Personal & Professional Experiences & Insights

Category: Uncategorized

  • My participation in the “Economic days” of the AHKs in Chile and Peru & my flight above the Nazca Lines

    Hi all together. Today I will invite You to accompany me on my memory travel to Nazca in the south of Peru. But let me tell You the whole story now.

    During October 2018 I was travelling in Chile. Together with our great friend and exclusive distribution partner in Chile Andres Puglisevich (https://scem-chile.cl/) I visited SCEM`s new distribution & service center in Antofagasta in the north of Chile in the Atacama desert, where most of the big chilean copper mines are located. From there we went back to Chile`s capital Santiago, where we participated together in CAMCHAL`s (https://chile.ahk.de/es/) yearly big “Jornadas Economicas Chile – Alemania” event. From there I continued to Lima, Peru, where I was scheduled to participate in the AHK Peru`s ( https://peru.ahk.de/) yearly big event “Jornadas Economicas Peru – Alemania”. Between these two important events in these two beautiful countries I had a free weekend and – with very nice support by Antje Wandelt, Managing Director of AHK Peru – I decided to spent it in Peru and take the opportunity to visit for the first time in my life the famous Nazca Lines in the Naszca desert in the south of Peru. 
    Let`s ask wikipedia for explaning to us, what the Nazca Lines are: The Nazca Lines are a group of very large geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BCE and 500 CE by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving differently colored dirt exposed. Most lines run straight across the landscape, but there are also figurative designs of animals and plants. The individual figurative geoglyph designs measure between 0.4 and 1.1 km (.2 and .7 mi) across. The combined length of all the lines is over 1,300 km (808 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 km2 (19 sq mi). The lines are typically 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) deep. The figures vary in complexity. Hundreds are simple lines and geometric shapes; more than 70 are zoomorphic designs, including a hummingbird, spider, fish, condor, heron, monkey, lizard, dog, and a human. Other shapes include trees and flowers. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but in general, they ascribe religious significance to them. They were designated in 1994 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

    Here a collage of some pictures from Peru – on the photo in the lower left corner I am together with Antje Wandelt, Managing Director, and Jan-Patrick Häntsche, Manager DE International, from the AHK Peru. 


    I already knew the Nazca Lines since my early childhood, because in the year 1968 Erich von Däniken made huge success with his best-selling book “Chariots of the Gods? (Was God an astronaut ?)”. Von Däniken is one of the main figures responsible for popularizing the “paleo-contact” and ancient astronauts hypotheses, means he made claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture. And the Nazca Lines were one of his most famous “proofs” for his crazy theories. But as a boy I found this kind of histories really amazing and they deeply impressed me. At least it created my live long desire, to to see the Nazca Lines one day with my own eyes. And finally this dream came true. Isn`t this wonderful?

    But I may not forget to share with You the really exceptionally beautiful experience which I made on my way by car from Lima to Nazca. As I had arrived at Lima, Peru, airport from Santiago, Chile, around noon on a friday afternoon, it was clear that I would need to spent the night in a hotel at a place close to the Nazca desert, because I would anyhow need to drive approximately six hours until arriving there and the flights over the Nazca Lines from Nazca`s “Maria Reiche Neumann” airport (I will explain the background of this name in one of my future posts to You) always start very early in the morning. 

    Following the highly appreciated recommendation of my great friend, wonderful person and manager, Mrs. Antje Wandelt, Managing Director of the AHK Peru, I had booked a room for one night for me in the very beautiful Hotel Viñas Queirolo in the city of Ica, at about two hours car travelling distance to Nazca. But this payed fully out. Actually this very nice tourist hotel is located in the beautiful hills of the quite wellknown peruvian vineyard Inthipalka. As I arrived there only in the late afterrnoon and because I had to leave again from there for continuing my trip to the Nazca Lines very early on the next morning, I could not really take too much advantage of beeing in this wonderful hotel. But I will never forget the beautiful sundown which I  enjoyed on the terrace of the restaurant and the excellent dinner there. For all those, who did not find the opportunity yet to try the peruvian cuisine, please go after this quickly and try as dish a nice ceviche or a delicious causa. The Peruvians have been very successful during the last decade with the promotion and spread of their very delicious and very special gastronomy all over the world. 
    My flight of approximately forty minutes with a small plane over the Nazca Lines surpassed all my expectations. It was so wonderful and impressive to see all these beautiful drawings in the desert ground from above in the sky. As young boy I had created certain imaginations of the different famous drawings there, like the colibri, condor, monkey, spider, “astronaut”, tree, hands and spiral. But like so often in life the reality can be much more impressive than the imagination of it. I can warmly recommend for all, who have thought to travel once there by themselfes, to really do it. Who knows, for how long these mysterious drawings in the gound of the Nazca Desert will be maintained undestroyed. Shortly after my visit there, the peruvian newspapers reported, that a truck driver lost his way on the road and was driving across some of the Nazca Lines without even noting it by himself. 
    After the leisure weekend in Nazca I participated as speaker (“Component Solutions for Smart Mining”) for our industrial division Vulkan Drive Tech (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/drivetech ) in the very important first “Jornadas Economicas Peru – Alemania” event perfectly organised by Antje Wandelt and her marvelous AHK Peru team on ocasion of the 50th anniversary of the AHK Peru. I met lots of friends and business partners and I also made very interesting new contacts there. Peru – as the rising star of the mining industry in the Andes region – is one of our main markets for our couplings, brakes and backstops for all kinds of industrial applications, like for conveyor belts in the mines. Our full industrial portfolio of almost 2000 types, variants and sizes of products is beeing supplied to our customers all over Peru by our exclusive distribution partner Marco Peruana (https://www.marco.com.pe/es).
    Did You find this interesting? I wonder, whether the one or other of  You readers of my blog has also already visited the Nazca Lines and would like to share his/her own experience upon this with us. 
    See You here again tomorrow. Enjoy the wonderful sunday. 

  • Our great friend & helper Swimmy

    Good morning everybody. Another sunny “winter” day has just started in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, where I live. Today I want to present our great friend “Swimmy” to You. But at first let me share with You, how this very important cultural concept has been developped by us.

