During the morning of presentations from Fayat’s leadership (parent company of BOMAG), which highlighted the group’s global success and its continued dedication to the road-building industry, Jean-Claude Fayat (CEO, Fayat) emphasized the group’s dedication and focus on its road life cycle divisions which make up 37% of its total revenue.
This emphasis included BOMAG’s 9th “Innovation Days” event for dealers and customers from all around the globe. While all aspects of equipment were on display, there was a lot of discussion about BOMAG’s existing and emerging technology platforms. This includes Asphalt Manager, Joblink, Asphalt Pro, BOMAPconnect, and the newly revealed BOMAPpave.
Editor Brandon Noel sat down with Jonathan Stringham, VP of sales and marketing at BOMAG, while at BOMAG Innovation Days in Frankfurt, Germany. Noel took the opportunity to ask about BOMAG’s adoption strategy and possible future expansions in the North American market. See what Stringham had to say in the following Q&A:
Q: Can you speak to me about Fayat’s recent acquisition of ADM and what that might mean for their plans in the U.S. asphalt market?
Brandon Noel
And I think North America was a bit of a white spot on our portfolio - and there are some specifics to U.S. technology, and this was just a very attractive company in terms of technology to integrate. So that, I think, should open up the North American market for us also to bring, eventually, full-fledged mixing plants to the market.
Q: I think it's exciting seeing Fayat enter into that space, with a real quality company in ADM. I knew that question wasn't related to innovation, but I wanted to ask.
Stringham: Of course, we are excited too. Again, it's just a presence that we really already have. When you [see] the word "life cycle asphalt", production has always been a part of the group. It was part of Fayat before we acquired BOMAG.
So, if you think about it, it's got a very long history. It's just in North America, we don't have that strong a presence, and I think that's one of the ways to now open up that market. Also, perhaps, combine some of the technology that they have with some of the technology and full-fledged mixing plants that we have.
Q: We're standing here in this massive training center, which is amazing. BOMAG doesn't currently offer broadly available end-user training for North American customers, is that something that might change in the near future?
Stringham: We actually already do it already in North America, partly. But I wouldn't say it's a custom program yet with a formal class. We do it for individual customers out of our Ridgeway facility. Actually, that's one of the ways [we're] looking to expand our North American headquarters. We have demo areas there, as well as, having training rooms there.
At the moment, we're training a lot of service technicians, but we gradually want to expand that to be training operators as well. I think it's an important skill in the market. Customers are buying expensive pieces of equipment and you want to make sure that their operators know how to utilize that to the best [of their ability]. So that's something that we want to do there. We probably train about 1000 operators a year. Mainly from Europe - from Central Europe. But I think that's something we also want to bring to the North American market.
Brandon Noel
Q: We're talking about technology and innovation. We know BOMAG believes in those things. What is BOMAG's plan to get that technology and innovation into the hands of contractors? What's the strategy for user adoption?
Stringham: I mean, there's a simple answer to that. The challenges are different depending on where you are. But one part does kind of go back to the operator training because you might be convincing the production manager, the job site manager, or the owner of the company that this is good, but they will only generate the value from it if you can actually train the operators. So, that's one of the things also we do here - training the operators on the use of the technology, make them more familiar with it.
We do that at the facilities, but we also do that on job sites. And that's actually, how you get into that - you've got to make sure that people are comfortable with using it. So it's not just about marketing, it's actually about bringing it to the fields, having people having people that can do it that can show them how it's used. It's a very hands-on, very person-to-person process that you need to do to implement some of these technologies.
It's important to have people that they feel know what their challenges are. So in all of our markets, we have people that used to be operators or technicians that have been there, they've done the job and they can talk shop. That's important in convincing these people and getting them to show how to use the technology.
Brandon Noel
Q: Does the Fayat group have any future plans for expansions in manufacturing for the U.S. that you can share with us?
Stringham: If you look at the Fayat footprint in the U.S., it is actually a couple more companies. We've got another company up near Charlotte in North Carolina. We're out in the Appalachians with airport baggage handling equipment that we build there. So actually, the Fayat Group has four or five production sites in North America already.
BOMAG definitely wants to expand the manufacturing footprint that we have in North America as well, but for the moment, at our existing facility. Currently, we're building U.S. pavers, specifically, for the North American market, but we're gonna expand that to other products as well, other machines that we will assemble in that facility. There's room to grow, we have space. When we acquired the facility, we actually acquired extra lines, so that allows us enough space to expand over the next 10-15 years, easily.
