Driving for results in competitive markets and a rapidly changing organisation
Our client worldwide
Every day, billions of people use their technologies and solutions to satisfy their basic needs for food, mobility or communication. All over the world, the company occupies leading market positions in technologies and methods for processing grain into flour and feed, as well as for the production of pasta and chocolate, in die casting, wet grinding and surface coating. The company's core technologies are in the areas of mechanical and thermal process engineering.
The Group operates in over 140 countries, has a global payroll of 10,640, and generated sales revenues of CHF 2,45 billion in fiscal 2016, as the largest family-owned company in Switzerland.
Our client in Asia
The company promotes itself as the expert partner when it comes to machines, plants and services for grain and food processing as well as for producing high-quality materials. The client has been operating in Singapore since 1977, and has gained in-depth knowledge of its customers’ specific requirements in the region over the past decades.
The subregion SEA (Southeast Asia) reports to the regional CEO and global board member who is based in China.
Strong local presence
The Singapore office takes care of the individual needs of all customers based in Southeast Asia, and has additional offices located in Melbourne/Australia, Manila/Philippines, Bangkok/Thailand, Ho Chi Minh City/Vietnam, Jakarta/Indonesia, Yangoon/Myanmar, Phnom Penh/Cambodia, and Taipei/Taiwan. The strong local presence allows a fast response to any kind of enquiry and customer service.
For individual solutions
As the market leader, they offer comprehensive solutions and systems to suit specific customer needs. The office in Singapore provides the entire range of products and services of the Group, with a focus on food processing and production technologies. Since customer needs vary greatly across the region, the Singapore office provides individually optimised solutions in order to guarantee maximum customer benefit.
Our phased approach in design and delivery in Asia
Our external programmes as a springboard: to learn something for herself, but most of all to ‘test our programme’, the regional HR manager joined our external Management & Leadership training course in mid 2013. After the second of five individual training days held over the course of four months, she asked when the next ‘batch’ would start and signed up the next participant, the head of legal and commercial affairs.
Based on their positive experience, these two participants recommended top management to engage in collaboration with gustavkäser for the regional leaders as the country managers and heads of the regional business units. This resulted in a customised programme of three two-day modules (six days in total), which were held in three different countries for two groups of 12 and 9 participants respectively from May through August 2014.
Our results and their impact
The results of the feedback were overwhelming with an almost unisono response to all the daily feedback of excellent or very good (over 94%) and a final rating for the full programme of ‘excellent’ by two thirds of the participants and a ‘very good’ by all others, measured against the objectives they had set for themselves for this training.
This was accompanied by the strong recommendation of these leaders to expand the gustavkäser programme to the sales teams in the region, with a focus on selling excellence.
This resulted in a customised programme on selling excellence with three groups across the region with 12 participants each. Again, the responses were overwhelmingly positive and a very solid relationship was established with many of the participants.
Finally in 2016, the Leadership training course was held for one group in China, with equally positive feedback.
After this, we rekindled discussions for a new round of training and a fourth group attended the Selling Excellence training, which finished in Dec. 2016.
At the same, we started discussions for an Advanced Negotiations/Strategic Selling training course with an initial group of hand-picked individuals, some with 35+ years of sales experience in the relevant industries and hailing from as far as the US, Argentina, Switzerland and Germany, as well as from regional countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.
The results were very convincing once again, especially when several multi-million dollar deals were reported as closed during and after this programme by some of these highly driven, skilled and successful individuals, a handful of whom had already asked, ‘What’s next…?!’