BALLARAT manufacturing success story Gekko Systems has announced it is laying off staff.Managing director Elizabeth Lewis-Gray said yesterday six members of its 80-strong local workforce had been offered redundancy packages.``They are all high quality people and we hope they will be snapped up by someone else,'' she said.Ms Lewis-Gray said the staff were in support areas such as reception, quality assurance and back office processing and were all offered outplacement support.``We've seen a downturn in our prospects since the December quarter last year,'' she said.``We have been hopeful some larger contracts that we were expecting would come through to alleviate this.``Everyone is finding in the marketplace that when you talk to customers they are delaying decisions.``We have re-forecast our budgets for the coming year and cut operational costs as a result of that.``We've tried to minimise the number of staff we've lost because they are our future.''Gekko Systems is a world leader in new technology for the mining industry. It employs 80 people in Ballarat and 25 in South Africa.