Entering new markets with partners: experience of Korea

In this article, we would like to share how we successfully grow our business in new markets, countries without local Siveco office, by working alongside EPC companies. EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) companies build plants and infrastructures. They rely on subcontractors and suppliers to deliver key components of the project.

The experience of Siveco in the Korean market is a perfect illustration of this model, which we hope will encourage partners in other countries (our focus is on projects in Asia and projects from Asia, more on this later).

Korean EPCs have always been very active building power plants in export markets, such as the Middle East and Africa, drawing on a strong domestic experience and industrial know-how. Korea has a strong ecosystem of suppliers, such as automation specialists. In the past few years, several Korean EPCs have won projects to build new gas turbine power stations in Algerian, a fast growing North African nation.

As is often the case for greenfield infrastructures (at least outside of China), a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) was required, to be delivered “turnkey”, fully populated with the plant’s technical data: equipment structures, technical documentation, spare parts list, recommended maintenance actions, plans and related SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), etc. Such a project combines IT technologies (the CMMS itself) and maintenance engineering know-how (the build-up of the plant database).

For more on the Korea-Algeria projects:

Hyundai Engineering & Construction, Hanwha Engineering and Daewoo Engineering were the first to contact Siveco in 2012, as they won the first projects for the Ain Arnat, Biskra and Ras Djinet power plants. They appointed Siveco to deliver the turn-key CMMS in these projects. As part of the projects, Siveco started to work with the automation subcontractors appointed by the EPC companies, namely Yokogawa Korea, Hanwha S&C and Emerson Process Control Korea – the companies delivering the plant automation systems for these projects. Siveco also had to deal with various related suppliers. All these companies have now become active Siveco partners.

We are able to help the EPC and their automation supplier to efficiently and successfully sell, deliver and support the CMMS part of their project. Typically such companies, that build the plants, do not have a clear understanding of the CMMS, its purpose, utilization and even less of its implementation. The CMMS project also represents a rather minor part of the total project value (in excess of 500M USD for the smallest of the plants, compared to less than 1M USD for the CMMS). For the end-client however, the CMMS considered an important, mandatory deliverable and a key tool to support handover from construction to operations. The involvement of Siveco relieves the EPC and its subcontractors of this burden, ensuring smooth delivery and customer satisfaction.

Sales support: Siveco has 30 years of experience bidding for CMMS projects all over the world. Our team is able to quickly analyze customer requirements, ask the key questions and prepare a competitive offer. Thanks to our international presence and project experience, our company and our CMMS have the credibility needed to win such projects. We are able to provide tailored proposals in a matter of days, which our partner can embed in their own proposal.

Project support: Siveco dispatch project teams to the EPC partner location (for example in Korea) and later to the project site (for example in Algeria). Our project engineers are multilingual and have extensive international experience. The Siveco China engineering back-office ensures cost-efficient support for resource intensive task that can be performed remotely, such technical data preparation and CMMS configuration.

Thanks to our international presence, we are usually much more competitive than local players (typically local IT suppliers) who lack sales and project experience. Such local players either resell another company’s CMMS (thus have no control on the software quality and may lack expertise) or develop their own CMMS (thus not known internationally, less credible for the end-user and usually less reliable).

Thanks to our unique combination of maintenance engineering know-how (our core business is maintenance consulting) and CMMS (we develop our own CMMS solutions for close to 30 years), we also more competitive than the alternative, which is for the EPC to purchase a CMMS from an IT supplier, then to hire a maintenance consulting firms. The total cost is usually much higher, not to mention conflicts between the two suppliers and the coordination effort needed.

Our target market and partners can be described as follows:

•     Type of partners: EPC and related subcontractors (usually automation)

•   Type of projects: power plants, water infrastructures, ports, airports, urban transportation (metro, light rail). Also see:

•   Locations: main target countries (partner office) are in Asia-Pacific, for end-user projects located anywhere in the world. On our global coverage:

For more on becoming an EPC partner of Siveco:

We warmly welcome enquiries. The easiest way to reach our Value Added Partner Team (VAPP) is to email us at: info@sivecochina.com

Tags： EPC、power plant、greenfield project、export project、Africa、Korea、Algeria、CMMS、infrastructure、VAPP