Kinder & Co – Driving the Industry Forward
CHRISTINE KINDER, Marketing Services Manager of Kinder & Co Pty Ltd looks at the driving force behind this growing and developing family business.
IN 1985, an entrepreneurial couple decided to set up shop in Melbourne, Victoria. From the very first day, Neil and Christine Kinder decided that Kinder & Co would keep family values and excellence at the core of everything they do and how they serve their customers.
Today, more than 27 years later, Kinder & Co has become a recognised company with a team of people who live and breath the ethos of family values and excellence. Looking back, both founders realise with humility that their decision to be professional yet familiar, extolling excellence but never at the expense of friendliness and approachability, has come to define greatness in how smaller companies grow, influence and impact their customers, competitors and industry.
As an independent supplier and manufacturer of innovative and practical solutions, Kinder & Co’s core business is to improve and maintain the running efficiency of conveyor and bulk materials handling equipment used to convey a variety of products including ore, quarried products, grain, sugar, salt and coal.
Kinder & Co has been at the forefront of the industry sourcing, discovering and designing world-class products to power the mining boom in the country.
Imaginative design capabilities, lateral thinking, rigid bench-marking and a ‘can-do’ attitude to overcome problems have made Kinder & Co a leading supplier and partner in the industry. All these values stem from Kinder & Co’s family values – integrity, trust, knowledge and goodwill.
Christine believes that modeling the right behaviour matters, especially in an industry where human interaction and customer-supplier relationships based on trust and mutual understanding drives growth of both business and industry. When the right balance of core values drives the positive and creative culture of an organisation, people flourish, safety and responsibility take centre stage and a caring environment is the outcome, providing a safer, more civil and productive atmosphere.
Driven by the right values, companies will look to the right matrix to measure their own success. For us at Kinder & Co, we measure our success on our other value – excellence. We take pride in everything we do to deliver the best and most innovative product and service we can to our customers.
This means better productivity, greater value and ultimately a bigger impact on the bottom line to grow and strengthen the industry we all work in.
Because we are clear about our values, our team has become a part of the company based on how they can contribute, and in their own unique way, project the values in their role. This creates greater alignment and deeper engagement as everyone knows his or her place in the organisation. Our customers and suppliers have often commented on our family values and how they see every member of the team live them.
Standing behind our products and solutions means that we put our name on the line, literally. Kinder & Co’s values drive the need to set the industry standard because there are no existing standards for some of the conveyor products and solutions in the industry. By setting a high standard and putting our name on it, we wear our values on our sleeves and live it. This has enabled us to be more stringent about the quality and value of the products we offer, and this shows our clients how far we are prepared to go to ensure that the industry leads the world especially in safety and environmental friendliness.
Our environmental policy drives our goal to incorporate ‘green’ standards and practices in every aspect of our business. From the sourcing of more efficient, innovative and better-value-for-return products and solutions, to waste-managing our operations, to educating and promoting the awareness of how our industry impacts the environment, Kinder & Co is committed to making the business socially and environmentally responsible.
Our quality policy drives our aim to provide our customers with innovative, high quality products which are safe, reliable and represent good value. As a crucial link in the industry’s chain, we take our responsibility to grow and our part to make the industry sustainable very seriously. To achieve this, we have recently invested in and developed a quality management system for the organisation that is ISO 9001 compliant and certified. This system covers design, sales, servicing and distribution of all our products and services.
Today, more organisations are seeking the answer to eroding staff and customer engagement. Trust, reliability and value are three attributes that are severely deficient in the marketplace today. Often, short-sighted companies seek to look at one of these attributes at the expense of the others. Our experience tells us all three are important.
Fortunately for the industry, we believe that all three are reasonably achievable. What needs to happen is for companies (both suppliers and customers) to realise that they need to demand for these values to be prevalent in the industry.
These values have served us at Kinder & Co well and will continue to. We have received numerous accolades because of our values and service, including a coveted Bulk Handling Supplier of the Year award. This recognition goes a long way to validating and appreciating the effort, commitment and dedication our team puts in to live our values to make the industry the best it can be in the world.
For more information contact Kinder & Co Pty Ltd on 03 9587 9244 or visit the website www.kinder.com.au
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