Siveco China, a subsidiary of Europe's largest maintenance management system supplier Siveco Group, has become over the years the leading maintenance consultancy in China, with an impressive track record delivering real measurable business improvement to customers in various industrial segments, ranging from large office buildings to multisite process plant owners. We met the company's General Manager Bruno Lhopiteau, who has been active in the Chinese maintenance market since 1997, to talk about his experience in the Chinese power generation market.

Q: Mr Bruno, my first question would be, why do you talk about CMMS while the term EAM is better known in China, especially in the power industry? Isn't EAM a more advanced version of CMMS?

A: "EAM" is a term invented by IT salesmen and which has indeed gained popularity in China. At Siveco, we have chosen to use the word CMMS (or MMS), widely recognized by maintenance and utility professionals all over the world. As far as the software is concerned, there is no difference between the two. More importantly, "EAM" represents a style of IT-driven projects, focused on computerizing administrative processes – an approach that has delivered very little benefits over the years: CMMS projects, on the other hand, are engineering-driven, designed to delivering measurable results. This is precisely what we do.

Q: While your company has been very successful in other industries, you are facing very strong competitors in power generation. Most of the EAM players have been present in China for over 10 years, while ERP suppliers have also developed their EAM capability. How can Siveco succeed in such a market?

A: Looking back at the past 10 years in China, many power plants now realize that their investment in the so-called "EAM" systems have not delivered results. Although systems of course work from an IT point of view, almost every project has failed to reach its management objectives. In most cases, the plant's maintenance history cannot be analyzed for reliability improvement purposes; equipment data gets outdated after a few years; preventive maintenance is often not planned in the system but still in Excel, Ms Project or even on paper. And I am talking about projects that have cost millions of RMB and took years to implement! This is a well known problem among power plants in China. Unfortunately, the solution offered by IT supplier is often to scrap the "EAM" and invest in an even more expensive, even more time-consuming, ERP… I think this answers your question: Siveco can be successful in the Chinese power industry because it answers those specific needs! This is what we have done in other industries, where a significant part of our business consists in replacing failed "EAM" systems.

Q: How is your software "COSWIN" different from those EAM solutions?

A: Most EAM or CMMS have similar functional scope. The main difference is that COSWIN was designed by maintenance engineers, for maintenance engineers. A very graphical user interface is the most obvious feature, allowing access to all data and functionality using diagrams instead of menus, which makes its usage very intuitive. From the implementation point of view, our drag-and-drop screen editor saves around 60% of the traditional customization time on large implementations, freeing resources to focus on maintenance improvement instead.

Q: You also propose a mobile solution is called "eHand", could you tell us more about it?

A: In addition to the main product COSWIN, we also have a suite of very intuitive mobile applications for what we call the "worker of tomorrow", consisting in eHand and the tablet-PC solution Mtv. Both can run with whatever system may already be there, for example Maximo or SAP PM, allowing our customers to gain more value from existing systems. eHand is the result of an investment we made in R&D, in China, at the top of the financial crisis, which I think also shows our company's long-term commitment to the Chinese market.

Q: In conclusion, why would power plants chose Siveco?

A: First of all because we commit on results, not just software functionality: we have proven our capability with over 50 customers in China, covering close to 200 sites, some of them very large. Major Chinese engineering companies like CNEEC trust us for overseas project, most recently in Malaysia, where they realize customers have much higher expectations from CMMS projects: for them, it is not IT, but the core of their operation system.

Read the original interview in Chinese in PDF format (here).