Celebrating the 25th birthday of Siveco Group!
Our mother company Siveco Group is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month! Founded in March 1986, Siveco was an early player in the highly developed French maintenance market, which it revolutionized with intuitive maintenance support tools. The CMMS “Coswin” was launched, with major evolutions in 1998 (as a result of projects with Singapore metro) and 2003 (the native web version known as “Coswin 7i”).
The largest CMMS supplier in Europe, with 82,000 users in 65 countries, Siveco boasts an excellent track record of long-term success stories with historical clients such as Airbus (EADS), Air France, the European Space Center in Kourou, papermaker ArjoWiggins, Carrefour, etc. All these years, Siveco has been known as an innovator, most recently introducing know-how sharing solution running on tablet PC. 2010 proved to be an excellent year with 90 new contracts including large multi-site deals with naval shipyards DCNS (closer to us, ongoing project with their joint-venture in East Malaysia) and Carrefour (deployment in almost 1,000 stores).
Far ahead of other European CMMS suppliers (running very small-scale operations from various European countries), Siveco Group has shown its resilience to crisis and other hiccups of the world market: while US-based competitors, victims of the whims of the stock market (not to mention, for one of them, malpractices in their China operation), got acquired by large IT companies in the mid-2000s, subsequently losing their identity, Siveco has been remarkably stable, the only global payer to remain entirely privately-owned, a guarantee of long-term focus.
Our own history in China is obviously much shorter: we started operations in 2004 and have since become the country’s largest maintenance consultancy. Our positioning, slightly different from that of the Group, reflects the differences between our markets. This flexible approach has been one of Siveco’s trademarks, as we adapt ourselves to the needs of our local markets. While less flexible competitors have tried to replicate Western business models and failed to deliver significant benefits to their customers in China, we invented a new approach tailored to the needs of what I have come to call “maintenance with Chinese characteristics”. As a result, we have been doing very well, with currently over 60 large clients and projects on more than 300 sites. Since 2009 we run our own local R&D operation in Shanghai, which shows our strong commitment to the market.
2010 has been excellent, with large multi-site maintenance improvement projects and the release of our mobile solution bluebee®. We have expanded our business to “export” projects, helping Chinese construction companies delivering complex infrastructure projects abroad – a major growth segment, where our Chinese experience benefits from the long historical presence of Siveco Group in the African and Middle-Eastern markets now dominated by Chinese players. In 2011 more than ever before, the potential of Siveco China as part of Siveco Group has become obvious. We have just recruited our 31th employee and we are profitable. 25 years of history for the group, barely 7 for our Chinese business… and many new fascinating adventures to come!
Welcome to the combined February-March issue of our “Maintenance in China” newsletter! Now that the holiday season is over, we are going back to our regular monthly schedule (next issue at the end of April). This newsletter contains all the usual sections, with a customer story on Shanghai Essilor Optical and a partner article by Korean PDA supplier Bluebird (the devices equip over 10,000 Shanghai policemen). The Reliability section features a reprint of my recent article “In Case of Fire”, which closes our series dedicated to risk management (see previous articles: Risk prevention and Of maintenance as risk management). This month’s Tips & Tricks is meant as a reminder of the powerful graphical screen customization tools available in our CMMS Coswin, immensely valuable for projects in China where maintenance staff may have never used a CMMS before. Finally, our Latest News showcases events and press releases.
Nothing is more powerful than customers’ testimonials. As our readers know, since we launched this newsletter, every issue has featured a case study (all available here: https://newsletter.bluebeecloud.com/en/newsletter/customer-story/). We are proud of the fact that we have recently started “Enhanced Maintenance Contracts” and maintenance assessment services with our 4 oldest customers: Beijing Oriental Plaza, Auchan China, SCIP SinoFrench Water Development and SITA Waste Services. Three of our customers also spoke at conferences: Brose Wuhan, International Paper and Sichuan Lutianhua. I thank all of them for their long-term support! Expect more stories from us in the coming months! Do not hesitate to tell your own story and, as usual, feel free to forward this newsletter to friends, colleagues, suppliers, customers etc.
Bruno Lhopiteau
General Manager
Siveco China
