I started my career with Jamesbury in September 1982 in Finance role. When Neles merged with Jamesbury in 1988 I was assigned to handle a sales role. I have served our key account customer, a leading manufacturer in the paper and pulp industry in Asia Pacific from 1992 till today almost 30 years. Due to the long term business relationship with the company, I am almost like part of their family.
My contacts with them ranges from top COO to the end-user. Earning their respect and trust helped a lot to secure all those past projects even for China and Brazil. Herewith my thoughts on key characteristics of a successful customer relationship.
Way of working with the customer
Success comes with knowing your customer and putting yourself into their position.
Success comes with knowing your customer and putting yourself into their position. I am always explaining them how can we help to optimize performance of valves and final target is to reduce loss cook.
We have a local resident engineer working together with their maintenance team assisting them to handle any problems that might occur, and doing also a trouble shooting with them. This is the way to ramp up our services orders and at the same time we take this opportunity to replace competitor’s valves if any. We have a frame agreement for Maintenance, Repair and Operations driven (MRO) projects. It helps us to secure orders.
Timely responses and efficient solutions describe my way of working with the customer. Especially considering a project work if we already know their “pattern” of valve selection for their processes in various plants, that would be in plus point. They can easily crosscheck the historical installed base for the similar type of processes.
Characteristics for a successful cooperation
The key factor in optimizing the production processes of a pulp or paper mill is to determine whether all of the equipment and control solutions that are in place are actually working to full potential. It is well known that there is often equipment installed in pulp and paper mills that is never really run at full potential due to the fact that the mill personnel lack the time, training, patience or knowledge to fine tune the devices for optimum process operation.
Expertise is the key. Assessing and fine tuning equipment in a mill can be a very large job, usually beyond the scope or capability of the mill staff. Therefore many of the more advanced mills around the world have turned to the solution of outsourcing their process optimization programs to external experts to both raise production and quality, with little capital investment.
Outsourcing is the way to go, both as a means to lower costs and to improve product quality. By using outside knowledge and expertise to run longer term process optimization programs, pulp and paper companies can free up mill personnel to concentrate on the areas where their expertise is most needed. In this manner they can utilize their own internal resources in the wisest manner, which is of course the aim of all successful enterprises. Our customer’s success is important to me and this is something I emphasize a lot in my collaboration with my key customer – one of the largest, most technologically advanced, and efficient makers of pulp and paper products in the world.
The text has been updated in April 2022, due to the company name change to Valmet.
