Monday 19 November 2012

Review of the 60th ARGE General Meeting held in Helsinki, Finland - 13 to 15 September 2012


The European Federation of Association of  Locks & Builders Hardware Manufacturers

ARGE would like to welcome a new executive to the board: Mr Hans Weissenboeck. Hans is from Austria but represents the Swiss Association. He attended his first ARGE Conference in Budapest in 1993 when he was general manager of Grundmann GEGE (Austrian manufacturers of cylinders and locks). He continued as general manager after the merger of Grundmann with Kaba in 1997. For a number of years Hans has attended numerous ARGE congresses as a member of ARGE’s Working Group C and also, as convenor of TC33 WG4 TG4 on cylinders.

Resignations
The delegates attending the General Meeting were informed of the official resignation of two board members that occurred earlier in the year.

Mr Guiliano Modesti who had been a board member for eight years, resigned in April 2012 to focus on his work as Chief Executive of Dorma in Italy. And also Gerhard Wenger, who resigned in January 2012 after four years of service. Wenger relocated to Singapore, to become Head of Division (Access and Data Systems for Asia-Pacific) for Kaba.

 Both the Chairman, Jorma Siren, and General Secretary, Joachim Kieker, wished Modesti and Wenger well, and thanked them for their years of commitment to ARGE.

The General Meeting in retrospect would have benefited by being given more than an hour’s time. The Chairman ran through a list of what ARGE has achieved over the last year. Which included:-

  • The 5 meetings of the executive board
  • Development of the Business Plan
  • Cooperation with EDSF
  • Lobby work with KELLEN and ORGALIME 
  • The quarterly technical reports produced
  • The numerous marketing communications created and distributed via website news stories and press releases.
  • A review of the three active working groups and the single sub-group of WG C.

Further detail of ARGE’s mission, aims and objectives are available in the 2012-13 Business Plan available from the General Secretary - j.kieker@arge.org

Sustainability
 The theme of the 60th Annual Congress was Sustainability, and this was emphasised in the review of the Business Plan. ARGE’s commitment to Sustainability was further addressed with an action plan on this topic that was written by Paul Browne of Assa Abloy. Unfortunately, at the last minute he was unable to present it himself. Stephan Schmidt from FV S +B came to the rescue and was the perfect understudy yet again.

Pierre Vilian presented his report on Standardisation. And Arjen Koole presented his report on the lock and hardware market, with graphs and forecasts.

All reports from the General Meeting will be available for members only on the website by the end of November 2012.

New Website
Zoe Quinlan, Marketing Executive, unveiled the new design of the ARGE website. This was very well received with some delegates jesting that it was too impressive to be British!  It has been produced by web design company, Hullaballoo and was launched on the 29th October 2012.

Review of the Lectures
A detailed review of the lectures held during the Conference will be published in our printed and digital magazines in early December. The digital version will be available at www.dijonline.co.uk from the 5th. 

For next year’s 61st Congress, Dublin has been put forward as a possible location


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