December, 2019 – Just five months removed from the conclusion of the year’s largest acquisition to reshape the lifting equipment industry, Tadano continues its integration of Demag mobile cranes into the Tadano family. From day one, Tadano has communicated to the industry that this is a major, strategic step forward for the company and one made to offer significantly more benefits to its customers.
The company has maintained the globally recognized Demag name as a stand-alone brand, adding the models to its existing product line. Bringing together both the Tadano and Demag brand products immediately filled in gaps in the existing all terrain line and added lattice boom crawler cranes to the Tadano family. As a result, the company now offers a significantly broader and more complete range of lifting equipment solutions for its customers, opening the door to increased flexibility in offering larger equipment package deals.
“As we continue to move forward with this large undertaking of integrating the Demag mobile crane business into the Tadano family, we do so while keeping our focus and commitment to our customers and their lifting needs,” says Kenichi Sawada, CEO of Tadano Faun GmbH. “Continuing to sell and service both the Tadano and Demag brands allows us to leverage synergies across both companies in order to create more value for our customers.”
Developing synergies
Following the Demag acquisition, Tadano formed Cross Company Teams (CCT) that consist of team members from around the world. Their mission is to uncover the best practices that can be shared by the entire Tadano Group. The Demag integration allows Tadano to infuse the best designs and technologies from both brands across the entire Tadano product offering, so the company can better serve its customer now and into the future. “Our number one priority is always our customers’ success,” states Jens Ennen, CEO of Tadano Demag GmbH.
To foster a deeper level of collaboration between team members in its European operations, Tadano recently announced the planned formation of a parent company to function as the link between the German manufacturing facilities. The new parent company will operate with joint functions among multiple shared departments like Engineering, Product Management, Sales and Marketing, among others. Reducing overlap and increasing efficiency, these joint functions will support the two manufacturing facilities, harness the vast experience of team members and fully develop synergies between the two operations, enabling the company to be more responsive to customer needs.
Throughout the acquisition and integration of the Demag mobile crane business, Tadano has made it a priority to provide the same, if not better, customer experience as it did before the merger. A combined German parts organization promises to capitalize synergies between the German Tadano Faun and Tadano Demag factories with the goal of further advancing parts availability and support capabilities globally.
Initial steps taken to blend the European service organizations are improving the company’s global service capabilities, resulting in faster response time to customers. Service team members are being cross trained on both brands, increasing the number of service technicians available to help to increase crane uptime. The company is also leveraging technology advancements through implementation of remote diagnostics to help improve machine uptime availability.
Region by region, Tadano is taking a measured approach to refine the Tadano and Demag sales and distribution networks. This will give Tadano and Demag the opportunity to jointly develop new markets and assist with global expansion efforts. It will also allow Tadano customers to package their equipment purchases from a single source, enhancing customer service, delivering faster response times and making Tadano easier to do business with.
With an eye toward the future, Tadano is significantly investing in both German manufacturing facilities to increase machine production. “We are learning from each other and working together to build and strengthen our manufacturing experience and knowledge,” comments Ennen. “This will help us decrease machine throughput times and deliver cranes faster to our customers. This effort is key to reaching our goal of becoming the leading global lifting equipment supplier.”
Source: Tadano
