USSK has new Transaction Center
The Transaction Center is a new organization set up on January 1st of this year as part of the Business Service Center Europe (BSCe). The aim of the Center is to simplify, standardize, consolidate, and continuously improve transactional processes, and thus form a state-of-the-art operational model of a commercial center supporting core business within U. S. Steel Kosice. Once completed, it will become a fully-competitive center comparable with leading centers of this type around the world. In the last few days training sessions have been held at USSK for more than a hundred employees involved in various transactional processes who are to be incorporated organizationally into cost centers within BSCe. Vice-president Business Service Center Europe Drew Armstrong and GM Transaction Center Europe Dave Pasquini informed about the aims and objectives of the new Center, which will be located in the former library building in the Public Access Area, once it has been reconstructed.
Power Division employees have lunch with President
This year's new series of informal meetings, to which Company President David H. Lohr invites employees who have been cited for their outstanding working results, began last week with the Power Division employees. The group sharing the table for an agreeable lunch consisted of ten people - turner-fitters, electricians, mechanics, machine operators and foremen. And as is now customary, they were joined for a bit of a chat by some of the top managers - Vice-president Operations Richard E. Veitch, Vice-president Labor Relations and Motivation Martin Pitorak, and GM Production Support Jan Vranec.
Our fire-fighters rank with the best
There were excellent results from the inspection which was carried out in the last few days at U. S. Steel Kosice by the State Fire-prevention Supervisory Office. According to Regional Fire-fighting and Rescue Brigade Headquarters Chief Jan Barilla, our fire-fighters' results were the best from among all the works fire-fighting units in the Kosice Region.
Employee representatives' observations evaluated
The best employees' representatives for occupational safety and supervisors gained incentive bonuses from U. S. Steel Kosice management for their contributions in the occupational safety field during the last quarter and the last six months of 2006. These were approved by the commission evaluating the results of observations regarding occupational safety, which recently decided on the best observations from the closing three months of last year. In its decision-making on the awards, the commission took into account the recommendations of the General Managers in the individual sectors. Bonuses were awarded to Slavomir Hutnik, Jaroslav Mamrak, Jan Liker, Jaroslav Dusinsky, Peter Hutter, Jozef Hamrak, Stanislav Kotik, Jaroslav Ferencik, Jan Kmet, Jan Labant, Zdenek Dzubera, Frantisek Kmetz and Imrich Kusnir.
They aim to be leading producer of refractory materials
There were especially good results for U. S. Steel Kosice subsidiary Refrako, s.r.o. last year. This producer of refractory materials for the steelworks exceeded forecast net income by 13 per cent, aided by the positive trend in the growth of external activities. While in 2003 customers outside of the parent company took delivery of 33 per cent of total production, last year that figure reached almost half. The excellent properties of Refrako's products are appreciated by customers in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, Ukraine and Latvia.