    As I have already explained in former posts, I took over responsability as President of our company Vulkan do Brasil in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, in September 2014, when our company – due to lots of historical reasons and situations – unfortunately had been in a very bad shape. But our reconstruction started immediately and after a complete restructuring process we reinvented ourselfes within a little more than a year and gained a lot of strength and dynamic from then on. With clear focus on the recovery of the satisfaction of our customers and the strong increase of our competitivity, I had launched a capaign internally from my first day at the company on, within which I described to all our employees my dreams of a our factory becoming “swiss clockwork”. With this symbolic picture was ment that we wanted our factory to become a well organized mechanism, which just works in the most efficient way and without any unnecessary interruptions and disturbancies. I will explain our concept of the “swiss clockwork” in a future post in more details.
    What happened really is, that after another year or so of hard work and implementation of lots of new processes and improvements, our factory since the end of 2015 had really become extremely efficient and showed impressive productivity results. So far my dream of the  “swiss clockwork” was obviously coming true. 
    But what we found out during this time, was that the high motivation of all our employees to continue aggressively with the improvement of our “swiss clockwork” started to create somehow egoistic behaviour at several departments. Obviously many employees were totally decided to optimise their own work and processes without taking into consideration those of other colleagues and other departments. 
    This was very good for the improvements of many isolated processes and the achievement of excelent results of certain groups of employees. But it became clear for my management team colleagues and me, that this was definitely not, what we were aiming at. Because the sum of several isolated good results and situations does not mean that they all together also show a good result and situation. A strong and successful team is knowingly much more than just the joining of several very strong individuals, as we can very nicely and often see in the world of sports, like in soccer.  
    It took us a good while, to become really clear about this situation and challenge until I finally got the clue shortly before the end of 2015. When surfing in the internet, I found the picture book “Swimmy”, written for small children by Leo Lionni in 1963. 
    The book is the story of a very small fish who is curious and adventurous, exploring the sea after being forced away from his home. When he meets a new big familly of small red fishes hidden behind rocks, he excitedly asks them all to come out and play, but they refuse. They are afraid of the big black tuna fish and don’t want to get eaten. Swimmy tells them that they must make a plan, because they can’t spend their whole life hiding in the rocks. He devises a plan to have all the small red fish swim in the shape of a large fish – and then Swimmy takes his place among them in the place the eye would be. After that they are able to swim in the sea without fear – scaring the larger black tuna fish away wherever they go.

    Here is the story:


    I found this simple children`s story very interesting for us for the sensibilisation of all our employees with regards to what we wanted to tell and teach them. By my own experience a really good campaign for the transmission of certain fundamental messages has to be designed and kept very simple and it must go straight into the head and into the heart of the people, which You want to convince and motivate to follow such new cultural paths within Your organisation. Finally the success of such projects depends on the full understanding, acceptation and identification of all the employees of the company and not just of parcial groups or hierarchical levels within it.  

    During the first concept discussions with my close colaborator and friend Marco Santos, HR & Special Projects Director of Vulkan do Brasil, it came clear, that this would become a very strong and helpful cultural concept for the further development of our whole company. We made some graphic designs and when we presented our final version to our whole management team everybody bought in. This was the birthday of “Swimmy” at Vulkan do Brasil. And since then, “Swimmy” – the same as our “Swiss Clockwork” – have become omnipresent at our company and in all our internal communication. Actually the combination of both concepts “Swimmy” and the “Swiss Clockwork” gave our company culture and team spirit an enormous power. 



    Since the introduction of the “Swiss Clockwork” at the beginning and of “Swimmy” at the end of the year 2015 You can ask any of our 200 employees in Itatiba, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá or Mexico City and she or he will immediately and perfectly explain You the meaning of these. Our employees have meanwhile deeply assimilated these simple but very strong cultural concepts and we do not stop to refer to them during our normal everyday work activities and events. The symbols of “Swimmy” and the “Swiss Clockwork” appear on all internal presentations and are posted at many places within our company. 

    This whole story is all but rocket science. There is nothing really complicated about it. To be true, it`s just children`s play. And it doesn`t require any investment to implement it. But it has been incredibly helpful during the reconstruction and turnaround of our company and for the persuation of the strong growth plans which we have set up and which we are realising successfully since a couple of years – no matter the several tempory deep crisis which we had and have in our country, the Latin American region and nowadays worldwide due to Covid-19. We just walk our line…..and keep going straight forward. 

    None other song would fit better to this post than this one from the late great American singer, songwriter, actor and author Johnny Cash:

    Hope this post and little story inspired You. Looking forward to Your comments, thoughts and own experiences. See You back here again in my blog tomorrow. 




  • Pitch & Zouk – Africa in my agenda and in my mind

    Hi my dear readers of my daily posts and followers of my blog. Another day is just starting (always seen from my home office in Sao Paulo, Brazil) and I need to mention something at first, which I unfortunately forgot to tell You yesterday. But anyhow all subjects mentioned in this post today will be about Africa and my so far gained experiences and initiated activities on this incredibly huge, beautiful and diverse continent. 

    Are You aware, that the African continent comprises 30 million square kilometers of land, enough to fit in it the USA, China, India, Japan, Mexico and many European nations combined?  Did You already know, that there are 54 independent countries with currently 1.2 billion people living there? According to UN estimates, the population of Africa may reach 2.5 billion by 2050 (about 26% of the world’s total population) and nearly 4.5 billion by 2100 (about 40% of the world’s total population then).

    Sorry, but the reason for many people`s ignorance of this is, that because the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents, like especially in the case of Africa.

    In my yesterday`s post I mentioned to You, that I have only listened to French radio stations during my two weeks stay in Paris in march. But I forgot to mention to You, that of all the French radio stations which I experienced during my two weeks there, RBM FM 103.4 “La radio des Hits” – a radio station in the French overseas territories, which plays endlessly Reggae, Zouk and other “tropical” music types – became the one that I liked and listened to the most. 
    If You want to try it, here`s the link to RBM radio station:
    By the way, I find it really fancy, that we all can listen  so easily and freely nowadays to any worldwide digital radio station on the multiple online streaming channels in the internet. Just download the apps for these on Your mobile internet devices. 
    My favorite latin music radio station is Radio Panamericana 101.1 FM in Lima, Peru:
    Yesterday I had the honor to participate as representant of our recently opened new company Vulkan Africa in the First EU-African
    Online Business Lab for SMEs     upon the following invitation of the European
    Entrepreneurs CEA-PME     (http://www.cea-pme.com/):
    “After the first EU-African SME Summit in Brussels in
    2019, when 10 African and European SME support organisations signed – under the
    auspices of the European Commission – the EU-African SME Alliance, and where
    the basic values and strategic visions for a better economic cooperation
    between Europe and Africa have been shared, it is now     time to explore more in depth the business opportunities for small
    and medium-sized enterprises in the two neighbouring continents. Due to the
    COVID-19 crisis, European Entrepreneurs CEA-PME, PACCI, BVMW, FIPME and CONFAPI
    have decided to organise the     First
    Online EU-African Business Lab for SMEs 2020    , which intends to highlight the chances for entrepreneurs
    and to share     the best roads towards a
    successful economic cooperation     of smart and open-minded companies in Africa and Europe for a common
    future.

    To encourage the potential investments in Africa, we have initiated an open call for business
    proposals, for local businesses fostering job creation and market growth in
    Africa. The top three businesses selected under the call will get a special opportunity
    for free consultancy and business development expertise to start their business
    on African ground.”

    The same as my colleagues from the other nine European and African SMEs and Start Ups which had also qualified for this final round, I presented during my 7 minutes pitch our market entry and business development project for the African sub-Saharan region countries and markets to the international online audience. 

    It was amazing for me, to find myself during my pitch presentation amongst entrepreneurs from Poland, Italy, DR Congo, Belgium, Benin, France, Senegal, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Uganda and Spain presenting their own wonderful business ideas for the African markets and people.

