International Collaboration in Heat Treatment and Surface Engineering

Plant closures and job losses, or the reverse – new investment and job creation – tend to have a distinctly local flavour. Even while conditions are good or ‘normal’, taking a larger-scale view (national, regional, global) can be seen as something of an irrelevance or a luxury. Yet what happens locally is quite likely to be the result of larger-scale effects and trends. Thus, while on a day-to-day basis many industrial and business issues are of strictly local or national concern, it should also be self-evident that, for survival against a changing global background of intensified environmental and energy worries - and major shifts in centres of gravity industrially and scientifically - there are many generic issues which are most effectively dealt with on a cross-border collaborative basis and/or which require the achievement of some level of mutual understanding and uniformity e.g.:

•      Encouragement and facilitation of collaborative scientific investigation and technology transfer

•      Energy management and the development of environmentally benign processes

•      Education and training – especially from the dual viewpoints of ‘portable’ qualifications and mobility of labour

•      Terminology establishment and approval

•      Standards and ‘best-practice’ coordination

•      Health and safety in the workplace

•      Compilation of databases

Multinational organizations face the ‘drag effect’ induced by national and regional priorities and even preferences. IFHTSE is no exception, but it also shows what can be done. It has been in existence now for about four decades as a platform for the exchange of information and plans in the industrially critical field of heat treatment and surface engineering. It provides the links and the networks for communication, coordination and intelligence on many subjects. Such action can be carried out effectively by the IFHTSE set-up without incurring heavy infrastructure and overhead costs.