Review of the 60th ARGE General Meeting

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.

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 hours 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 ).

The theme of the 60^th 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.

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, Hullabaloo. It is planned that the site will go live on 29^th October 2012.

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