    Once again I could “show our flag”, made lots of very nice and interesting friends and contacts and gained  several opportunities for discussion of future cooperation and joint projects, with regards to our concrete market entry and business development plans for the African continent.

    Please regret, that I keep my today`s post a little shorter than normal, but because of my participation in the above mentioned event during great part of yesterday, I need to catch up with lots of other subjects which I need to attend properly today still, before the weekend starts. 

    Once more I had great fun, to share my experiences with You and I am looking forward now to Your comments upon what I mentioned above. I am really curious to hear from You, whether You like my two radio station recommendations. 

    See You back here again tomorrow. Have a great and successful friday.   

     









  • From Paris to Covid-19 – some more personal & professional challenges & experiences

    Good morning faithful readers of my posts and followers of my blog. 

    It continues to impress me very much, when I watch how my posts soon after publication start to attract readers all over the world. It`s a little bit like when You watch people switch on the lights of their mobile fones during a music concert in a dark concert hall. My yesterday`s post gained it`s first readers at so different and distant places as Rio de Janeiro, Bonn, Passau, Hannover, Tunis, Munich, Mogi Guaçu, Campinas, Cologne, Piracicaba, Berlin, Istanbul and Curitiba within a few minutes after publication. But for sure, during the course of the day readers on other continents and in different time zones of the globe followed. And it is amazing, how such a process increases steadily and how the readership increases constantly. One of my analytical interests is, to discover, how this is linked to the titles, subjects and pictures of my posts. There must be a certain pattern. I will definitely keep You informed upon my discoveries and conclusions about that.
    But at first le me congratulate us – me as the writer and You as the readers of my posts. Today we have completed the first four weeks of our uninterrupted daily joint activities and of my blog project. This makes me proud and happy, because I was not really sure, when I started my blog 4 weeks ago on thursday, June 18th, whether I would really be able and remain interested and motivated for the daily continuation of my posts. Maybe You rember my motto “after action – satisfaction”, which I have repeatedly mentioned in my first posts. This is exactly what we should practice triumphantly tonight! 
    At the same time today it is exactly 18 weeks ago, that I have arrived back home in Sao Paulo on sunday, march 17th, from my holiday trip to Paris. I had travelled to Paris for two weeks with the intention to  improve my french language skills. Originally my plan was, to stay there for three weeks, but due to the dramatic development of the Covid-19 crisis, I decided to shorten my stay in Paris and to return home to Sao Paulo one week earlier than scheduled.
    My time and my studies at Paris started perfectly. I stayed in a fully equipped flat at Montrouge in the outskirts of Paris and travelled every day by Metro to the center of the city, where my reputable language school “Alliance francaise” was located. 
    Alliance française is an international organisation that aims to promote the French language and francophone culture around the world. Created in Paris on 21 July 1883 by a group of illustrious French people including the scientist Louis Pasteur, the diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, the writers Jules Verne and Ernest Renan, and the publisher Armand Colin, its primary concern since then is teaching French as a second language.

    Together with other students from Brazil, India, Pakistan, USA, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Portugal and China I attended clases from 9am until 1pm from monday to friday  and in the afternoon I had every day 3 additional hours of individual grammar and conversation trainings. In the evening I did my homework exercises and recapulated once what we had learned during the day at school. 

    My discipline was hard as steel and before I had started this holiday activity, I had already firmly decided, to confront and immerse myself during the whole time of my stay in Paris totally and exclusively into purely French language environment. I read only French newspapers, I watched only French TV and I listened only to French radio stations. I love such challenges. The weather was ideal for my enterprise. It was cold, stormy and almost uninterruptedly raining during my complete time there. 

    When I left Sao Paulo at the end of february for Paris, almost nobody in Brasil was still talking about Covid-19. During my first week in Paris, the coronavirus – mainly due to the dramatic news about the increasing number of deceases in Italy – started to irritate the people in France and other European countries and became the predominant subject in the newspapers and on TV. But live in Paris continued still unchanged. During the second week of my stay everything changed quickly and dramatically. Covid-19 outbrakes in some regions in the north of France appeared and also in Paris more and more calls for protective actions to be imposed by the government became loud. After having watched the dramatic evening speech and appeal of the French president Macron on TV on the evening of thursday, march 12th, it was clear for me, that I should not waste any more time in Paris and fly home as quickly as possible. The public schools in France started to close and it was obvious, that many more and much more drastic and restrictive actions were about to be decreted by the authorities and that Alliance française would have to close soon as well.

    I finished my classes at Alliance france on friday, march 13, enjoyed a 20 km foot walk through the main touristic quarters of Paris during an ice-cold, but thank God mostly dry, day and left France at night homewards again to Sao Paulo. During all this time I was wonderfully fine and without any health issues. 


    When I arrived back home again in Sao Paulo on a sunny and warm sunday, it was absurd for me to see, that nobody in Brazil still took Covid-19 as a really existing dangerous ameace. Watching TV, the crowded beaches in Rio de Janeiro, the full soccer stadiums in Sao Paulo and the streets, parks, restaurants and bars packed with unsuspecting masses of people in all cities shocked me. 

    After 3 days of living at home with my familly I started to suffer the starting of a  strong dry cough, which became quickly stronger. Concerned about this, I went to the Sirio Libanes Hospital, one of the best private hospitals in Sao Paulo, for medical examination. Several immediately performed medical examinations proofed during the next hours, that my lungs were clean and that all other suspected illnesses could be excluded. Alone the result of the Covid-19 test was still outstanding. 

    I was released for going home, where I entered into a strict quarantine regime with total seperation from all other members of my familly. After three days I received the positive result of my Covid-19 test. But I did not suffer any serious symptoms like fever and breathlessness. To be true – besides the ongoing dry cough and sometimes a little head ache – I did not feel anything else unnormal. 

    I remained for in total three weeks in my strict quarantine regime at home during which my doctor maintained frequent contact in whatsapp with me and accompanied my development. And finally after the conclusion of the three weeks, I became released to normal life, which meanwhile ment for all of us social distancing, wearing of masks etc. And after two more weeks another examination proofed to my whole familly`s great satisfaction, that my body had in the meantime produced lots of anti-bodies. By the way – Covid-19 tests proofed also, that none of my familly members had been infected. 

    My doctor firmly suspected, that I had not caught the Covid-19 infection during the two weeks of my stay in Paris, but on the airplane during my flight home from there to Sao Paulo. Who knows….? 

    Immediately after my return from Paris we set up our internal “Covid-19 Committee” (myself,  our VP Administration, our VP Operations and our HR Director)  at our company Vulkan do Brasil and we established the first strict protection measures against Covid-19 incl. sending almost seventy employees into home office, isolation of the work cells in the factory, distribution of our workers over additional shifts,  obligation for all employees to wear masks provided to them by us and several others measures.
     
    Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis in Brazil our internal committee controls attentatively the whole situation within our company and takes all necessary corrective decisions. We are very happy that we did not have a single known case of infected employees until today and we are very proud on all our employees because of the high discipline, with which they respect and follow all the strict protection measures and rules, which we have implemented in the meantime. 

