REGULATION FOR THE AUTO LOCKSMITH TRADE?

Debate seems to be the word of the week in the 3D Group office this week! We do like a good natter and there’s been some interesting topics of conversation being bandied about with a mixture of opinions.

Besides discussing the latest Xfactor contestants, and the great changeable British weather, one of the main work related topics that we’ve discussed is the availability of auto locksmith information and tools to every Tom, Dick and Harry. We aren’t talking about the experienced, qualified auto locksmiths here, we’re talking about Joe Bloggs off the street. Any criminally-minded person could quite easily get their hands on lock picking and key coding information and ‘how to’s’ on the internet. And then there are those suppliers and websites that would sell a programming machine to my gran if she said she wanted one! A recent example of this is Amazon.co.uk quite happily selling lock pick sets to anyone who wants one!

Making these products readily available on popular non-trade websites is only benefitting the consumer making them easy to buy and cheap. It is doing nothing to protect legitimate businesses that are currently operating within the industry and ultimately the consumer willexperience the negative side with higher risk of break-ins and car theft.

 I think we could probably all agree that it does need to be regulated in some way. The major debate occurs when you start to discuss who should be the governing body if one were to exist. Should it be the government? Should it be an organisation such as the Auto Locksmith Association or MLA? My argument would be that the government could do a lot more to restrict machine and tool imports from Europe and the Far East and ensure that machinery and tools being imported into this country are going to legitimate wholesalers like ourselves. There are some countries that already class locksmith tools as military tools. Maybe the UK should adopt this approach as it would make it harder to import machines, which protects the consumer and automotive locksmiths already in the trade. It would then fall to authorised wholesalers such as ourselves to ensure that we only supply these machines and tools to legitimate auto locksmiths and this is something that we already try to do.

We have the opinion that trade should be trade and we try and do everything in our powers to make sure it stays that way; we don’t sell on eBay, we don’t sell to anyone unless they have experience of some form in the trade or they are willing to provide a start-up plan of their automotive locksmith business. This would be made a lot easier if there was one governing body that auto locksmiths had to be registered with in order to operate in the UK. This would work in a similar way to gas engineers who must be ‘Gas Safe’ registered in order to work legally.

In the way that the industry currently operates, the only real winners are the manufacturers in China and the Far East. These companies are copying tools and machinery and making them so cheap that kids could buy them with their pocket money! This is making it very difficult for those that are trying to progress the trade legitimately. No sooner have you developed a new machine or product, then China come along and clone it! When thousands of pounds are put into the development of a new machine, to see it cloned and sold at an 8th of the true value is disheartening to say the least!

Anyway, I’ll get down off my soapbox for now. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts and opinions on this matter, so please feel free to add your comment underneath this blog post.

On a more positive note, two years ago we felt the need to set up a meeting with Renault France after they halted our supply of Renault cards. Renault believed that only Renault machines were able to programme these cards and decided that supplying to us was a security issue. In this initial meeting we showed Renault that there are several machines that can program their Renault key cards such as the  Truecode. We explained that if they stopped supplying the genuine cards the Chinese aftermarket versions would become dominant in the market and in the long run Renault would lose out on sales of key cards. They agreed that it was in their best interests, and that of security, to continue the supply but they were in disbelief and seemed a little unsure that we were capable of programming the key cards. Fast forward to today and we have confirmed another meeting with Renault France. The main aim of this meeting is to prove to them that there are a number of machines that can program their cards (demonstrations in suits will be required I’m sure!) In return for our expert knowledge, we are hoping that we will be able to talk to them about fast tracking our supply chain. Fingers crossed!

Today is another day of coding for me. As the main website developer for 3D Group I am continuing to develop our new trade website. This system has already been in production for a year and it is taking a lot longer than expected. Our full system including our picking and packing, invoicing and stock control systems are being rewritten to improve the overall experience for our customers and our staff. When we ready to unveil our new look website we will be shouting it from the roof tops so keep your ears peeled for our dulcet tones!

With the ALEX exhibition fast approaching our marketing department is currently finalising our exclusive show offers and finishing the design of our exhibition stand. Keep your eyes on your email inbox as you will shortly be receiving further information but we can tell you that we will be offering discounts on almost all of our stock range on orders placed at the show. We will also be running our GeeKey Advice service on stand at ALEX as we did last time, so if you need any unbiased auto locksmith advice please book your appointment with one of our experts as soon as possible by emailing geekeyadvice@3dgroupuk.com

Well, this new website isn’t going to code itself, I best get back to it! My collegue Dan, another director here at 3D Group will be penning next week’s blog and we should hopefully have news from the Renault meeting to tell you about.

Dean Sanderson