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alongside our hydraulics, as well as digital control. The vehicles we supply our products into are moving towards driverless technologies too. This is the way the industry is heading, and we need to ensure we can support these future technological advances.”
Alongside technology, health and safety is integral to KPM UK, and improving staff safety played a key part in a recent Six Sigma project.“ For several years, we’ ve been using sodium plant to treat castings, which essentially is a bath of sodium hydroxide and is quite a dangerous mix of chemicals,” Lee reveals.“ It treats the surface of the casting to ensure there’ s no dirt or debris, but it has high health and safety risks, so we have had to have rigorous standards and training. The team worked hard over a two-year period to test alternative methods of surface treatments, and we’ ve been successful in replacing this process with a shot blasting process. Our suppliers are also now treating the castings too, so we don’ t carry out this pre-treatment processes on site.”
With employee wellbeing at the forefront of the business, KPM UK has implemented leadership development training in alignment with its increased head count of 50 people.“ We’ ve hired more people since the start of 2025, which is great,” Lee continues.“ Training new staff in conjunction with the production rate going up can be a challenge, so we’ ll be focusing intently on that training throughout 2026. Regarding our staff engagement strategy, we have what we call‘ wildly important goals’ that are aligned to the company
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