Tony Radcliff, former vice president of marketing, offerings and engineering for Uponor North America, was recently promoted to vice president of group technology for Uponor Corp., UNA’s parent company, headquartered in Vantaa, Finland.

The corporation oversees business in 30 countries and is looking to Radcliff to lead group technology across multiple segments.

"This is not only a new position for me, but a new direction for Uponor to align and globalize research, new-product developments and other innovations,” Radcliff said. “From Germany to Finland to Spain to the United States, we want to develop platforms to support all our locations, not just the ones we office at every day."

Uponor Corp. saw that innovation talent was being used at various locations for only regional impact and determined it should leverage all talent globally for all its global locations.

"We are confident that Radcliff is the person who can bring strategic insight to guide Uponor to that place of alignment with people, planet and profit in mind, while at the same time enhancing current work flow and successes," said Fernando Roses, executive vice president, group technology and corporate development, Uponor Corporation.

This new position will allow for both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to benefit from some of the most talented engineers in the industry. Radcliff’s team members could be managing a project from Apple Valley, Minn., with engineers in Sweden while gaining customer feedback in Canada and Estonia or vice-versa.

The idea is to take the best existing competencies, behaviors, and processes, from wherever they currently exist and bring them together to create a formidable global research, technology and new-product development capability to benefit Uponor’s customers globally in all locations where Uponor products and services are offered.

"This opportunity for me is a credit to all of the people who have worked so hard to generate the success recently achieved by UNA,” Radcliff added. “UNA has enjoyed the success it has because of our strong culture of collaboration, commitment to the brand values and always keeping our customers in mind, and we will continue to ensure this doesn’t waver as we move forward."

From both a local and global perspective, this new position will not only bring strong unification to Uponor’s business, but it will bring a more stimulating user experience to Uponor’s current and future customers, because they will see even greater levels of innovation happening throughout their country and the world.

"There will be a period of challenging discovery and collaboration when it comes to culture, time zones and differing processes, but what will come out of it is a more focused direction and an unmatched expertise,” Radcliff said. “Uponor installs more water systems globally than any other competitor, and we intend to deliver more innovations in that space than any other company’s resources can muster."