Siveco more committed than ever to Smart Maintenance in China: feedback from SMC2020
The Smart Maintenance Conference 2020 (SMC2020) was held in Shanghai on September 2-3, attracting a large numbers of industry professionals and experts to share their perspectives on developing trends and latest technologies. As the event, initially planned in February 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis, many vendors and suppliers had chosen not to join or to reduce their participation. On the contrary, Siveco decided to prove its continuing commitment to China’s maintenance community with a particularly strong showing at this year’s SMC!
In the words of our Managing Director Bruno Lhopiteau, speaking from SMC2020: “I have been in the maintenance business for 25 years, I know that in times of economic crisis, maintenance always becomes a hot topic. New investments are slowing down, fancy projects get cut, optimizing existing assets becomes essential. For this reason, Siveco has decided to do more, not less, since the COVID-19 crisis started. Times are tough for everyone, but we have chosen to renew our commitment to R&D in Shanghai. We have launched new solutions, in particular the new ‘X’ version of our industrial risk management platform bluebee® cloud and its prepackaged edition for SMEs as part of the newly launched bluebee® ‘club’. “
“We are also doing more marketing, in a market where other vendors have chosen to cut their spending: this SMC 2020 event is the perfect example, but also this month we joined other events targeting the manufacturing industry in Suzhou, Shanghai, Kunshan and infrastructure focused conferences in Shanghai and Hefei. We are also taking parts in conferences in Southeast Asia, including the ASEAN Sustainable Energy Week 2020 in Bangkok later this month, showing our continuing involvement on the Belt & Road. I believe that we are part of a community, that of maintenance practitioners, and we must play our role in this community as we have done for 16 years already.”
The Siveco team, six people in all for this event, held a booth at SMC2020. The booth’s highlight was a live showcase of our latest Smart O&M platform build around the Coswin 8i, bluebee® and bluebee® cloud products, catering to all types of industrial clients. The state-of-the-art demo featured bluebee® for WeChat, bluebee® for Smart Glasses and our newly released package for industrial SMEs, the bluebee® club. Visitors naturally showed strong interest in bluebee® for Smart Glasses, asking about real implementation experience and trying on the glasses to see how it could help.
Siveco’s smart glasses partner LLVISION held a separate booth, located on another floor of the exhibition, featuring their wearable technology. Again, bluebee® for Smart Glasses was part of the exhibit and LLVISION & Siveco helped introduce each other to visitors, sharing brochures and referring visitors to each other’s booths. This direct and indirect Siveco presence on two floors gave great visibility and allows us to address the demand of attendees who were more hardware-oriented (at the LLVISION booth) and those who were perhaps more improvement or management focused (at the Siveco booth).
During the main sessions, a Siveco case study was presented in the form of the video of the Smart O&M project implemented at Baosteel Packaging, with an interview of Assistant General Manager and a system demonstration. Siveco has always relied in testimonials from our clients and case studies rather than product selling, which is one of the keys to our success in the Chinese maintenance market since 2004!
Talking about case studies, the booth featured another demo movie of the latest bluebee® cloud “X” with embedded BIM model and highlights of our projects with industrial gas giant Yingde Gases, automotive supplier Marelli and specialty chemical leader Arkema. Our team answered many questions about project experience, possible application of our solutions and technology.
A recurring topic at the event was that of Predictive Maintenance. For many people in the industry, the difference or the relation between Predictive Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance is not very clear, due to lack of strong conceptual and methodological training. Confusing marketing by vendors promising magical solutions does not help… From Siveco’s point of view, establishing the right understanding is essential to achieve maintenance improvement, so we focus on explaining the fundamentals, which explain the challenges met in most Predictive Maintenance projects in the past few years. Among others, we have published a series of article on the subject in our newsletter, see: Predictions on Predictive Maintenance: it will fail… unless and Information overload, the Cassandra effect.
Finally, the COVID-19 crisis has already last over 9 months, although there are signs of economic recovery in China, many manufacturers have been severely impacted in particular SMEs. Maintenance improvement is becoming a priority again (our marketing hotline is receiving more calls than ever before) but expensive 4.0 budgets are getting cut. To meet the immediate needs of industrial clients, Siveco has repackaged our proven solutions and services under the new “bluebee® club” concept. During SMC2020 we met many visitors interested in this package designed to solve their difficulty and challenges.
We thank the organizer for arranging this professional event and giving us such a great opportunity to share our best practices with friends in this industry.
