to the required highest degree of precision is expensive. To address that need, we imported a computer numerical control machine,” Manyala explains.
The machine, which uses the plasma cutting technique to cut metal with utmost precision, turned out to be a big asset for the nascent enterprise as it sparked a whole new business line, that of making floral metal clads for doors by cutting delicate designs on metals, which keeps the business buoyant.
The businessman bemoans the importation of most of the machines used in Kenya “yet the country has what it takes to make machines for powering small scale enterprises”.
He is at the final stages of manufacturing nuts and bolts in a lucrative deal he has struck with a local company which imports motorcycles from China. But it is the successful completion and selling of the automatic cup filler and sealer machine which has him over the moon.
