Engineering

The strategic goal of the Engineering Services is to provide functional reliability throughout all of the operations of the Group. We maintain our processing machinery to standards that ensure the maximum economic life for every unit, with the aim of causing no loss of availability of plant to the manufacturing operations. This life-cycle approach begins in the procurement phase, where we constantly look for the most energy-efficient and maintenance-efficient machinery that will carry out tasks to the standards required from the leather manufacturing process.

Through the entire lifetime of the equipment that we use, it is our intention to keep them as close to an as-new state as possible - in this way we set not only a visual quality standard but also keep the plant capacity as close to maximum as we can. Even for machinery at the end of its life, where possible we will trade in the older machinery which can then be refurbished for use in the tannery industry around the world.

The standards for equipment are mirrored in the standards that we expect from our engineering staff, with the appropriate level of training and experience always present within the factories. Our engineering apprentices can be found in every part of the Group and we have high expectations from the investment in their skills and training.

We are on a steady pathway towards becoming a fully implemented predictive, on-condition maintenance organisation and, in concert with the Operational Excellence programmes, we are progressing towards full reliability of all functions.