Wizard Power has developed a unique manufacturing and deployment approach for dishes known as the Factory-in-the Field.  In this approach, the bulk of the dish components are manufactured and most assembly tasks are performed, at a purpose built facility located at the power station site, minimising the installed cost per dish and maximising the rate of installation.  The Factory-in-the-Field is designed with the capability for manufacturing at least a dish a day per factory construction line.  These construction lines can be replicated to increase the manufacturing rate.

The Factory-in-the-Field is a customised manufacturing environment, which contains a combination of standard and specialised equipment.

The Factory-in-the-Field has been developed to achieve a range of objectives:

• A focus on manufacturability as a key input to design
• Elimination of all non value-adding activities (double-handling of materials, warehousing, and transport of space-taking sub-assemblies)
• A rapid and low cost assemble-to-tolerance approach, rather than an expensive manufacture-to-tolerance approach.  The Big Dish design requires no structural frame or mirror panel adjustment in the field to achieve its highly accurate performance
• Use of specialised equipment, which manufactures components Just-in-Time allowing close to zero work-in-progress or finished parts warehousing for all manufactured components
• Automatic on line inspection and data recording for quality analysis
• Optimised transportation of raw construction materials (by weight rather than volume)