Foundation Builders_Main_v1

This is going to be just a conversation on collaboration culture and we have some questions that we wanted to ask you guys. So the first one we want to just have you tell us a little bit about the project and how it all came together. I think that's good. Chris, do you want to go first? Chris Coffey, Director of Service for LPT. My role in this was really to support Jamie and Sam selling this internally, but also helping selling the value to the customer. My name is Sam Troughton and I was the Business Development Manager for HRT. My role in the project was to put together the HRT offer for the BritVic SLA. Hi, my name is Jamie Stirling. I'm Service Sales Manager for Beverage within LPT. I was Commercial Lead within the BritVic SLA project. The project was a follow on from a large project that we were successful. It was a Nexus heat pump project and this was at BritVic Bexton. This was basically a first service offering, which is something we always offer as LPT. This was to get on site and align our portfolio with BritVic's requirements and seeing what within our services we could offer to them in line with the project and also further developing our relationship on site from a service point of view. And then also bringing in HRT so that we could bring together our portfolios and offer, you know, one combined offering to BritVic. So this question is all about the walls that you guys experienced and encountered. Were there any walls or challenges that you had to work through? Yeah, so we had to coordinate the joint bid and that was aligning with our strengths both on HRT and the LPT side. Trying to get alignment of what our key ambitions were, what our main direction was. That was to get a cohesive offer to the customer that picked upon the strengths from HRT and LPT from the Nexus project. And we sort of overcame those collaborative challenges with open and strong communication between myself and Jamie. HRT had a good relationship with site and we had good communication with the site team. So we were able to funnel and relay the information from site back throughout myself and Jamie to ultimately get to site, do a presentation where we went through both the skill sets and the offering from HRT and LPT. So communication played a big role then in this success. Yeah. Yeah. One of the hardest points was that presentation, trying to get all the key stakeholders in the room and present both from your side and our side in a way that we weren't overworking any of the points and getting them to take on board what we could offer from both sides. We knew the intention of the presentation, what we were going to deliver, but as part of that and kind of using what our, you know, our 'Juice' and what we can offer, you know, with a little bit of investigation of Britvik itself, we then tailored that presentation to pitch the full portfolio because we knew that they didn't have that full support already existed on site. I also think from my perspective, one of the challenges was getting that combined offer out. So obviously I did the HRT offer in isolation and you guys did the LPT offer on your side, but yourself, Jamie, you and the team took our offer from HRT. And then combined it into an overall package, which was then put forward to the customer that all married up and kept all the content and still had all the key information that was required, but it was all packaged in a way that could be presented to the customer in a sense that it was one offer, one company, one package. Yeah. And typically as well, you know, previous to this, people have, you know, customers sometimes feedback that GEA is such a big company with multiple different, you know, salespeople they deal with different areas that they deal with within the business. What we aim to do is to bring that and be one face to the customer. So, you know, as being customer centric and putting them first, this was definitely the right approach and doing a joint visit. Was the internal challenges, there was clearly the external challenges, getting the customers buy into this collaborative offer, but internally, you know, traditionally, and for some people and some stakeholders in our groups, you know, that the attitude was, why change what we've always done before, these guys navigated that very well by being open, transparent, listening to every stakeholders concerns, giving all the stakeholders a voice, and taking that to the table, and coming up with an offering and a solution and a working mode, that covered all of them concerns, and ultimately put us in a position where it was an absolute no brainer. And I think that was probably the best thing that I seen. In all of this. All right. So what advice you would give to anyone that when we're presented with that choice of we've got an old way of doing it, or we can explore this unknown territory? What advice would you give? My advice to others would be to invest the time in understanding the priorities and constraints on collaboration. Collaboration works best when everyone is aligned on a shared goal. Once we broke down the barriers and we began communicating, I feel that there was a huge benefit to the customer and internally. So it was nice to see the kind of barriers, you know, brought down and people working together. I think that allowed us then to realize the kind of true capabilities of GEA's portfolio when it's combined. You know, there's great strengths within each division. But working alongside colleagues and counterparts, it's really shown that bringing it together then will definitely help kind of roll out and further cement our kind of service offering and embed ourselves on the customers' site. We can achieve anything. We can achieve anything. We can show massive differentiation to our competition when we've got the right people and the right mindset and that common goal and everybody's all aligned and giving it their all then to succeed. Don't be afraid of change. Embrace doing something differently. Yeah, no, I agree. Be open to new ideas and a new approach. The ways of working currently do work and we are successful. But actually what we realize is a change in the way we approach the customer gave us even further added value and increased turnover within the business as well. So there was a massive benefit to working in collaboration with other divisions. What's best for GEA is ultimately the question we need to ask. You know, what is best for GEA, not necessarily what is best for the division or the individual. And when we took ourselves away from that and stepped outside the box to say, actually combining this gives GEA, the revenue, the much higher revenue, everything else is secondary to that. And that's just, they're very, very small hurdles we need to overcome. So don't let that be the driver to not collaborate in future. That is a barrier we need to take down and bring this together because ultimately we're one company. So that's definitely a key to take away from this from my side. Thank you. Thank you for being so open and so collaborative on this little collaboration itself. And yeah, just thank you so much, guys. Cool. No problem. Really good. Really good conversation.