“Why would you waste time changing that? We never had any complaints!” An associate was recently relaying a story to me about how he was trying to improve some of the documentation going to the customer when he was hit with these statements.
We’ve all heard this and most of us have probably fallen victim to it [...]
I recently watched Daniel Pink‘s speech from TED on the gap between the science of motivation and the actions of most businesses. If you aren’t familiar with Pink, his book “A Whole New Mind” is one of BGE’s most recommended reads and describes the game changing shift from the knowledge economy to the creative economy. His latest [...]
I recently completed Sylvia Lafair’s book “Don’t Bring it to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success”. As the title suggests, this book is focused on how family behaviors manifest themselves at work, and how, by recognizing these patterns, you can change them and improve your relationships and be more successful.
In the interest of full [...]
Part five – A new reality and the way forward
Ours has been a long journey, starting with a melting pot of equipment manufacturers and cement producers who had close ties, progressing through a period of globalization. We watched the Chinese enter the market and examined the response. Today we close our story by taking a final [...]
This posting discusses corporate decision rights versus plant decision rights – where should the line be drawn? [...]
Part Four: The response
To this point, everything we’ve discussed in this series has been a trip down memory lane. Today we start to examine the latest changes, and where things stand today.
Western equipment suppliers had already been in a race to remain competitive, and cost reduction was a major focus for the reasons described in Part [...]
Part Three: Enter The Dragon
Previously we examined the cement industry and the relationship between all the players as it existed for generations, and then looked at how it began to change in the face of globalization. Today our little story about differentiation and changes in the marketplace is going to turn its focus on the relatively [...]
Have you ever heard the expression “Life’s how it is, not how it ought to be?”
An enterprise that wants to implement a standard reliability strategy across multiple sites must confront the implication of this statement.
Most mining enterprises do not have cookie-cutter plants or facilities. The locations will vary in age of equipment and workers. The quality [...]
Part Two: Globalization and Consolidation
This is the second article in continuing series about how equipment and service suppliers differentiate themselves in the eyes of the cement producers. In the previous article, “One big happy family” we examined the time period where cement producers, equipment suppliers and manufacturers were generally well mixed and experience was widely shared. [...]
Cement producers today face a globally competitive economic landscape and a wide variety of choices in how they approach major and minor capital expenditures. For suppliers the game is all about differentiation and defining what value they can offer. How can the producers navigate these waters? We at BGE thought it would be worthwhile to look [...]