Foreword » Welcome to our 100th Smart O&M newsletter!

Welcome to our 100th Smart O&M newsletter!

Posted on 2019-07-10

Dear reader,

The newsletter started in 2010 on a simple idea. As the Siveco China team was growing, we were producing more and more information that had to be shared between us: customer stories, reliability or CMMS tips, dos and don’ts, professional viewpoints on industry news, new product features etc. So I started writing and emailing such stories internally, suggesting my team members do the same. We quickly realized that it would be beneficial to share our stories externally as well, with customers: the monthly “Maintenance in China” newsletter was born! Most articles are now read on WeChat and the newsletter has been renamed “Smart O&M”.

We are often asked how we are able to release such a newsletter every month, with fresh, made-in-China articles, while most other vendors seem to have nothing interesting to say. In particular, people wonder why our competitors do not publish any local customer stories, while Siveco has dozens. Our business produces successful customer stories, so it’s easy for us to publish them! More and more, with the growth of social media and corporate communicate around sustainability, it is our customers themselves that write and publish their stories of working with us! Recent WeChat articles by customers include this news by giant industry gas company Yingde Gases, domestic national company Capital Water, municipal water company Zhongshan Water, etc.

Certainly our newsletter has also helped copycats develop ideas for their business! Our newsletter team has long struggled with this, how to balance between marketing and confidentiality. Especially after the launch of our pioneering bluebee® solution, multiple copycats have appeared, some copying our slogans, some even claiming cooperation with us, some others openly aiming to be cheaper version of us…“Cheap” is always the approach, which anyone who understands O&M knows is terribly misguided. Inevitably many of these businesses have failed and none has become a serious threat: in fact, having obvious fakes around sometimes helps us. A message to you, the copycat competitor, the misguided fan, and the ethically challenged: you might copy what you see, but you will never know the secret sauce!

9 years later, our company has grown a lot, with over 45 staffs (the largest CMMS team in Asia by far), a local R&D center dedicated to mobility, cloud and IoT since 2009, business all over Asia and on the Belt & Road, over 850 customer sites… Many of the trends we announced in this newsletter, sometimes years ahead, have become reality! Not that we are particularly clever, but we have been specialized in this market for such a long time, on the ground, so we know what is happening and we understand why it is happening! In September this year Siveco will celebrate our 15 years in China! In December I will personally celebrate my 20 years in this country! We have been here for a long time, we are here to stay, we are having great fun!

Has the market changed a lot over this period? This is perhaps the subject of a future article, but the answer is really yes and no. The two traditional US competitors have lost their focus on CMMS, now a minor business they outsource to their IT partners. Two major vendors from Northern Europe have also left China earlier this year, citing lack of profit. Some local competition has appeared, very fragmented, in the form of automation suppliers thinking they can extend their portfolio with a maintenance module. From time to time, we see the cheap copycats already mentioned, as well as IoT startups think that “predictive maintenance” was invented last year.

As for us, we have never been so profitable and our revenue is still growing (in fact we have never seen such growth potential in the past). I keep my fingers crossed and work hard for the rest of 2019, but 2019 is looking good! This is why, as our readers will notice, we are investing more into marketing: we will continue to take part in conferences for the infrastructure market (water, waste, energy remain our main market segments with very large state-owned clients in China and on the Belt & Road) but we are also now making our comeback in the manufacturing segment (in particular chemicals and automotive, where we already have a large clients base but where corporate decisions have in the past been slower and maintenance improvement was not the focus: we believe it has changed).

I cannot conclude without saying that this newsletter owes everything to our successive marketing managers: Fiona Yan who started it, followed by Taylor Huang and now Faye Cao, as well as their team and all the contributors. A fantastic team to work with, bright, fearless and hard-working, not to mention friendly and beautiful, I am so glad to have you girls!