Manager's Letter

5/05/2009

For the past 18 months AustChrome has been undergoing an unprecedented era of change.   This change has been part of AustChrome’s strategy to fully realize the company’s potential as a “Reclamation Engineering” company instead of an Industrial Chrome Plater.

Strengthening our investment in reclamation technologies has placed AustChrome in a leading role in the Reclamation field, being able to offer a broad range of technologies and a diverse portfolio of alloys, for rebuilding components and improving productive life.  At the same time, AustChrome has not lost focus on our traditional Hydraulic business.  The company has continued to invest in upgrading both our Assembly and Testing capabilities as well as our repair and remanufacture capacity.  

To ensure that our business processes continue to grow to meet the needs of our growing and diversifying business, AustChrome has separated the Hydraulic business and the Reclamation business into two separate divisions, housed in two separate workshops.  This allows the productions teams to implement production management and Q&A processes more suited to two different fields achieving greater productivity, tighter production control and higher quality.

Within our Hydraulic Engineering Workshop, AustChrome has been able to modify our processes and equipment in line with ISO 4406 standards of contamination control to provide a greater assurance to our hydraulic customers that hydraulic assemblies assembled and tested by AustChrome meet the highest standards of contamination controls, providing longer working life and reducing chances of early hour failures.

Housing all our Reclamation processes in one specialized workshop has consolidated full control over every aspect of the job under one team, ensuring greater control over the reclamation process, and creating more ownership by the team in the job outcome and turnaround.  This has resulting in significantly improved job turnaround times, and reduction in coating failures and reworks.

AustChrome has fully adopted the concept and spirit of Continuous Improvement right down to the floor level.  This culture in the company will continue to ensure that AustChrome will continue to adapt to changes in the market and customers needs and remain at the leading edge of the Reclamation and Hydraulic Engineering industry.

Cameron Maclean