Maintenance with Chinese characteristics: interview with Siveco China’s GM
This interview of Siveco China’s General Manager was published in China Plant Engineering in December 2011.
Q: In a few years Siveco has gone from being virtually unknown to becoming the largest maintenance consultancy in China. Your positioning however seems unusual compared to other suppliers: would you please explain it?
A: It is simpler than you think. We focus on delivering sustainable maintenance improvement using high-technology, in the specific context of what I have come to call “maintenance with Chinese characteristics”. Our background explains a lot. First, there is Siveco Group, the largest CMMS supplier in Europe (CMMS is just another, more accurate, word for “EAM”), a company founded in 1986 by an Italian and a Brit with background working for engineering firm ABB. Siveco Group is now present in over 60 countries and employs over 1,000 people. Second, my own history in the Chinese market: I am a mechanical engineer, maintenance specialist, who was sent to China in 1997 to implement a preventive maintenance program in a paper mill in Suzhou. I later involved in condition monitoring (my initial focus when I started my career), CMMS/EAM and industrial maintenance services. In 2004, we decided to launch Siveco China, aiming at helping Chinese companies improve their maintenance. At that time, there was growing recognition in the market that most so-called “EAM” projects failed to deliver results. We developed well over the years, with a strong focus on delivering ROI for our customers, then sharing our successful experience with the market, so as to gain a reputation. I am quite happy with the result so far.
Q: Interesting to hear you are a mechanical engineer. You seem proud of it! Isn’t it unusual for an EAM supplier?
A: Yes, but we are not an “EAM” supplier. I refuse to use this term, synonymous of IT-driven project and, in most cases, of failure. A significant part of our business consists in auditing and improving existing “EAM” systems: we observe so many major mistakes, mostly due to the lack of industrial experience of suppliers, which are indeed IT companies. One of the characteristics of IT project is to blame customer for failure. In China, we often hear “the customer’s maintenance team was not mature enough” etc. Interestingly, customers often accept it! I think mechanical engineers have a different culture, a culture of result: the same culture as our customers who need to run their plants!
Q: Tell us about your customer base in China. Looking at your website, your company seems to communicate a lot on customers’ stories and case studies, again a very different approach from your competitors.
A: Today we have over 60 large accounts in China, many of which are large multi-site companies – a total of more than 500 sites where we involve in China. We also work on export projects with Chinese construction companies building plants in Southeast Asia or Africa. We have worked with leading multinationals like Arkema, International Paper, Nokia, Hanwha etc. but the fastest growing part of our business is with local companies such as Sichuan Lutianhua, an example of how Chinese companies can actually be far ahead of their international counterparts.
I see it as a very positive sign that many companies who work with our competitors abroad, have chosen to work with us in China. A significant number of our clients also use other CMMS, which we have improved by providing add-on services or solutions, typically our mobile solution for technicians, bluebee®.
Q: So who are your target customers?
A: We work with three main market segments: industry, infrastructure and facility management (buildings). As far as industrial markets are concerned, the process industry (chemical, paper, metal etc.) is the largest segment, but we also have many projects in automotive or electronics. Our target customers all have a need to improve their maintenance, typically in order to reduce its impact on the business (downtime, energy consumption, safety, environmental compliance etc.). They may or may not already have a CMMS or EAM. We rescue a lot of failed CMMS projects and we work very well for example with SAP customers. We usually aim at a ROI within a year, which is almost always the case as maintenance is seldom optimized. This is really what is fueling our growth: the results obtained by our clients.
Q: EAM suppliers mostly target multinational companies, which have more mature business process. Is that also the case of Siveco?
A: Not at all! The truth is we often work much better with local companies! There is a major misconception is this market, that China will become more like the West in the future. I disagree; I think China is developing “maintenance with Chinese characteristics” due to differences in size, development growth, experience and skills available i.e. the Chinese market is very different from that in the West. This is the main reason we have invested so much in local R&D (in Shanghai) since 2008 – we are the only multinational CMMS supplier with local R&D, which I think says a lot. I am always so surprised to see international suppliers pushing the same EAM products, virtually identical to what we have used in the West for 30 years! Sure some technology has changed (that’s why you hear so much about “SOA”), but an EAM system today is exactly the same thing it was 30 years ago, which is rather unbelievable! Designed for a Western environment, for example with a focus on counting working hours so as to reduce overtime or headcount. These EAM systems also rely on a lot of printed paper, handwritten notes taken on paper work orders, then input by a secretary. I believe this approach is fundamentally wrong, anyway it almost always fail! I am ready to bet that a few years from now, the “EAM of grandpa” is dead. It will die first in China, where we are already implementing technician-driven maintenance systems, using advanced mobile solutions. You can already see this in action at Sichuan Lutianhua or Hanwha Chemical, and on a larger scale with customers like Changcheng Property Group. We are already exporting this technology, with projects in Malaysia. Our R&D will release even more innovations in 2012.
Q: You talk a lot of mobile solutions, with a very cute name “bluebee”. We have seen this kind of solution in the market for a very long time, isn’t it?
A: Mobile solutions have existed for over 10 years; I remember downloading Work Orders from a CMMS on a palm-PC. Portable instruments used for condition monitoring also look similar. What we are doing with bluebee® is fundamentally different, we call it “solution for the worker of tomorrow”: it is centered on the technician. It is not about sending work orders to the mobile device for execution and reporting. It is about helping the technician to do his work: diagnose a problem, conduct an inspection routine, access critical information when needed. bluebee® works with any back-office system, we have customers using SAP PM or Maximo, it also works with our own CMMS Coswin or with our central cloud-computing platform bluebee® cloud. For customers who already have an EAM system, the most immediate result of using bluebee® is to clean up their database, usually outdated. It is amazing to work with companies that have invested millions in a modern EAM system but most engineers have never used it! With bluebee® they get immediate access to the system, for the first time in their life!
Q: I see from your website that you are running a “bluebee® roadshow” all over China. Could you tell us more about that?
A: It is the same idea really, taking our customer’s experience all over China, as a marketing tool. bluebee® itself is easy to understand; somehow it is a good “branding” tool. At the same time, we talk about the improvement, the results obtained by our customers, which is the most important in our opinion. We have been running this roadshow for over 6 months now, in many cities of China. The next event will take place in Chengdu in December, showcasing our excellent customer Sichuan Lutianhua. [The event already took place, see summary here.]
Q: We all know Western China is a huge developing market. Is this a target area for Siveco?
A: We already have a significant customer base in Western China, especially Sichuan province, where we are even considering opening an office. This is quite a major move for us, as our strategy so far has been to dispatch people from Shanghai to projects all over China and even abroad – this approach has worked very well, as it has allowed us to build a strong back-office support center in Shanghai, together with our R&D. Today our customers are really all over the country, a very wide geographical spread. In the case of West China, I strongly believe more efforts should be put there, together with our local partners in Sichuan, Yunnan and later I hope in Xinjiang. I expect to be spending a lot of time in Sichuan in the next few months and to decide around Chinese New Year whether or not we open a local office. All in all, I am very confident we are making the right moves, with a true understanding of the Chinese market unlike our competitors, with strong local R&D while other maintenance systems are all developed abroad, with our bluebee® solution that have proven extremely successful already and finally with our “Go West” strategy.
Read the original interview in Chinese in PDF format (here).