    All our company activities and business processes continue completely unharmed by Covid-19 since Covid-19 started and we have not lost a single production hour since the beginning of this year until now. This has already become another success story for Vulkan do Brasil. We are crossing now our fingers together with all other people in this as beautiful as suffering country, that hopefully the worst – after meanwhile the death of more than 75 thousand people due to Covid-19 – will soon have passed and that our live and economy may return more closely to what we altogether consider as normality soon. In the worst case we`ll have to wait for this until vaccination for our whole population will be available, which might only be during the next year. But no matter when ever and how this will happen, we at Vulkan do Brasil will always take care in the best possibly way of our employees, customers and our business. 

    Hope this was of Your interest and gave You some insights about how I treated personally and how we in our company deal professionally with this kind of challenges. I wish You a great and successfull day and hope, to see You here in my blog again tomorrow. Take care !


     

     





  • Better use a “Wall of Fame” instead of a “Wall Cemetery” for displaying Your company trophies to Your employees

    Hello again everybody. It feels really good, not to be alone here in my blog this morning. In my today`s post I will count You the story of the “Wall of Fame”, which we have erected in our factory in Itatiba one and a half years ago. But at first let`s have a look at wikipedia`s explanation of the term “Wall of Fame”.

    A hall, wall, or walk of fame is a list of individuals, achievements, or animals, usually chosen by a group of electors, to mark their fame in their field. In some cases, these halls of fame consist of actual halls or museums that enshrine the honorees with sculptures, plaques, and displays of memorabilia and general information regarding the inducted recipients. Sometimes, the honorees’ plaques may instead be posted on a wall (hence a “wall of fame”) or inscribed on a sidewalk (as in a “walk of fame”, “walk of stars”, or “avenue of fame”). In other cases, the hall of fame is more figurative and consists of a list of names of noteworthy people and their achievements and contributions. The lists are maintained by an organization or community, and may be national, state, local, or private.

    Great. Now we that know this perfectly, I can tell You, that for exactly these reasons and purposes we at Vulkan do Brasil decided at the beginning of last year, to install our own “Wall of Fame” inside our factory. We wanted to expose all our trophies, prizes won, awards and praise received from customers and other business partners for all our employees at an adequate place and in a nice and beautiful manner. 

    Before we erected our “Wall of Fame”, all such beautiful moments and achievements had always been verbally or in written form communicated to our employees, but afterwards these trophies, prizes, award medals and other beautiful items were just hung on the walls or put onto furnitures in the corners of meeting rooms – and, with the natural reduction of the human capacity for remembering – became quite soon afterwards forgotten and sometimes even dusty.

    I always – and in all the companies where I have been working so far – found this terrible, if not unjust and even sad. The way in which these originally so beautiful and important success stories of lots of people and often whole companies involved ended up on “wall cemeteries” in meeting rooms and on office floors, was definitely not helpful for my opinion for the creation of the highly inspiring and motivating, open team culture inside of our company, which we want and need so much.

    One morning, when I was running as usual around the small lake in my housing area, the idea to create a beautiful “Wall of Fame” at a prominent place within one of our operations areas was born. During my drive to our factory I called my friend and colleague Marco Santos, HR & Special Projects Director of Vulkan do Brasil, on his mobile and shared my spantaneous idea with him. It was no surprise for me, that Marco liked this idea immediately very much and that he jumped on it actively directly. From this moment on, I was exempt from this subject and Marco and his team took over, to put the idea into action and to erect our “Wall of Fame”.

    A few days later Marco showed me his design proposal and he took me to the place in our factory, which he proposed for the installation of our future “Wall of Fame”. Both were perfect – as You can see on the beautiful picture of Marco and myself (taken last week during my short factory visit) below. 

    We have finally installed our “Wall of Fame” vis-à-vis to the meeting place of the daily “level 4” shopfloor management meetings of our factory management team, where also all our “level 4” KPI exposition boards are hung out publicly and where all our employees normally pass by several times every day.



    Our employees like our “Wall of Fame” very much and every time when we expose there new success trophies etc., we inform all Vulkan do Brasil employees in advance during our internal weekly routine communication – I will explain this in more detailed in one of my future posts – and many of them take the opportunity to have a look at these with their own eyes or even take a picture of themselfes or their group of colleagues in front of our “Wall of Fame”. It makes a lot of fun, to see our employees feeling proud about our success. 

    Thus our trophies, prizes, awards and praises by customers stay alive and amidst us instead of beeing burried in such unfortunately still quite common “cemeteries” on floor or meeting room walls and furnitures in the corners. 

    This small detail is just another sign, for how we at Vulkan do Brasil understand the importance and develop our own modern, colaborative and open minded business and company culture. Because for us, to do business successfully means much more than just to manufacture products and to sell them to customers. 

    Our mother company Vulkan, as a  more than 130 years old, in the 4th generation familly held and globally acting highly successful German company, is clearly long term oriented. And we know very well, how important our internal company culture is for our short, mid and long term success.  




  • Soccer & Management – I`m passionate for both

    Good morning everybody. Welcome to my today`s post in this blog. Inspired by the requests of several of my readers, I take this opportunity, to share my opinion and experiences about soccer with You and I will explain why for my opinion passion for soccer and general management combine perfectly. 

