An introduction to Siveco Value Added Partner Program (VAPP)
After a series of articles featuring various Siveco partners in the previous issues of the newsletter (ABB in March, Areva 01-db Metravib in April, Terranova Telecom in May), we have this month chosen to highlight our partner strategy to both our customers and potential partners. Partners’ articles will start again from the next issue, with a continued emphasis on solutions and case studies.
The Valued Added Partner Program (VAPP)
Siveco China’s Value Added Partner Program was initially launched in 2007. The program aims at providing better access to Siveco’s well-recognized maintenance improvement solutions for customers across regions and industries. VAPP is tailored to offer significant profit-sharing opportunities to partners with strong expertise in their industrial or geographical areas.
Value Added Partners will work alongside SIVECO’s Partner Support team, located in Shanghai, both for sales and implementation. Customers benefit from the improved support capability, wider geographical coverage and better integration with local third-party solutions, based on Siveco’s well-recognized software platform. The VAPP includes a comprehensive training and certification process. Partner seminars and joint marketing events are regularly organized.
While, even today, most projects are still handled directly by Siveco, the introduction of a well-structured mature partnership model was a reflection of the successful growth of the business as well as of Siveco China’s future ambitions. This is what Bruno Lhopiteau, GM of Siveco China, explained when VAPP was launched:
“We have entered the third phase of our development in China, aimed at creating an ideal environment for our partners to thrive. The first phase consisted in localizing our solutions. In the second phase, we created strong reference customers within our three target markets: namely infrastructures, facilities and manufacturing. Both our sales and technical teams have been strengthened. We have now established the best possible conditions for our partners to develop business with us and to help customers’ achieve their asset management objectives. We call this approach Win-Win-Win.”
A modest success, more to come
Since 2007 VAPP has proven moderately successful. Siveco has established strong relationships with software suppliers, automation vendors, system integrators, as well as consulting companies and engineering firms.
Most notably, through partnerships, Siveco China has made its mark in export markets where Chinese construction companies are involved. Previous newsletters have featured projects in Malaysia and Sudan. Siveco China teams are currently involved in four Asian countries, namely China, Malaysia (4 projects), Indonesia (1 project), Singapore (3 projects) and is responding to tenders all over the world, on all continents.
In addition to extending the company’s geographical reach, VAPP has fulfilled another of Siveco’s original objectives in terms of increasing its solution and service scope. Among partnerships already covered in previous newsletter:
– The cooperation with Terranova Telecom has allowed Siveco China to develop its highly innovative suite of mobile solutions, while being able to use Terranova’s technology and resources for large-scale mobile deployments (field service solutions scalable up to thousands of mobile users).
General Managers of Siveco and Terrova Telecom at a partner event
– The ABB partnership has proven very fruitful in terms of skills complementarities – ABB’s strong automation expertise, combined with Siveco’s unique maintenance and reliability consulting experience, gives the two companies a complete life-cycle approach to infrastructure and industrial projects, yet unmatched in China. Siveco’s CMMS Coswin has also been integrated with ABB 800xA platform.
– The recently unveiled agreement with Areva 01-db Metravib shows similar potential. While Coswin nicely complements 01-db’s condition monitoring systems, Siveco’s consulting resources also extend the company’s capability to deliver full-service reliability solutions to its industrial clients.
Three years since its launch, with successes in both extending geographical coverage and scope of solutions, it is in terms of business development that VAPP has still not attained its full potential. The Chinese maintenance market, still largely undeveloped, is maturing very slowly: most local partners have never been exposed to modern maintenance concepts, making it very hard for them to convey the benefits of our projects to customers. Business development for most companies still relies on relationship and low price, not on delivering measurable benefits.
In order to better address this challenge, and recognizing that a small company like Siveco, in spite of its good reputation, cannot expect to accelerate the maturation of the market, Siveco China has started to “productify” its offering, both services and the supporting software. By better packaging the deliverables in products that partners can readily understand, the sales process becomes simpler. This will greatly enhance the capability of local sales partners to get deals with Siveco.
Siveco at a partner event
Ethics and trust, the foundation to all our partnerships
In true Chinese fashion, trust is the very foundation of our business: trust, not based on existing relationships, but on competence (our ability to convince customers and deliver results) and on a strong ethics. When it comes to partnerships, Siveco China’s very distinct business ethics stands out.
Siveco only appoints partners with a strong industrial value added and commits to fully support them, which also means Siveco will never develop competing partnerships. This philosophy is highly relevant to the Chinese so-called “EAM” market (“EAM” being the term most commonly used by software companies to talk about CMMS), where customers often see several local companies competing with each other, supplying the same software. More often than not, the original vendor is never to be seen by customer, leaving its local partner to handle the problems. Almost inevitably, a blame-game will start, where local partner blames the software supplier (“bugs”, “lack of support”, “too expensive, no margin left for us”), software supplier blames its partner (“lack of skills”, “too much discount”) or even its customer (“not mature enough” is what we hear most often!). Partners suffer greatly in this model, competing with each other on price and relationship (the kind of relationship that comes with a cost, still too common in China), which in several cases has even led to bankruptcies.
The success of Siveco China is also based on this strong ethics, on which we will never compromise, values which should be shared by our partners.
The VAPP strategy, with its latest addition to “productify” our offering for sales partners, has proven its worth. The years to come will certainly see a faster development of Siveco China’s indirect business.
For more details of the different levels of partnerships available, please contact our VAPP manager at vapp@sivecochina.com.
