Business View Oceania | December 2019

85 86 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA DECEMBER 2019 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA DECEMBER 2019 THE SECO/WARWI CK GROUP company to serve Eastern Europe and Russia. In 2002, we bought one of our competitors, Camlaw Ltd., that was going out of business, and that added to our dominance in the heat exchanger brazing field. Right now, as a Group, we have branches in the U.S., Poland, Germany, Russia, India, and China. We employ, globally, roughly 850 people. In 2007, the company went public on the Warsaw stock exchange, so at that time the Polish facility became the headquarters of the Group.” “Many people don’t realize that a furnace is similar to an automobile,” Boeckenhauer remarks. “There are different parts that have to go together, and work together, to get the right result out the back end. So, we view ourselves, basically, as systems integrators - we design the furnaces, we write the control programs, and we’re integrating other components into one piece of equipment that can do a process. So, we have heating source vendors, vendors for combustion equipment, burners, heating elements, insulation, controls, and insulation that all have to be integrated within the furnace as a package.” Boeckenhauer says that Seco/Warwick is able to maintain its competitive edge because of its proprietary and innovative technologies. “In the aluminum industry, for example, we’ve got a furnace that uses a jet speed air flow to heat the load faster than the traditional mass flow,” he explains. “A typical mass flow furnace needs a large mass of heated air to heat-treat the aluminum load. The jet vortex design uses high speed air, which impinges on the aluminum that you’re trying to heat-treat. So, it transfers heat much faster than just moving a large mass of air. We have that in our aluminum process furnaces for aluminum coils, making product for use in the automotive industry, the packaging industry, and the building products industry. ‘Vortex’ is the trademark of our high speed coil annealing furnaces.” “We employ the same theory of jet speed impingement on what we call ‘logs,’ which are turned into billets for extrusion,” Boeckenhauer continues. “The logs are round bars of aluminum that can be 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, or 18 inches in