Greetings from the IAPMO R&T Oceana office in Melbourne, Australia. Time has certainly flown and we find ourselves another year older and wiser. The same can be said for the Australian IAPMO R&T Oceana business.  Our client base continues to grow at a steady pace as we continue to make in roads on our main competitor. Whilst we have only been operating our certification schemes for three years, IAPMO R&T Oceana now has the second highest number of WaterMark clients of the seven JAS-ANZ accredited WaterMark Conformity Assessment Bodies here in Australia. Not a bad effort for the “new kids on the block.”

Not only have we increased market share in respect to the number of clients, we have also become known in the Australian plumbing industry as the Conformity Assessment Body whose product certification staff has the most technical expertise out of all of our competitors. This is constantly being brought to our attention by the testing laboratories, technical regulators, major plumbing distributors and manufacturers. This all goes well for a continued expansion of our client base now and in the future.

For those of you that are regular readers of the IAPMO press releases, you may already have been aware that Stuart Henry has resigned from his position as IAPMO R&T Oceana Managing Director. Stuart and his family have decided to sell their house in Perth and move to Lafayette, Ind. Stuart’s wife, Mary, was born and raised in America and the Henry’s have decided that a move back to Indiana to be closer to Mary’s family is right for them at this stage of their life. We all wish them well.

Michael Kefford has resumed his previous role as Director of IAPMO R&T Oceana, but will be taking on a more operational position, and we all welcome his valuable experience and his net work of important contacts within the Australian Plumbing Industry. Michael has recently demonstrated his uncanny ability to get changes made to the benefit of IAPMO Oceana by having JAS-ANZ agree to undertake a review of their internal policies in respect to reducing audit durations at IAPMO R&T Oceana.

Due to the expansion of the IAPMO R&T Oceana client base, we have recently employed a new Technical Officer, Mark Daly. Mark has extensive experience in the plumbing world and is, in fact, a licensed plumber and gas fitter.
Mark has gained valuable technical experience with plumbing product compliance during his employment with Reece Plumbing. Reece is Australia’s largest plumbing distributor, with more than 400 plumbing outlets throughout Australia and New Zealand. Mark set up and ran the product testing laboratory that Reece utilised to evaluate potential plumbing suppliers and to undertake regular quality tests on received batches of imported products from their suppliers. Mark is a welcome addition to the Oceana team and continues our tradition of having a highly skilled and technically competent product certification staff.

For those of you who remember the last IAPMO R&T Oceana “Year in Review”
piece in Official, we were just about to move to new premises. The move was undertaken with minimal disruption and we are now well settled in. Whilst our new office is not in the same league as the new IAPMO World Headquarters, it does afford us extra space that we so desperately needed.

During the year, we have had the pleasure of having Megan Lehtonen visit our new office. Megan will be a welcome regular visitor to the IAPMO R&T Oceana office as she overseas more of the corporate role that was in the past the sole responsibility of Russ Chaney. We certainly hope that Russ will still have the opportunity to travel “down under” to visit the IAPMO R&T Oceana team whenever his very busy schedule allows.

This year, IAPMO R&T Oceana attended the Shanghai Kitchen and Bath Expo and had the opportunity to meet with several of our clients, as well as meeting with many prospective clients who were keen to grow their markets by gaining product certification in Australia through IAPMO R&T Oceana. The Chinese market continues to be a significant supplier of plumbing products to Australia and IAPMO R&T Oceana sees this has a huge potential for new clients. 

Our previous Managing Director, Stuart Henry, brokered an agreement with the IAPMO R&T Beijing office for their staff to provide resources to promote the three product certification schemes to which IAPMO R&T Oceana offers product certification in Australia:

WaterMark: Plumbing and drainage products identified in AS5200.000 – “Technical specification for plumbing and drainage products – Procedures for certification of plumbing and drainage products.”

OceanaMark: Any water related product that is not listed in AS5200.000, i.e.
rain water storage tanks; waste water treatment systems, solar water heaters, water meters, etc. This certification program can also be expanded to cover other products for which there is a performance based Australian Standard.

GasMark: Gas appliances and gas components.

With the cooperation of the dedicated staff at the IAPMO R&T Beijing office, we have high expectations that IAPMO R&T Oceana will attract a high percentage of companies that have WaterMark certification with other WaterMark Conformance Assessment Bodies and who may wish to transfer their certification over to IAPMO R&T Oceana; as well as Chinese-based manufacturers who are interested in exporting plumbing products to Australia for the first time.

I would be remiss not to make a special mention in this article of our dedicated administration staff at IAPMO R&T Oceana: Georgia Kokosoulis and Melanie Steele. Both Georgia and Melanie provide the Oceana office with a level of administration support that is second to none; and we sincerely appreciate their contribution.

Likewise, I would like to thank our technical team that is the envy of all the other Certification Bodies in Australia: Gary Dalton, who is our Gas Certification manager, and Brian Hedger and Mark Daly, who are our Client and Technical managers for the WaterMark and OceanaMark product certification schemes.

We are all working hard to continue to build the IAPMO R&T Oceana business and to become the benchmark to which all other certification bodies in Australia aspire.