The African Business Journal: Reutech

Reutech
================================================================================
admin on 03 November, 2009 03:07:00
 
Reutech Radar Systems began in 1986. The company was “originally designed
purely to service the South African defence market,” recalls CEO James
Verster. “It had about 20 engineers and was really just looking at
servicing the South African army to build radars for their self-protection
needs.”
“As time has passed and we have developed, we are now exporting our radars
and sub-systems worldwide, including Australia, South America and Europe. We are
also currently positioned to export to the United States, Canada, India and
China, which is a big next step.”
He explains that Reutech is “small enough not to suffer that badly”
from the recent volatility in the marketplace. “We are a fairly small
company of about 200 people with about 100 engineers, whereas the parent
company, Reunert, is about 20 or 30 times larger than that. We’re
realtively small, but we’re the highest tech company in the group because
we deal with radar systems.”  Reunert Limited, has been a strong backbone
in the impressive growth Reutech has enjoyed in its 22-year existence.
“The main role Reunert offers us is the ability to participate in fairly
large contracts,” adds Verster . “Those contracts require almost
guarantees of perhaps tens of millions of dollars and the parent company can
stand in for those guarantees. Also when we require cash to fund these
operations, for example, the cash required in export contracts where you only
see cash on delivery, cash flow operations can be supported by our parent
company. Although we haven’t actually been in a position where we’ve
needed that for quite a while.”
This large contract exposure has, in no small part, allowed Reutech to shift
focus from their original efforts to serve the South African defence market and
move with market trends.
“Now the projects have also changed. Originally we were just looking at
servicing air-defence customers but today the big markets for us are
homeland-security and mining—specifically mining safety so this is now
where we apply our know how, and these two are considered to metamorphose. This
is where I think we will spend the next five years, so moving more away from the
traditional military markets,” Verster says.
Now looking forward, Verster explains the potential for development in the
mining sector.
“It’s a great opportunity for us and for them,” he says of
technological advancement potential.
KEEPING UP WITH TECHNOLOGY – THE REUTECH WAY
Vester attributes Reutech’s consistent high standards in mastering new
technology to their ability to partner with the major-players of the mining
industry.
“If you consider radar, it basically consists of seven major subsystems
and the technological challenges lie within those subsystems. I would say that
in any point in time over the last 10 or 15 years, more than 50 per cent of the
company has been involved in development projects in any one or all of those
seven subsystems simultaneously,” he says.
“We’re constantly busy with the development of new packaging,
antennae technology, and synthesizer technology—all the main subsystems of
the radar. We’re very well aligned with the South African government for
their R&D activities as far as radar is concerned. So we’re constantly 
active in that environment. That’s basically the secret of keeping
abreast: having at least 50 per cent of the work force busy with
development.”
This thirst for innovation and supportive company value has allowed
Reutech’s team to continually expand upon their skills and foster a
culture of learning and development within the ranks.
“Over the last 10 years, we have grown a very acute awareness of the
importance of innovation. Everybody’s always talking about some sort of
new scheme,” Vester says.
“The other thing is that we really promote people to learn a lot about
adjacent fields, not just your own field of expertise. We have a lot of
broad-base structure people and we really support that. For example, if you are
a software engineer but you’re really interested in radio frequency
design, we will definitely support that.”
This is just as well, because asking questions and retaining a culture of active
interest has proven integral to their employees.
“Another strong thing we have within our company is that nobody should
have the idea that they’re unique in the sense that they know everything.
Asking questions and knowing that you have a lot of clever people around you is
definitely an attitude that we have at the company. That open learning approach
is definitely part of our company’s culture,” Vester says.
But within this informative and educational attitude comes an acceptance and
supportive stance when things go awry. “The other thing in our culture is
that it’s okay to make mistakes at Reutech,” Vester says. “Our
company has this culture where we allow people to make mistakes and you
don’t get your head bitten off.” This is a key aspect of a truly
successful educational culture.
RECOGNIZING FUTURE POTENTIAL
As Reutech continues to move a step ahead of the industry, Vester explains the
company is careful to communicate and consult with their respected partners.
“At the moment, if we look at mining safety we spend a lot of time with
all of the big companies—the medium-sized to large corporations, the
BHP’s, the Anglo’s, the Barrick’s, the Rio Tinto’s,. We
sit with their top geotechnical specialists and ask how they see mining
progressing in the future. What we see from that is mines will become much
leaner and they will be much more safety orientated,” he says.
“They are really embracing technology in the mining
domain—monitoring the vehicles, monitoring every load, monitoring the
slopes; to a high degree, this is only the beginning for them and they see the
value of that. I think there’s a great opportunity for mining operations
today to inject a solid boost in technology in there and increase productivity
dramatically. That’s quite possible. We will be pursuing this thought and
this direction with them over the next five years.”
In adapting to changing market trends and favouring hesitant and slower
purchasing, Reutech has got it right again.
“I’ve seen other companies that operated in this field before we
entered into the market and the mines were really struggling to get highly
reliable systems and performance guarantees from these competitors. When we
entered the market, we immediately set a benchmark of operational availability,
for example, how many hours in the month our systems will work. Then if our
systems don’t work and we’ve guaranteed it, we don’t expect
our customers to pay for it,” Vester says.
“It’s almost like renting a car. If you rent a car and it
doesn’t run, certainly you’re not going to pay for that car.
That’s how we see it and the customers love it. They say ’this is
the right way.’ of course, they expect it to run 98 per cent of the time
then if it doesn’t run, they don’t want to pay for it and we say
’that’s fine’” We are the market leaders when it comes
to that attitude and we built that through reliability in terms of our
product.”
With their large contract relationships, record of success and reliability and a
culture of education and support, Reutech is raising the bar for radar systems,
not only in the mining industry, but for any counterpart who looks across and
recognizes all that this leading company have accomplished.