    Bad news first! Let me tell You the truth. I have never played soccer in my whole life and I hardly know the rules. 
    As a six year old boy, living in a small village in the middle of nowhere in Germany, I desperately wanted to play soccer. One day I convinced my hesitant mother, to take me to the local soccer club for registration. But something totally unforeseen and not acceptable at all for me had happened there. Some of the young players at the soccer club of our small village started laughing and joking about me because of what they described as my “bowlegs”. 
    Sometimes things finish before they have started. I urged my mother to leave this soccer club immediately and to take me back home. From that moment on, my interest in soccer turned zero and I never played soccer, even not during my school times, where I consequentially preferred other ball sports like volley ball and basket ball. And my repugnance towards soccer continued from then on for  in total 17 years.
    During my studies of chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, at the age of 23, I used to relax always for an hour or two after lunch before continuing my learning exercices. One saturday afternoon, when I was lying comfortably on the old sofa in my students appartment, the music programme on the radio finished and the live transmission of a Bundesliga soccer match started. I was half sleeping and much too lazy to get up and switch the radio to another channel. Thus I started to listen unintentionally to the soccer match live transmission on my radio. And it impressed me as a very nice means for disconnecting easily and totally from the world around me and especially from my learning exercices subjects.  From then on I started to accompany the Bundesliga live transmissions on the radio during the saturday afternoons. But it was much more the very enthralling style of reporting and the background noise in the stadiums, than the soccer matches themselfes, what distracted and fascinated me. 
    The real fascination for soccer caught me 1996, during the first months of my in total three years as Project & Engineering Manager at Henkel`s chemicals and adhesives plant in Jacarei, Sao Paulo, Brazil. At that time I was living in Sao Jose dos Campos, a nice and quite big city, where our brazilian pride Embraer has its headquarters and manufactures it`s airplanes. On a saturday morning my american colleague Tracy Hunt, a process engineer from Henkel`s big chemicals plant in Cincinatti, USA, who was visiting me in Brazil for two weeks, and I decided, to drive very early to Rio de Janeiro, where we had not yet been until then. For the afternoon on the same day we had bought tickets for the “classical” soccer match between the two local “carioca” teams Flamengo and Fluminense, which we wanted to watch in the world-famous Maracana stadium. Actually it was Tracy`s desire, to go there and I just agreed to accompany him. 
    To drive from Sao Jose dos Campos along the Dutra highway to Rio de Janeiro should have taken us approximately five hours. But something unforeseen happened and prolongued drastically our travelling time to Rio. During those years the brazilian highway police used to stop frequently cars travelling on the highways for doing “general inspections”. They usually checked all traveller`s identification documents, controlled the content of the luggage department, confirmed that a fire extinguisher was on board, looked at the tyres and demanded the cash payment of relatively small fines. 
    This was exactly, what happened to Tracy and myself. The police stopped us shortly after our departure from Sao Jose dos Campos on our way to Rio. And my very intelligent colleague Tracy had forgotten to take his passport with himself for our trip. But travelling without an identification document was not foreseen in the rules of the brazilian highway police. Therefore the police officers let us park our car in front of their office container besides the highway and made us sit inside the container in front of their desc for a hell of time. To be true – we had no clue, for how long this was foreseen to continue and how we would end up there. When my friend Tracy desperately begged the policemen, to let us please continue our travel, because we needed to reach the Maracana stadium before the match began in the afternoon, the situation changed immediately and completely. The astonished policeman behind the desc asked us to reconfirm, that we had planned to see the match between Flamengo and Fluminense in the afternoon. When we confirmed this desperately and showed him our tickets for the match, he jumped up from his chair and urged us to run to our car and get away quickly because otherwise we would not be able to make it in time and loose the opportunity to see the victory of Flamengo against its adversary. 
    At that time I was already fully aware of the importance of soccer for the Brazilians, but the crazy passion of the policeman for his team Flamengo and his decision, to forget all rules and let us drive away, surpassed my imagination, how far the soccer fever can lead people. After the exciting 2:1 triumph of Flamengo against Fluminense in the wonderful, recently modernized, Maracana stadium there was no more remaining doubt for me, that I had to become a passionate Flamengo fan from this moment on too. And this passion for Flamengo never cooled down since then, although my friends and colleagues in Sao Paulo never really accepted this “treason” and endlessly tried to convince me, to substitute my passion for the carioca team Flamengo by passion for one of the big soccer teams in Sao Paulo.
    This collage of fotos shows You some pictures of me during important events of my two most beloved soccer teams Flamengo (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Deportivo La Coruña (La Coruña, Spain):
    In June 2000 I gained another deep learning session about the importance of soccer for many people and many times as well for the management of businesses. This happened exactly on the day of my arrival in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, where I lived and worked in total three and a half years during my time as Managing Director of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s “La Toja” cosmetics plant. Actually I had just come driving by car from Düsseldorf, Germany, to La Coruña, Spain, with all my possessions left over from my recent divorce behind me in the luggage compartment of my car. When I stationed my car in the underground parking lot of hotel “Maria Pita”, another car pulled in and stopped on the parking place beside me. I got out of my car and a small black boy and his father got out of their car too, smiling very friendly to me. It was immediately clear, that we liked each other. But when I asked the man for his name, his small son for my absolute surprise got almost petrified with his mouth wide open. Something obviously had been wrong with my question about his father`s name.
    A few days later I understood, why the small boy did not understand my stupid question. His father was the brazilian soccer star Mauro Silva, the great hero of Deportivo La Coruña, the local soccer team, which just had won the legendary spanish soccer league for the first time in their club`s history. The whole city including all my employees admired this wonderful man, whose new neighbor I had just become. From then on I met Mauro, who besides an outstanding soccer player was a very intelligent and nice person, several times and we always laughed about our first encounter and my ignorance. For the years end party of my company, I bought a flag of Deportivo and asked Mauro, to let all players sign it. My employees loved me. The flag became framed behind glas and was hung at the central wall of our canteen.
    Consequentially I became a member of the Deportivo soccer club and during my time in La Coruña, I watched many spanish soccer league matches of Deportivo together with colleagues of my management team and other friends in the local “Riazor” stadium. By the way – I could walk from my appartment in the hotel building at the other end of Riazor beach to the nearby soccer stadium. During these years, all soccer matches became wonderful familly parties and the stadium was constantly booked out when Deportivo was playing there. 
    On 8 September 2001, Deportivo played its 1,000th game in La Liga. In 2002, they won the Copa del Rey for a second time in their history with a superb 2–1 win against Real Madrid. This match is commonly known in Spain as the Centenariazo. Deportivo’s illustrious opponents were expected to win the final comfortably as they were nicknamed the Galácticos and were among the strongest teams in Europe at the time. Additionally, the final was being played at their home ground, the Santiago Bernabéu. Imagine the party which was happening in La Coruña from the end of this match on and through the whole night everywhere in the city.
    After my return from Mexico – to where I had moved from Spain for six years during my times as Managing Director of renowned german automotive supplier companies there – to Brazil, my passion for soccer in general and especially for Flamengo have increased tremendously and whenever I can arrange this, I watch Flamengo playing matches – either on the TV screens in our house or in Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro. My fifteen year old son Gabriel has also become a fierce supporter of Flamengo. Thus we can nicely assist the national soccer league games together and with friends, at home and sometimes also together at the Maracana stadium. 
    Soccer and general management have in common, that for achieving success in both disciplines team spirit and close and efficient cooperation between all players are fundamental for gaining success. 
    During one of my future posts I will describe this direct relationship a little more in detail at the example of my great idol Jürgen Klopp, trainer of the FC Liverpool, the recent winner of it`s first english soccer league triumph since thirty years. 
    Thanks for having accompanied me in my post today. Looking forward to seeing You back here again tomorrow.

  • The “Times Square Effect” – Definitely a challenge, but not really a problem

    Hello again all You readers of my daily posts and followers of my blog. After yesterday`s excursion back to my – mostly boring – early childhood years during which I grew up in the small village in the middle of nowhere, I decided to share today with You some experiences with absolutely the contrary type of challenges in my life, with which we altogether are beeing confronted nowadays from the wake up ring of our alarm clock in the morning until falling into “light sleep”, as the brain researchers have named the first two of the in total five different stages of the human sleep cycle, in the evening. 

    Actually I am referring to what the psychologists describe as the famous “Times Square Effect”. But before starting to describe, what the “Times Square Effect” is, I would like to give wikipedia the opportunity to explain to all of us, what the Times Square is.

