Question: It’s been said KISTECH’s exclusive area of responsibility is safety checks on major installations. Could you please explain this to us in detail?

Answer: KISTECH is a semi-government corporation under the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and was set up under the Special Law for Safety Mana-gement of Installations in 1995. The company has been dedicated to making precision safety checks on major and small-scale installations exposed to dangers as well as R&D activities for technologies for safety, the management and supply of those technologies, and the training of safety checkup experts and the evaluation of checkup reports.

The company also runs the Secretariat of the Conflicts Arbitration Committee; the National Green Construction Project Center; Special Education Maintenance Management Center; and the Installations Safety Research Institute in addition to the investigation of Defects in Joint Residential Houses.

KISTECH technician inspects a safety equipment at a plant.(Photos: KISTECH)

Q: What is the direction of KISTECH’s management now that installations are getting old, causing the paradigm for indiscriminate construction projects to change to the recreation of old cities? 

A: The rebuilding of cities will be a future growth engine with Korea becoming an aged society in 2020. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport has been very aware of the situation and is preparing plans that will be effective enough to take care of the various problems that the poor areas of cities have been faced with in such areas as economy, society, and culture. They need integrated and diverse revival plans which can only come by revising the Special Decrees on City Revival and Resurgence Support Law, strengthening state-level assistance to the municipal revitalization programs.

Before the implementation of the special decrees, we have to make safety checks on the dilapidated installations in the deteriorated sections of the cities along with the green remodeling of those dilapidated installations in the poorer areas of the cities.

In tune with such developments, KISTECH opened the Green Remodeling Creation Center for the upsurge in green remodeling and for successful settling as projects that must be promoted. The company has strengthened safety management on old installations among the installations up for safety checks, especially on small-scale installations that are close to the lives of the people and need to be taken care of often, although they are not the subjects of the major safety checkups under the special decrees.

KISTECH conducted safety checkups on 1,300 such installations around the country last year and we plan to strengthen the safety checkups by increasing the number of such installations that are close to the lives of the general public in order to make them safer for the people this year.

Q: What is KISTECH’s position regard-ing the rising public demand for more specialized safety management technologies as installations get more diverse and sophisticated?

A:  At the moment, the public installations in Korea have been getting larger in scale, mixed and fused with high-tech IT and, therefore, KISTECH has been pushing 24 cases of R&D activities with the strategic purposes of futuristic safety policies and the development of technologies at its Installation Safety Research Institute in order to be able to effectively manage such installations.

In tune with the government’s 3.0 Policy, KISTECH has integrated the installation safety management information system such as FMS, Ontong, and IREMS, in order to come up with a safety management system for state installations, so that all installations ranging from the installations for daily lives to high-tech large installations can be managed safely with a safety management system to be developed later by KISTECH.

Q: When you took over as the top manager of KISTECH, you said you would strengthen the global competitive power of the company. Can you elaborate on your plans?

A: The domestic market for safety checkups and testing for installations comes to around 200 billion won annually for 625 safety inspection organizations, but there have been limits for growth in the market caused by budget cuts for safety checkups and reductions in installations at industrial complexes. KISTECH has been looking at overseas expansion, therefore internationalizing all of its safety checkup standards and manuals with a special effort to make its safety checkup technologies of the highest standard in the world.

We plan to go about globalizing our operations step-by-step, starting with inviting foreign technologists to Korea for research and education and participation in official development support projects. We have to include the details of our overseas operations in the decree of the applicable laws as our operations overseas would be limited to the countries whose public awareness on the safety of installations are not so high.

Q: How are you going to lead KISTECH to do its job fully as a global leader for insuring the safety for public installat-ions?

A: KISTECH will celebrate its 20th anniversary soon. The first decade was a period for the company to take deep root in the world, while the next decade was a period for learning and for growth by furthering our know-how on safety inspections.

The new decade will be a period for the company to make a true takeoff as the leader in its given territory and step up in the world as the master of its own rights. We have to internationalize all of our experiences and know-how on safety checks and maintenance of installation safety in tune with global standards. In order to do that, we have to strengthen our safety management functions of aging installations and the installations exposed to climate change, thus to boost the lives and comfort of the people and our capacity to safeguard the installations under sustainable and rational management system development.