Digital innovation, aftermarket growth and global expansion underpin KPM UK’s evolution in the hydraulics industry
As a leading total systems engineering company, Kawasaki Precision Machinery UK Ltd (KPM UK) manufactures and distributes hydraulic components to the mobile construction, agriculture, marine and industrial markets. Its products include radial piston motors, axial piston pumps & motors and control valve technologies. Many of these go to various mobile construction, earth moving, agricultural and material handling vehicles supplied by OEMs, such as yellow goods giants, JCB. KPM UK has over 50 distribution partners worldwide and is supported by over 100 years of hydraulic engineering expertise.
Manufacturing Today catches up with Lee Crocker, Managing Director of KPM UK, who reveals several exciting business developments since we last spoke to him in April 2024: “During 2025, we increased our after-service business by increasing our Authorised Service Centres by nine companies, which has meant we can now tap heavily into that market. Over the past year, we have also expanded our distribution by 11 companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, alongside setting up a branch in Italy. These major advancements have enabled us to increase sales with our partners in strategic locations.”
Discussing KPM UK’s growth strategy, Lee highlights recent market shifts: “After the mobile construction market slowed in 2024, our 2025 sales rebounded and we’re currently ahead of plan this year. Last year’s growth reflected organic market recovery driven by reducing interest rates and inflation, which restored market confidence and investment. Political uncertainty in 2024, particularly around government infrastructure and housebuilding projects, has now abated as inflation decreases and interest rates continue falling. We’ve also seen recovery in the deck machinery business for motors and increased industrial applications across Europe, contributing to our overall positive recovery.”
More recently, the company developed an after-service app for customers called Kawasaki Hydraulic Finder, allowing clients to locate the hydraulic components they require in the aftermarket business. Using a serial number, the customer can search in-stock components in our authorized service centers, an advancement which was set up in the past six months with a view to support KPM UK’s growth in the aftermarket.
Digital innovation and operational excellence
“The app is a good example of one of our technological innovations,” Lee explains. “In addition, we’re constantly looking at automation, robotics and improvements in our processes. Our assembly areas are fully integrated semi-automated processes, and each step in the operation has a digital electronic procedure. We have a digital footprint of every product that’s manufactured on site for full traceability in the field and, over the last ten years, our quality level has improved hugely to class leading by having that level of control in our production processes.
“Another area we’ve been focused on is improving business systems. We have a specialist team that is working on our SAP ERP system to make process efficiency improvements. We’re currently in the process of working on the foundations ready to move from the current SAP ECC6 system to S/4HANA, which is a far more intuitive Windows-based ERP system with operating and reporting processes. S/4HANA will streamline a lot of our business systems, so this is a major project for us.”
KPM UK manufactures its pump products under license from Japan and this has therefore kept R&D efforts in Japan. However, in the last two years the UK business has been authorized to develop some Japanese designed products at KPM UK, which Lee outlines as an exciting opportunity: “We’re in the process of developing a higher power medium duty pump, increasing the power from 32 to 35 megapascals, to compete in the European market. We’re also developing a digitally controlled motor called Smart Motor, and that subsequent success means we’ve been given authority from Japan to start developing digitally controlled pumps. In general, the hydraulics industry is moving to digital control, so when it comes to our radial piston motor, we recognize that the hydraulic motor is in competition with electric motors. Both options have their own strengths, but the hydraulic motor has a higher power envelope, so we created a hybrid hydraulic motor that is controlled digitally.
“Additionally, the mobile construction market is all about efficiency gains, reducing costs, and improving sustainability. As such, we also sell hydrogen fuel cell technology alongside our hydraulics, as well as digital control. The vehicles we supply our products into are moving towards driverless technologies too. This is the way the industry is heading, and we need to ensure we can support these future technological advances.”
Alongside technology, health and safety is integral to KPM UK, and improving staff safety played a key part in a recent Six Sigma project. “For several years, we’ve been using sodium plant to treat castings, which essentially is a bath of sodium hydroxide and is quite a dangerous mix of chemicals,” Lee reveals. “It treats the surface of the casting to ensure there’s no dirt or debris, but it has high health and safety risks, so we have had to have rigorous standards and training. The team worked hard over a two-year period to test alternative methods of surface treatments, and we’ve been successful in replacing this process with a shot blasting process. Our suppliers are also now treating the castings too, so we don’t carry out this pre-treatment processes on site.”
With employee wellbeing at the forefront of the business, KPM UK has implemented leadership development training in alignment with its increased head count of 50 people. “We’ve hired more people since the start of 2025, which is great,” Lee continues. “Training new staff in conjunction with the production rate going up can be a challenge, so we’ll be focusing intently on that training throughout 2026. Regarding our staff engagement strategy, we have what we call ‘wildly important goals’ that are aligned to the company objectives and in specific areas, and we encourage our employees to take responsibility for those goals. We, as leaders, describe what objectives we’re trying to achieve and then the teams work on how to achieve them. As the senior leadership team, we review progress with each team every month to review their progress and look at how we can support the teams. Culturally, this has improved our engagement as a company, making sure our employees understand the company’s goals and how they contribute to the company. I think that’s hugely important for performance. We’ve also just conducted another employee survey, delivered by Korn Ferry business consultancy, the results of which will help us to further develop our leadership and company culture.”
Over the next 12 months, KPM UK’s priorities focus on supporting and expanding in key local markets, following the formation of its Italian branch, and over the next three to five years it looks set to launch similar local sales companies throughout Italy, Germany, Turkey and the Nordic region. “Realistically, in five years’ time we will have captured more EMEA market share and increased our business size by 60 percent in regard to turnover,” concludes Lee. “We will expand Staffa global sales through increased cost reduction, and we’ll have more R&D work in the UK. Our strategic focus is on adding more customer value technically and offering the best service to our customers”.
