Driving Customer Confidence through Innovation

‘James Walker was founded in the 1880s, but it is by continually looking forward that they inspire the confidence of their global customer base;’ says Global Marketing and Business Development Manager, John Bowers.

It is a challenge for companies in the modern market place to continue to innovate since customers today have an automatic expectation for products and systems to evolve to meet new challenges. James Walker has state of the art testing facilities at its Cockermouth plant in Cumbria, including test rigs designed to replicate conditions seen in valves, putting its sealing products through the same rigours they can expect to face in the field. The results of these tests go a long way to inspiring customer confidence and reinforcing James Walker’s position as a market leader - a position the company maintains by continuing to introduce a stream of successful new products and solutions to market.

An industry leader in sealing technology, James Walker invests heavily in research, development and innovation. The investment is not merely financial. The company structure and culture is arranged in such a way as to foster innovation. ‘We work in dedicated teams, and encourage those teams to take ownership for what they do.’ Says Mr Bowers ‘The approach works because we have the appropriate expertise within the business.’

This may sound like a simple methodology, but for a company with 11 production, engineering, distribution and customer support sites in the UK, and a further 40 spread across Continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, SE Asia, South Africa and the Americas; organising these teams is a design feat in itself.

Taking the industry forward

Despite having over 2000 employees across the globe, James Walker remains privately owned.Mr Bowers believes this gives the company the flexibility it needs to help continue to support the challenges faced by the valve industry, even during difficult times for the global economy. Private ownership also helps to create a family ethos, and a business environment that employees do not want to leave once they have become part of the James Walker team.

James Walker was founded in the 1880’s and it was the principle of applying ‘engineering science’ in order to ‘…enable machinery to work more reliably’ that fuelled the company’s growth in those early years. That growth was so rapid, that James Walker has been a global company for over 100 years. However one can easily see the link between the founding principle of James Walker in the late 1800s, and the modern company’s focus on research, development and innovation today.

The company continues to provide new products which prove to be extremely popular with the industries they supply. A recentexample is the success of James Walker’s RotaBolt©, the tension control device that uniquely assures bolted joint integrity. The concept is very simple; a bolt that is not just accurately calibrated but that also provides a tactile or visual indication that it has been installed at, and is maintaining, the correct bolting design tension, assuring the integrity of the joints where bolts are subject to vibration and other stresses. The clever part is that James Walker engineers have been able to take this simple idea and turn it into a finished product range that is easy to manufacture, robust and above all reliable. The result – a highly successful product adopted across a range of industries that is now manufactured and distributed across the globe.

Increasingly James Walker has become known, not only for effective products, but also for the provision of design solutions. Mr Bowers believes that it is the company’s complementary teams, spanning disciplines as well as Continents that mean it is ideally positioned to provide this.

‘We have teams in Brazil, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Middle East, and USA as well as across Europe and we insist on local support in each of those countries. We invest heavily in training so that our teams can provide solutions that don’t just work but provide additional benefits such as reduced maintenance costs or performance improvements for our customers.’ says Mr Bowers.

By providing customer support on a local level backed up by dedicated teams of experts who have the freedom to focus on driving research and development, James Walker is achieving its aim of building customer confidence and maintaining a position as a leading global provider of effective, innovative sealing solutions.

James Walker
Tel: +44 (0) 845 520 88 00
www.jameswlaker.biz

Published: 9th December 2013