    Times Square is a major commercial intersection, tourist destination, entertainment center, and neighborhood in the Midtown Manhattan section of New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Brightly lit by numerous billboards and advertisements, it stretches from West 42nd to West 47th Streets, and is sometimes referred to as “the Crossroads of the World”, “the Center of the Universe” and “the heart of the world”. One of the world’s busiest pedestrian areas, it is also the hub of the Broadway Theater District and a major center of the world’s entertainment industry. Times Square is one of the world’s most visited tourist attractions, drawing an estimated 50 million visitors annually. Approximately 330,000 people pass through Times Square daily, many of them tourists, while over 460,000 pedestrians walk through Times Square on its busiest days. 
    Here a collage of pictures from the holiday week, which have I spent together with my daughter Christine in the “Big Apple” at the end of 2002, one year after the terrible terrorist attacks on the twin towers in Manhattan:

    Now that we know, what the Times Square is, we can talk about the “Times Square Effect”. The term “Times Square Effect” has been coined originally by neuroscientists and is widely used today by psychologists. It is often also called as “sensory overload”, which happens when one or more of the human body`s senses experiences over-stimulation from the environment. In the case of the Times Square this is symbolized by the enormous quantity of adverts, signs, movie screens and blinking lights. Apart lots of other negative symptoms and serious disorders, which can result from exposition to such environment for longer periods, this cerebral overload provokes that practically nothing can be observed or remembered within such an environment.  
    I choose this as subject for my today`s post, because we all are constantly beeing bombarded with all kinds of information during the day and the big challenge for us is, how to manage this confrontation in a sane but participative and productive way. To close our eyes and ears and to abstain from active utilisation of the information available can definitely not be the right choice. Somehow we need to find means how to select the right type and quantity of information and how to to use it actively and correctly. 
    When I became responsible for a whole company including all its employees, processes and business twenty years ago, I started to develop my own style and tools for handling lots of information permanently. And I must say, that I have been quite successful with this and I have always tried at the different companies, where I have been employed so far, to share these experiences with my management teams. Because for us as managers information is the driver for all our activities and decisions. 
    Just as a small example the explanation, how I deal efficiently with the daily flood of emails which I receive. First of all I keep the entrance box of my email account permanently empty, means I look it up constantly during the day and sort what is coming in. Unnecessary messages and messages with information, which I just need to note, are beeing deleted immediately. For all other emails I have installed directly below my entrance box several folders for email categories which I named “today”, “hot”, “to do”, “general follow up” and “follow up direct reports”. All messages with which I need to work actively during the same day still, are beeing moved into the “today” folder. Emails with very important subjects, but which must not necessarily be touched again during the same day still go into the “hot” folder. All emails with contents which require activities of me, but which are somehow not urgent, are beeing moved into the “to do” folder. Emails with subjects, which I need to observe or accompany further  are beeing put into the “general follow up” folder. And – last not least – all emails with subjects, which I need to follow up directly with single management team members, are beeing moved into the subfolders which I have created for each of them within the folder “follow up direct reports”. 
    Does this sound complicated to You? I can assure You firmly that this is a very simple but at the same time an extremely efficient way of working. It oblidges me to clean up the entrance box permanently and to empty my “today” folder before I switch off my notebook every evening. Whenever I find the necessary time, I go through the “hot”, the “to do” and the “general follow up” folders and work upon or just reorder these, if necessary. My system is completely flexible. The “follow up direct reports” folders for my management team colleagues are very helpful for the individual follow up meetings resp. conferences which I hold once per week with each of them. This procedere has shown very high performance and very good results during the last years, when we all have been travelling around the globe so much and it has helped us, to keep close touch and maintain stable control of all our projects and workflow processes. But for sure, such systems depend fully on the establishment and maintenance of the necessarry high discipline. If You start to relax and loosen Your discipline, such systems get messed up within a few days and make You loose totally the control of Your procederes. 
    This was just a simple example for one of  todays “Times Square Effect” challenges in our daily business and private life. I will share my experiences with other related subjects in future posts.
    Enjoy the great new day, which has just started. Have fun and success! See You back here in my blog again tomorrow.

  • Music as an important stimulation factor for my live and career

    Dear faithful readers. For today I have selected a very personal subject. Yesterday one of You asked me, which role music plays in my life and I really love to answer here publicly this very nice question.

