Engineer's Voice - The Blog of PTM Engineers

Blogs in English from a Consultancy in Japan

My name’s Simon Forrest and I’m the translator at PTM and responsible for the English translations of our Engineer’s blogs. I’ve been asked to write one myself, so I thought I’d tell you about our International Projects Group and why we are translating these blogs into English.

PTM is a company of consulting engineers based in Tokyo. Although the bulk of our projects are domestic we do have an Overseas Projects Group that mainly does consultancy work for international banking and securities companies, but also for various other types of companies either setting up offices or relocating in Japan. Many of these projects are ‘mission critical’, which means we have to ensure any construction work does not interrupt the client’s business operations – there can be no outages in power while modifications are made to the electrical system.

Recently many clients have also recognized the importance of conserving energy, so we also provide solutions to reduce energy consumption. Many potential and existing client’s employ people from overseas so we thought it was important that the blog be available in English.

You will notice that the focus of recent blogs has been energy saving. After the earthquake on March 11th this year and the subsequent prediction of a shortfall in power supply, we were called on to provide energy saving advice to a number of clients. It was also felt that as consulting engineers we had to make our own efforts to reduce energy consumption. This coincided with the decision to get our engineers blogging, and they naturally focused on this energy conservation work.

Anyone who has ever tried to get their staff blogging will know that it can be difficult to motivate people and get them involved. They often have other work to attend to which they feel is more pressing, so there have been a few lulls in our blog activity. However people seem to be getting used to the idea and I’m sure we will continue to keep posting.

Simon Forrest
http://www.ptmtokyo.co.jp/