AMECO

Source: Construction Digital

Date :11/04/2008 01:45:27

After restructuring at corporate level, AMECO is now set for further growth. Exec learns more

Written by Ian Armitage and Produced by Sean Bakke

For over 60 years, AMECO, a unit of Fluor Corporation, has been a global leader of integrated mobile equipment and tool solutions for the construction and industrial markets. Headquartered in Greenville, SC, it provides a wide range of services to clients around the world, bringing top-tier people, practices and assets together to reduce costs and give customers the best possible experience.

Customer service, it seems, is the name of the game for AMECO, which is focused on how it can best serve its clients. To maximize that, it provides three primary business lines – Site Services SM, Fleet Outsourcing SM and Equipment distribution.

Site Services SM provides site planning, maintained mobile equipment, tools and supplies, and more to help capital construction projects increase productivity, reduce cost and finish on time.

Fleet Outsourcing SM reduces overall operating costs and improves the efficiency of mobile equipment and fleet operations, enabling industrial customers to redirect key financial resources and personnel to core business.

Equipment Distribution focuses on equipment renters and buyers in Latin America and Western Canada, providing the sale, rental, parts and service of new and used equipment.

“We have unsurpassed expertise in sourcing, procuring, delivering, managing and maintaining vehicles, construction equipment, tools, supplies and consumables,” says Gary Bernardez, President. Indeed, by providing a single point of contact for a wide range of services, AMECO enables clients to refocus and revitalize core business objectives.

“Our purpose as a company is to provide what we call integrated tool and equipment solutions,” says Mr. Bernardez. “We do everything we can to better serve our customers.”

Refocusing

Mr. Bernardez took over as president in 2001 and has since helped AMECO refocus; becoming the international success it is today. Once reliant on Fluor for a large percentage of business, AMECO has focused on diversifying its customer base to enable it to grow even further in the future.

Mr. Bernardez decided that in order to reduce reliance on Fluor, it was best to restructure the business into three primary regions – North America/Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa/Middle East. “This has since enabled us to better serve our customers,” says Mr. Bernardez. Today the AMECO platform has been optimized and it is now focused on enhancing service levels in order to grow effectively.

Although this has helped AMECO get closer to its customers, understanding their needs at a local and national level, regionalization has been a major challenge and required AMECO to restructure slightly at corporate level: “These regions have grown very quickly, which is why we regionalized – we wanted to take advantage of the opportunities internationally. But because we grew quickly, we have also reconfirmed which corporate functions needed to be strengthened in order to more effectively manage growth, which meant we had to be strong at corporate level, ensuring we retained our focus.”

Why was this? Well, AMECO recognized that cultural differences exist between each region, requiring some diversification – yet, at the same time, some standardization was necessary. “This has forced us to rethink how we communicate across the globe and try to provide more consistent communication with where the company is going, because, as you can imagine, there are some people in far off locations that don’t feel very connected to the company. We have recognised that and tried to make some changes at the corporate level to fix it.

“We look to the regions to help us understand trends and what we can add to the portfolio of AMECO in other markets. We have quarterly business reviews and we use them to keep development an organic, strategic process,” says Mr. Bernardez.

Strengthening supply

AMECO has also strengthened its global asset management over the past 18 months. It has looked at supply chains, logistics, estimating, fleet management and how it defines strategic vendors on a worldwide basis. “This is all to help us offer more responsiveness to our customers,” says Mr. Bernardez.

2007 was AMECO’s 60th year. In that time a lot of players have come and gone. The fact that AMECO has remained has driven the company to become a more consistent brand globally. This, it is hoped, will help it remain a force for many years to come. “We compete against a lot of regionalised players, so to differentiate ourselves we wanted a global platform, regional marketing and sales, and some combination of our three business lines to allow us to serve global clients in a much more integrated way.”

Boy has it worked. Last year was AMECO’s best ever in many areas. “We think we are leaders in certain areas,” says Mr. Bernardez. “We think we lead in the area of being able to respond globally with a local presence but have a global understanding of a brand so that if a client needs us anywhere in the world, we can serve them. There are only a few competitors that can put a consistent face in front of customers and make them feel that they are going to get what they ask for in tough operating environments. So we have strength there and think that we are ahead of our competition.”

Positioning itself early in this respect has been essential, as most competitors are now recognizing that going global is the way forward.

Determined to succeed

AMECO today has five brand drivers – expertise, innovation, reliability, responsiveness and safety. However, the AMECO brand drivers are not just catchy words. They are philosophies and practices that define it as a business and are ingrained in the AMECO culture. “Our entire workforce lives these five attributes daily for our customers,” says Mr. Bernardez, believing this is a major part in the company’s success.

Ultimately, the customer and customer satisfaction is AMECO’s top priority. “We measure our quality through the feedback we are getting from our customers on our performance. Are we doing better? Do we measure up against our competitors? We use a third party database company to help us do a formal review with clients throughout the time of our engagement to answer these questions, then provide us with a competency score. That is one key area that we try to differentiate ourselves in terms of gathering input from our customers, how we are doing and uncovering solutions earlier than our competitors.”

AMECO works inside the gate of customers to offer better solutions, and is therefore set for more success in the future. The company is targeting double-digit growth through 2010.

Click here to view the corporate brochure on AMECO