    As mentioned already in former posts, I grew up as child in the middle of nowhere in a small village in the forests close to the city of Kaiserslautern in Germany. One of the very few really exciting experiences for me and my childhood friends there was the sporadic contact with US soldiers stationed allover this region and at the big european US airbase Ramstein, not really far away from my village. But “far away” has become a dubious expression for me during the last decades. As a child, living in that small village, to make one of the very few visits together with my mother to Kaiserslautern or to Mannheim, the other city quite close to our village just on the other side of the river Rhine, was a real travelling enterprise, which my mother used to plan days, if not even weeks, before and which always turned into a full day activity for us. 
    Since many years I got used to real long distance travelling. Look at these two extreme examples. Sometimes I fly from Sao Paulo just for meetings of two or three hours to the beautiful city Recife, where by the way my beautiful wife is from and which is situated 2600 km away from Sao Paulo on the beautiful coast in the north eastern brazilian state Pernambucu. My early morning flight to Recife takes three hours flight time and in the evening my flight home to Sao Paulo from Recife takes the same three hours. So this means that for a meeting of two or three hours I am sitting six hours on airplanes. Crazy, isn`t it?! The other extremely long distance travelling challenges are my frequent flights from Sao Paulo to Australia. The shortest and most convenient (better: least unconvenient) travel route for me and my colleagues, with whom I use to do these trips together, is to fly from Sao Paulo to Santiago de Chile, from there to Auckland in New Zealand and finally to continue from there to Sydney. If I have appointments in Perth in Western Australia, where great part of the australian mining industry is located, I need another five hours long connection flight from Sydney to there. But in this case, if available, I prefer to fly from Sao Paulo to Johannesburg in South Africa and catch a direct flight from there to Perth as the much better option. Such a trip takes us “door – to – (hotel) door” easily between thirty and fourty hours of total travelling time. It`s true – we have become modern nomads. 
    As far as I remember, the US GI`s which I met as a small boy of six or seven years in the woods around our village, called very much my attention with their Rock`n Roll and Soul Music, which they heard endlessly and wherever they moved. But to listen to this type of music during those times in Germany was all but an easy enterprise. German TV – black and white, only one channel, just for a few hours every day in the afternoon resp. evening – had just started, was still available only in very few households and did not show such, publicly not yet accepted, music during it`s first years. Thanks God and my mother, my hottest desire during these years found acceptation and I received one of those small transistor radios as christmas present at the still sweet age of eight or nine years. 
    With this fine equipment I started to listen almost every night, hidden under the blanket of my bed, so that no other familly members could discover this, to the great “Jim Pewter Rock`n Roll Radio Show” sessions on AFN Europe, the American Forces Network radio station. This was – besides a little later-on the “pirate” (because stationed on a boat in the North Sea outside the 3 miles country zone) Rock Music radio station “Radio Luxemberg” – practically my only possibility, to listen to this kind of music.
    A couple of years later, when I was twelve years old or so – still living in the miniscule boring village on the countryside – I accompanied the birth age of real Rock Music, with all these famous bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zepplin and many others. At this time, due to my complicated familly and generally spoken poor education situation after the early loss of my father, who had died on December 24, 1964, when I just was 6 years old, I made my first experiences with lots of other things like drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. By the way I still like drinking beer, but – and I consider this as one of my greatest achievements so far – I quit smoking at the age of twenty eight years and I have never missed it until today. And I let my hair grow long, which made some elderly villagers tell me “if Hitler was still here, he`d cut Your hair”, but this neither impressed me nor made me change my personal style and habbits. Today, when I am angry about my lovely fifteen year old son Gabriel, I just think back to my own times when I was at his age and this makes me immediately relax and feel friends with Gabriel again. Thanks God Gabriel does not keep company with such fellows as I was one at his age. I`d not let them into our house.
    When I started going to secondary school in the small city Grünstadt, also not really far away from my small village, I bought my first music “single” with just one song on each side of the vinyl. It was this one:
    To be true, I still like this deeply romantic, admittedly a little bit kitschy song, which during a short period was under the “top10” of the US charts at the beginning of 1971 and if this question came up, I definitely would buy it again. 
    And here a mixture of some fotos of my early childhood years:
    Soon afterwards, when I was fifteen years old, my mother moved together with my sister, my brother and me to the “big” city Mannheim, just on the other side of river Rhine. This gave me many opportunities for gaining new practicle experiences with living in a city and all it`s new inspirations. This was at the the end of the hippy era, the Woodstock concert,  the movie “Easy Rider” and also the culmination point of the terrible and completely senseless Vietnam war times. In terms of music, “underground” came up and I became a fan of bands like Iron Butterfly (In A Gadda da Vida), Cream, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and all others. 
    But I must admit something now, which I find personally very important and wich applies equally to my experiences with literature and arts in general. During all my life I have made lots of experience listening to totally different music styles and types and I have changed quite often my temporarilly preferred music types. But I never until today substituted, means “overwrote”, former music preferences by new ones. Instead of this I just added the new ones to the former ones, let`s say I increased my collection of accumulated former and actual music preferences. Thus I gained during these long years since my childhood until today a huge treasure of music experiences, which I use and mix widely and freely just following my momentaneous moods and desires.  No doubt for me – Mozart and Beethoven would have become Rolling Stones fans too. In this sence I have become a very rich person and I enjoy this widely. In my opinion it`s not money, which enriches You, but experiences. For sure – money can (but not must !) easen for You to gain and to increase experiences enormously. 
    Shortly before I divorced and left Germany behind me, when my three wonderful german children were very young still, I enjoyed very much listening to classical music concerts together with my children. During this time I actually started to collect classical music cds. Today I still listen to classical music sometimes and whenever my schedule permits and I find nice opportunities, I try to go to classical music concerts in Europe, when travelling there. 
    When I was living for almost 4 years in beautiful La Coruna, during my time as Managing Director of Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s famous “La Toja” cosmetics plant there, I made friends with a couple of illegal immigrants from Senegal, which were making their living there with the sale of pirate CDs in the streets and in the bars. They will for sure not have forgotten me as client yet, not just because I bought so many CDs from them, but also because I obviously was their only client, who asked them for copies of their own private african music CDs, which did not belong to their sales portfolio, because – except me – apparantly no other customers were interested in this kind of music. This was my first contact with the fanzy west african Souk music, congolese Rumba styles and the very romantic but also sad Morna songs from the Cape Verde Islands, to where african music was brought by slaves on their treary way to the Americas and which in a further development step over centuries merged into the wonderful brazilian Samba music. In one of my future posts I will share some of the exceptional experiences I made during a vacation travel to the Cape Verdian Islands at the beginning of the 21st century.  During my frequent travels to several african countries within our Vulkan Southern Hemisphere Initiative, I could listen to many other current, modern african music styles wherever I went, because Africans seem to be as crazy music lovers as I am and music is really omnipresent, wherever You go in Africa. 
    I have not the least doubt, that You can easily imagine, how much the local music and culture in general has interested, impressed, influenced and changed me during my six years of living and working in Mexico and also during my meanwhile in total 11 years of living and working in Brazil and South America, with all my frequent business travels in this unique and exciting region since many years.  
    Was this interesting for You? Anyhow I wanted to interrupt the sequence of posts with very strong focus on my job and work. Therefore this small very personal intermezzo today. Anyhow I need to clarify for You, that this is my personal blog and not a propaganda channel for my job and company. But as I truly love my job and company and spent great part of my life on my professional activities and responsabilities, it is very normal for me, to comment on all this here in my daily posts as well. 
    Looking forward to meeting here in my blog again with You tomorrow morning. Take care. 

  • Like foo fighters – My pride in our Technical Customer Service team

    Good morning everybody. Another wonderful weekend has just started – at least here in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, where I live. Today I am going to share my admiration, passion and pride for a group of colaborators with You, which do an outstanding job with extremely high personal contribution and which link us directly to our customers allover the world. 

