Caterpillar’s Damien Giraud has a clear passion for construction equipment - a quality that will be key to his new role as core industries solutions manager. Claire Symes reports
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Although a mining engineer by profession, Giraud was inspired to move into the construction sector after watching a road building team at work close to Lake Geneva during a lunch break from an intern job. This inspiration took him into working on site as an engineer with
Giraud took up his new role with Cat in July last year and will oversee matching new technology with customer demand for a number of construction sectors.
"Cat's core industries includes quarrying, construction work on roads, tunnelling and earthmoving, and industrial and waste," he said. "I want to use this position to work with our customers and sell solutions.
"Cat has regrouped marketing and sales for all its core product lines into two groups - in one team are the sales reps, while the other is formed of industry marketing people. The aim is to provide better transfer between sales and customers and between internal and external operations. There are still some people dedicated by industry and the new team creates an internal voice.
"There two key themes - expertise and solutions. It is a daily discussion of how to develop expertise and that is expertise in terms of product and expertise in terms of customer needs to know what technology to deliver and offer product support. It is the same with dealers - we need to ensure they have the right expertise too.
"When it comes to solutions, events like the recent Caterpillar Connected Worksite event in Malaga are key. This is just one building block though but if we can bring them all together and build a wall with a strong foundation, then it will help our customers to drive and grow their businesses.
Giraud has a team of pure marketing people across EAME and the CIS with a sales team to support dealers already in place. "My team travel more than I do so they help to bring back the voice of the industry to me and the people who design new systems," he said. "It is important to keep these messages fresh." In terms of strategy, Giraud said that it is important to keep the business simple.
"We don't need to strategise forever," he said. "Our new CEO Doug Oberhelman has taken the existing strategy and revamped it in June last year. We are now applying that to our core industries - it is all about the execution."
Construction Career
Giraud is clearly enthusiastic about construction equipment. "I love people, love machines and love people that love machines," Giraud enthused. But he also has good experience of the challenges faced by customers on site after spending a number of years working for Colas.
Giraud graduated as a mining engineer after studying in St Etienne in France and worked as an intern for a materials research company in Geneva during his summer break but didn't find the job stimulating. "My summer job in materials research just didn't suit me - I wanted to be outside," he said. During his time there though he saw a paving team at work by the lake while on a lunch break from work and was enthused by the operation.
Some of Giraud's friends were working on internships with Colas so he arranged his own internship there to train as a foreman before joining the company on graduation. He worked on a large motorway project in Belgium for Colas and then in South Africa before returning to Geneva to undertake an MBA.
"During my MBA I met a lot of people who worked for Cat and the idea of being involved with the manufacture of the construction equipment appealed to me," he said.
Giraud joined Cat 13 years ago and this was when he first became involved with the quarrying industry from the equipment side of the business - he initially spent time in Italy working with some of the marble quarry operators. "Working with Colas involved me in specifying materials for projects from the company's own quarry network so I have had experience of aggregates from the customer's point of view," he said. "I'm pleased to be involved directly with the business again." From Italy, Giraud moved to a new position working as a marketing manager covering quarrying across Europe. He later moved to the US where he spent some time in a corporate role.
"I felt that position was important for me to understand the whole business and not just the customer facing side of it, although working with customers is what I enjoy the most," he explained.
Giraud moved back to Geneva last year to take on his current role as EAME core industries solution manager which give him a marketing responsibility for wheeled loaders, trucks, tractors and excavators across a number of major industrial users, including the quarrying sector.
He has never been tempted to move over to Cat's mining equipment division though. "I get enjoyment from trying to be good at something and that is not something you develop over two years.
We need people in a position for the long term - some experts have worked with their core industries for a long time - and we want to keep people in those positions.
"I have developed as a market professional in the construction business so it makes no sense for me to move over to mining now even though that is what I studied as an under graduate. Many people in our team have eight to 10 years of knowledge built from working in the same industry or product category. I can't tell the team to develop expertise if I'm moving roles every 24 months, so core industries will remain my focus and I won't be tempted back to mining.
"During my career with Cat I have developed knowledge of equipment and now I can draw this together with my experience of industry."
Prospects
"Having spent four years in the US, I intend to spend time with quarry customers in my new region over the next six months," said Giraud.
Despite the recent economic situation, Giraud is confident that the industry has good prospects and said, "We are working in a dynamic environment. The dynamics across quarries in Europe, Africa and the CIS are all different though. In the Middle East, Africa and CIS the business is driven by commodity prices. We see 2011 improving over 2010."
