NEWS COMPANY/BRAND 24 Dec 2018

How One Komatsu is delivering major service benefits to our customers

Chris Cassettari, Director Customer Support OneKomatsu_ChrisC_350x1785-(1).jpg

With One Komatsu, we have achieved a very successful integration of two service organisations into a single service business team, bringing together what were formerly two organisations that have highly complementary skills and resources for the benefit of our customers.

On the one side, we had our Komatsu Mining Corporation (KMC) business, which contained our Joy, P&H and LeTourneau products, and on the other side our Komatsu Australia business, with our “traditional” line of Komatsu products.

Certainly, we always knew that the Joy Global and Komatsu product lines were highly complementary, but what we have found in our service business is that our service skillsets and expertise have proven to be equally complementary.

In the former Joy Global business, there were very high levels of skill and expertise in servicing and supporting electrical components and in complex and large-scale fabrication works – reflecting the nature of the equipment and its applications. On the Komatsu Australia side, the high skill-levels and expertise were focused around diesel-powered equipment.

The Joy side of the business also has traditionally had very strong project management capabilities, due to the very large sizes of many of its product lines. And with the amount of rebuild work coming up in the next few years from customers across all sides of the business, we are very well placed to handle this work far more effectively.

As a result, due to the highly complementary focus that each organisation had, we now have a far broader base of skills, along with a much wider skillset resulting from the combining of these two companies.

This has meant that the integration of these two service businesses – which has been concentrated in the three major mining states of Queensland, NSW and Western Australia – has worked very well for us.

We were fortunate at the time of the integration that both companies had a lot of service-related work on, which meant we were quickly able to use people across what had been previously been two companies.

This has meant a great opportunity for cross-skilling early on, and for people to get used to working as a single team.

It also meant that employees from both sides of the business got a real appreciation of each others’ skills, expertise and knowledge.

As well, these extra skills and resources coming into One Komatsu have allowed us to “insource” a lot of work that the previously separate businesses had to contract out to external suppliers.

That has meant that the integration has worked exceptionally well for us – and for our customers – as we very quickly have everyone feeling we are all working in one team.

We have also moved rapidly to have single points of contact for our customers, no matter what line of business they are in, or what is written on the side of the machine.

In addition, we’ve worked to ensure there are excellent and ongoing career opportunities for everyone within One Komatsu, no matter which organisation they came from originally.

We have placed Joy people with the required skills into key leadership positions within One Komatsu, genuinely working to utilise the best-possible skills across this new integrated organisation.

One measure of the success we believe we’ve achieved is that our employee turnover levels in our service operations have actually dropped since the integration, compared with what they were previously across the two separate organisations.

We are pretty proud of how this integration has proceeded and how it’s worked out – and in fact, we would even encourage customers to talk to our employees about how they view the whole process.

We recognised it was absolutely essential to bring employees from both organisations along with us, because we understand that the key to ensuring our customers receive the highest levels of service is to have employees who are committed, enthusiastic, and who feel valued.


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