    I choose the name “foo fighters” for these colaborators in analogy to what this term originaly meant. Actually that was how Allied aircraft pilots in World War II, which reported encounters with unidentified flying objects, had been collectively called. And this compares a lot to our own situation in many cases, when customers, sometimes very far away from our factory in Itatiba, ask us for support for getting problems in their installations solved, which nobody can really understand at the first moment but which need a quick fix in order to allow our customers to continue with their operations. 
    We behave like a fire brigade when such calls arrive. Ednei Leite (ednei.leite@vulkan.com, +55 11 98387 9985), our Technical Customer Service Manager, and Francisco Monção (francisco.moncao@vulkan.com, +55 11 99527 4259), our Quality Manager, and their teams colleagues are available during 24 hours on 364 days, means non-stop, whenever one of our customers needs support from us in emergency situations. Our whole management team is connected by different communication means. Whenever a customer call arrives at one of us, all other Vulkan do Brasil management team members are beeing informed and involved immediately, no matter at which hour and during which day this happens. Immediate and highly qualified customer attendance is one of the distinctive factors, with which we explain our reconfirmed high attractivity for our customers and which makes one of the many differences between ourselfes and our competitors. 
    This picture shows some of our technical customer service team`s activities for customers in Mexico, Malaysia, Moçambique, Chile, Ghana and Peru.
    When a customer contacts us because of an emergency situation, we call immediately an internal “war council” of all our own specialists for exactly the particular subjects, with which our customer approached us. We do these “”war council” meetings as physical meetings within our factory or – like nowadays during the Covid-19 crises – online. Ednei Leite, in his function and responsability as our Technical Customer Service Manager, together with – depending on the concrete subjects – Francisco Monção, our Quality Manager, Josial Leal (josias.leal@vulkan.com, +55 11 98571 2107), our Development & Engineering Director, Ferdinand Senske (ferdinand.senske@vulkan.com, +55 1197461 4712), our Vice President Operations, make an initial quick analysis of the information received from the customer. First problem solving ideas are then normally already beeing discussed between our specialists. If necessary, further investigations are beeing carried out in direct contact with the customer. Availability of all materials, tools and the best technicians and/or engineers for the execution of all technical problem solving measures at our factory, our suppliers, our external service providers and at the customer`s facility are beeing carefully checked and discussed with the customer. 
    If it finally comes out, that immediately or after a certain preparation time one or more of our specialists need to go to the customer, all travel activities are beeing started in close coordination and cooperation with the customer. Our Technical Customer Service and Application Engineering team members are experienced travellers. As we sell our products (all types of couplings, brakes and backstops for industrial and marine mechanical power transmission applications) for installation at customers (marine, power generation, mining, steel, sugar, paper, oil & gas, bulk solids handling and transport in general, cranes,….) allover the world, we are very much used to provide our international – the same as our national brazilian – customers with all types of technical support like installation supervision, commissioning, start-up participation, product and maintenance training, verification and optimisation and – for sure – problem solving. Just a detail, but very often extremely important. We supply our complete technical product documentation incl. drawings and operation and maintenance manuals either in english, spanish or portuguese language, exactly as each of the customers needs it. And in the case of customers, who need other than these languages, we can supply this as well. 
    In some cases the missions of our technicians and engineers are really “foo fighter” missions, when at the first glance unexplicable technical situations appear. We do not always find immediate explications and we do not always have appropriate solutions right on hand. But even in such complicated situations we almost always – together with our customers and fully and strongly supported by our factory – finally find the right solutions for our customers. This is actually one of the many reasons, why we have been able to gain such a strong and trustful relationship with so many of our customers, wherever in the world they are. In fact this is our business model – we don´t want to be cosidered just as suppliers. Our desired role is, to become fully recognized by our customers as their business partners and friends. Our approach is successful colaboration and cooperation with them on the long term, not just spot business and sales from the shelf, as many of our competitors do.
    Ednei Leite and his complete Technical Customer Service team know the globe already very well. Our specialists are actively supporting our customers in Australia, in many African countries, allover Latin America and also at many places in Asia and Europe since years successfully. We go to where our customers need us. The only limiting factor for us at the moment are the temporary travel restrictions imposed by several countries because of Covid-19. But in many countries worldwide we can call support from our colleagues of our Vulkan sister companies and also from our worldwide network of authorized, qualified distributors and service providers, whenever needed and helpful. There can hardly be found a problem when it comes to couplings, brakes and backstops for all kinds of marine and industrial mechanical power transmission applications without a propper Vulkan solution. 
    I am extremely proud, that we have accomplished this strong and efficient Technical Customer Service set up with availability for all our worldwide customers from out of our Engineering & Technical Service Center and our factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, Brazil, during the last 5 years. Just to demonstrate my personal unlimited identification and commitment as President of Vulkan do Brasil, I would like to mention to You, that I am always personally beeing informed immediately – the same as my colleagues Ednei, Ferdinand, Francisco and Josias – whenever a customer calls us for support because of an emergency situation at his installation. From the first moment of such cases on, all involved team members at our company communicate, share all information and take all decisions by means of special whatsapp groups, which we open for each such case immediately and which we only close again, when all activities have concluded successfully and after all our employees have arrived back home safely again. This has become a question of honor and pride for all of us. Nothing and nobody gets lost at Vulkan do Brasil !
    Here my music recommendation – fitting nicely to this post and subject – for this weekend:
    I hope You found this interesting. Please do not hesitate, to address all Your remaining doubts or questions with respect to our Technical Customer Service portfolio and capabilities to me (klaus.hepp@vulkan.com, +55 11 97503 9323).  
    See You back here again tomorrow morning for my 3rd sunday post since I started this blog.
     

  • What is more important during Covid-19 times? To be concerned with the end of the month or with the end of the world?

    Hello again all together. Last wednesday evening I participated in our monthly conversation round, which CAMCHAL, the German-Chilean Chamber of Commerce and Industry ( https://chile.ahk.de/es/ ) has wonderfully set up as an online conference for all interested CEOs of associated German and Chilean companies. This was actually our second meeting and this time we were in total eight participants, including Johanna Sternberg, the Commercial Director of Camchal, who prepares and moderates these encounters perfectly for us. As Chile is a relatively small country in terms of the size and diversity of it`s industry and economy, most of the participants represent companies, which are mainly focussed on doing business with the chilean copper mining industry, which is the biggest copper supplier of the world. Chile alone accounts for 25% of the copper supply of the world, double as much as Peru, which is the second biggest copper supplier (12,5%), China (9%), the USA (6,5%) and the DR Congo (5,5%). 

    For us at Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) Chile is a very important country, to which we supply our complete portfolio of all types of couplings, brakes and backstops for all kinds of typical industrial mechanical power transmission applications successfully since more than twenty years. The products of our industrial division Vulkan Drive Tech are beeing distributed and serviced in Chile with full support of our development and engineering center and factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, by our highly experienced exclusive partner SCEM Ltda ( https://scem-chile.cl/) from out of it`s headquarters and technical sevice center in Maipú, Santiago and it`s regional service and distribution center in Antofagasta. 
    During our Camchal CEO conversation round, we discussed intensively the current challenges for all our companies and for the chilean industry, economy and society caused by the ongoing Covid-19 crisis and we exchanged information, how the different companies deal with this situation individually. Another subject of our discussions were the actual general economical and political situation in Chile and the expectations for their future development.
    For me it is really impressive, how Covid-19 and it`s colateral economic effects have impacted almost in a similiar negative way all economies in Latin America and – with minor differences between some of them – practically also all other economies in all other regions around the globe. This explains, why we see ourselfes confronted with almost the same questions as all others in all countries and companies worldwide
    We at our brazilian company have so far managed quite successfully all challenges and our business and all our administrative and productive processes continue unharmed and work perfectly. For sure our highest efforts – besides the protection of the health of our employees – is to guarantee the uninterrupted continuity of all our manufacturing and delivery processes and services for our customers. 
    With the given situation of the general high uncertainty due to Covid-19 and it`s completely unpredictable development and impacts for all of us, I personally have defined full concentration on the short term future as our main focus at Vulkan do Brasil since the outbrake of this terrible crisis meanwhile more than 3 months ago. For me this situation compares very much to driving a car in tight fog. I believe strongly, that it is in such situations the most important, to move carefully and watch only as far as one can see, because driving too fast and trying to look too far are not helpful anyhow and can even provoke dangerous situations. This does not mean at all, that we do not prepare ourselfes at our company in the best possible ways for the different future scenarios we can imagine. But the situation itself and the imaginable future scenarios are frequently changing and therefore I give the highest importance to avoiding any avoidable failures and the exclusion of all unnecessary additional risks. 
    For these reasons I am personally and in my function as President of our company not really concerned today with “the end of the world”, which so many scaremongers predict. Our main customers and our business are functionning  – thank god – almost unharmed and this must be successively secured and continued. We at Vulkan do Brasil are adapting ourselfes within the natural given limitations to all new circumstances arising and  I am sure, that we all will get through these difficult times and out again of the current deep global trouble sooner or later. Our main focus and objective is to achieve this in the best possible manner, during the shortest possible time and with the lowest possible losses.
    The collage of the two beautiful pictures above shows our factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, and – from out of my office- a view on the surrounding landscape during sundown. 
    Thanks for paying me once more Your valuable and highly appreciated attention. Hope to see You back again here in my blog tomorrow.