Surprising Reception

I got a nice surprise the other day. Hughie, our UK MD had just come back from head office in Germany and showed me a picture of their new reception. The main feature in that new reception is a three panel image consisting of one my photos!

It was the one I took of the Reilly's job at Merseylink, which also featured in this year's calendar and also a jigsaw puzzle!

Who'd have guessed when I took that photo it would become so enduring!

And here is the original:

Showing Concrete

Yesterday was my annul trip to Birmingham NEC to visit the UK Concrete Show. It's always a good opportunity to catch up with a few people and to see the new development in the world of all things concrete.

The highlight this year was to see the large Utiform display area and catch up with Ian (our Utiform representative). We work with Utiform and sell their screed pumps and other products. They had a much smaller set up last year so it was great to see them expanding their reach this time round.

Boom Up Stairs

As regular readers will know, we have been doing some renovations here at Schwing Stetter HQ in Perivale. And this has left us with some spaces to fill in terms of brightening up the place. The stairwell was one such place and I was asked to produce a connected series of 5 shots of a new S 52 SX and its boom to fill the void above a sections of the stairs.

Creating such a series was as interesting challenge as it's not a just a quick photo cut up and stuck on the wall.

A second visit to the S 52 SX at Merseylink was organised (thanks to Paul and Mark at Reilly's) which was luckily a short pour so the pump operator had the time afterwards to raise the boom to the right angle to get the shots. I wanted the angle to roughly match the angle of the stairs so it could reach from the lower left corner of the space to the upper right one.

Finding a spot to take the shots from wasn't easy given the fence in front of the truck but I tried from a few different places and came away with a few sets of five shots that were usable. I needed five separate shots as a single shot would not have been a high enough resolution for large canvasses like this. The actual shots overlapped by quite a lot and I needed to find the ideal size to crop them down to so that they were small enough not to overlap each other too much, whilst being big enough to get a decent shot of the truck mounted pump itself in the bottom left image. There was also the issues of ensuing the colours and exposures matched properly - Photoshop is a very useful tool...

There is actually a bit of overlap there on the finished canvasses - making the boom look a little longer compared to the size of the truck, but for a boom that can reach the other end of an Olympic sized swimming pool anyway, the exaggeration is quite small - the S 52 SX really is an impressive piece of equipment.

A few calculations were required to get them in their correct positions on the wall with the whole display centred properly but I think people would agree that the finished display was worth the effort.

A Good Investment

Yesterday we were officially recognised as an Investors In People accredited company.

According to the Investors in People website: "Investors in People signals an organisation that puts people first." 

What this means for us is the recognition that Schwing Stetter (UK) values its employees and wants to see each member of the team reach their potential. It was also an opportunity to tighten up and formalise some of our internal processes.

The whole process began last year with an initial induction and staff interviews. Then with expert guidance we went through the process necessary to achieve the core standard. In many ways this just meant formalising things we were already doing. The very low staff turnaround rate already showed that people here feel valued and generally 'invested in'.

Some of the things that needed to be evident were staff:

• being aware of their management line
• feeling happy to contribute ideas
• having the opportunity to progress in their career
• having the opportunity to receive training
• understanding where the company is going
• having opportunities to discuss targets, achievements, shortcomings and possible solutions
• not turning up each day just feeling like a number

Demonstrating all of these and other things has taken a short while but it has certainly been worthwhile for the company. It is also good news for our clients who can see that our staff care about the company, the products and service they are offering and the clients who benefit from them in the end.

You can see this and our other accreditations on the accreditations and memberships page of our website.

Blast From The Past

This week we are moving the server to a new home in what was the stationary cupboard (as part of the downstairs refurbishment). So last week we were cleaning out the old stationary cupboard and as you can imagine, there were things hidden away in there that hadn't been seen for ages.

One such little nugget was this pile of promotional ash-trays, back from a time when handing out promotional ash-trays was an entirely acceptable thing to do. They came emblazoned with out telex number(!) and our phone number beginning with the area code 01. I'm sure this had become 0108 by the late 1990's and I think there was an 081 version since around 1990. That makes these at least 25 years old!

As expected this was from the time when we were still Burlington Engineers and wouldn't become part of the Schwing Stetter group for at least another 16 years (see more about our company history here).

Of course we were still working with Schwing pumps back then. In fact we had been doing so since before 1962 when we were made the UK and Irish distributor for Schwing GbmH. Compared to that length of experience, this ash tray is positively modern!