Enhance total plant productivity with IoT condition monitoring & mobility
Increase asset performance and reduce maintenance costs
Reduce the CO2 emissions of your plant and facilities & meet your SDG goals
Optimise inventory to avoid stock outs with just in time purchasing
Maximise Rolls utilization through their lifecycle
Manage your customer portals
Enhance total plant productivity with IoT condition monitoring & mobility
Increase asset performance and reduce maintenance costs
Reduce the CO2 emissions of your plant and facilities & meet your SDG goals
Optimise inventory to avoid stock outs with just in time purchasing
Maximise Rolls utilization through their lifecycle
Manage your customer portals
Just spread your wings Let loose and fly with me Come on let's Leave This World Behind
Kreator: Leave this world behind
It was exactly a year ago that I returned from BrauBeviale, an international trade fair for the beverages and brewing industry and realised that I had lost my sense of taste. It was still pre-Covid-19 in the news, my doctors put it down to an inexplicable neurological cause that they couldn’t diagnose and it took me a month to regain my taste. In hindsight, it is obvious that I had caught a mild form of the coronavirus. Fast forwarding to this week, there have been some very positive developments in humanity’s hunt for a vaccine coming from companies like Pfizer and Moderna. I wonder with (some trepidation) whether the world will simply go back to normal. But should it? Go back to normal?
As the CEO of a startup, normal before Covid-19 was waking up at 3am in order to take an 8h train from Basel to Göttingen for a 90 minute meeting with a prospect and then taking the train back to get home past midnight on the rare day when Deutsche Bahn trains were running on time. Normal was spending big budgets for a booth at trade fairs like Hannover Messe, simply to announce our arrival at the industrial stage and generate a few dozen good leads in the process, after 5 days of standing on our feet all day and smiling at the passing crowds. Personally, normal also meant missing out on various family events to grow the business, flying hundreds of thousands of air-miles a year to meet customers and prospects alike. At Facterra, Jade, Madhav and I wore these personal costs with pride, as a badge of startup-grind honour. I don’t believe that startups are alone in these experiences. Many people in different industries can relate to the above. The cost of doing business the right way – where people like meeting their prospective business partners in person, even for small deals. This used to be the Normal. How Covid-19 has changed it all!
In a matter of weeks in March, all the people we were in discussions with effortlessly switched to online meetings. Companies went from clunky Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts in days. In the 8 months since, at Facterra, we have closed more deals without in-person meetings, progressed further on customer projects without days-long workshops and acquired more new customers despite cancelling our participation in all trade fairs, than in the previous 3 years. And all this at significantly lower costs! We shut down our office in Poland but our engineers have built better products at greater speeds, working from home. Personally as well, my life changed in this period. We welcomed our third child in August this year. Juggling online meetings with daddy duties, I have connected so profoundly with my infant daughter, discovering at the same time (with much regret), the moments that I had missed in the first days and weeks of my older children. In France, the lockdown meant that we had one hour a day for exercise, which we have used for daily family walks almost every day. Something we never did when there were no restrictions.
Some of the ugly realities of our world also came into sharp focus as a result of Covid-19. The virus outbreaks in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants convinced exposed the stark living conditions that we thought no longer existed in Europe. As a result, many of us have significantly reduced our meat consumption. Last week, we heard news from Denmark about the virus crossing over to minks and back has led to the extermination of millions of these tiny animals. This is not only scary but magnifies just how miserably we treat fellow creatures for such trivial needs as fur coats. In an era where technology has progressed to such an extent that synthetic material are more effective than fur in protecting us and keeping us warm, do we really need to continue slaughtering animals for leather and fur?
In summary, for us at Facterra, this “break down” of our normal routines forced us to question who we are, what kind of a world we have sleep-walked into and when we “start up” our engines again post-vaccine, we are determined to do our part in not going back to a world that proved so ripe for disruption. So vulnerable that a dead bat in a market half the world away could turn our lives upside down.
There are many things that changed thanks to Covid, that make us better as a company and as individuals. Do we want to lose these gains after the vaccine? No. And for those of you who have made similar lifestyle changes and business process adaptations, do you want to lose these benefits? So let’s stop second guessing what the world will be like and trying to “build strategies” to capitalise on them. Let’s not just passively look at the future as optimists or pessimists, and instead choose to be activists (as my personal CEO role model Jean-Pascal Tricoire likes to say).
So what is this new normal for the machinery industry then?
Your employees will abandon you progressively for industries and companies that offer better work-life integration vs. the failed work-life balance model that traditional companies offer today. Your IP and strong customer relationships can at best delay your customers switching to newer suppliers that offer better financing models and RoI on performance SLA’s – all enabled with data-driven digital tools. You should see such upstarts as the Teslas of the industrial machinery industry and they are being built as you read this post in a foundry somewhere. They won’t outcompete you in building better machines at the beginning. They will use digital tools to make the financial risk of experimenting with their machines much more attractive for small and medium sized companies and then your strategic accounts will fall – and the most ambitious and competent of your employees will see more upside in working for them than to compete in the shark tank that is the traditional machinery company today. Just like the auto-industry did with Tesla- first you will ignore them, then you will laugh at them, then you will fight them and then you will lose. Or, you can be them if you make a good crisis out of Covid-19. The choice is yours.
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For the last couple of decades, as service revenue grew in importance
July 24, 2020
This is the final in a 3-post article series on Smart Services. If you haven’t read the previous parts, here are the links:
July 6, 2021
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