Labor is the sole source of value. How to go up in value is the key question for labor-intensive industries such as property management, with thousands of staff working across multiple sites. This is the topic of this month’s “Maintenance in China” newsletter!

This month newsletter is focused on retail, drawing on our experience in this market in China and abroad. Ten years ago, when I started this company, coming from an infrastructures and utilities background, I would not have imagined applying our know-how and technology to retail stores! It however happened, first with Auchan, Ikea, B&Q, much later with Carrefour, Sephora. Even more surprising, we found that the advanced technological solutions we designed for retailers could also apply to industrial customers.

As announced in our last newsletter, Siveco China will celebrate its 10 years anniversary in September 2014. This month, we are kicking off a campaign of activities that will lead to the birthday celebration later this year.

This month was particularly eventful for the Siveco China team, with new projects starting in Korea and… Algeria! This demonstrates the global reach of our China operation and the recognized “world class” quality of our work! This also proves that we were serious when we launched our “Go West” strategy a few years ago! Well done Siveco team!

Isn’t Christmas the best time of the year? Every year I am looking forward to the holiday season, the Christmas greetings to our customers, the Siveco Christmas tree and the presents for the Siveco kids (more and more of them!), not to forget the Christmas issue of our newsletter!

This month’s “Maintenance in China” newsletter revolves around Coswin Light, the preconfigured version of our CMMS Coswin, tailored to the needs and budget of small-to-mid-size facilities. I have to admit that we have struggled over the years with how to help such companies to improve their maintenance (and to gain business with them!). Their needs are fairly well identified (“build up a modern maintenance organization”) and not very different from their larger counterparts, apart from resource and budget...