Corporate Vision April 2017
32 CORPORATE VISION / April 2017 , The CEO of the Year 2016 – UK award was recently given to Daniel Cooper, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hanson UK, who in this insightful article, shares his thoughts on the firm’s important role in the construction industry and the challenges he enjoys in his current role. We Live in Interesting Times The construction industry is always challenging, indeed for a bricks and mortar style business there are still enormous changes underfoot in a year best described as interesting times. At Hanson, we have been navigating our way through a complete business reengineering and digitisation overhaul, while ensuring that we kept a large workforce engaged throughout the process. It was therefore pleasing to receive recognition of this change and our business success through Corporate Vision’s CEO of the Year 2016 – UK award. Hanson are one of the UK’s largest heavy building material suppliers, being the number one cementitious and ready mix concrete producer, third largest aggregates and third largest Asphalt supplier. We supply materials and solutions to a broad range of customers from government infrastructure, major building contractors right through to the home handyman. In the UK, we employ over 3500 staff directly across 300 sites. Last year we significantly outperformed our 2015 total profit result despite the uncertainty of Brexit while delivering a major change and digitisation program. The business environment is changing faster than the UK political sphere and staying ahead of the curve is where we are setting our sights at Hanson. We are in the process of building a customer focussed organisation with a live digital platform capable of meeting the current and future needs of our customers, staff and suppliers alike. Our strategy is not to sit and wait for disruption but to actively drive our own business ahead of the pack. Growing up in a family private business environment was for me a great lesson in the importance of the value of customers and the critical nature of cashflow. For my staff, I ask that they employ a simple test when decision making, what would you do if this was your business? It ensures that we think like owners, value every customer and every penny we spend. Every business large or small requires a purpose and vision for what they wish to achieve. In my mind, a good strategy underpins the vision and it is clear for everyone in the organisation what we are aiming to do and that they can see actions and initiatives aligned to the vision occurring. Strategy is after all a doing word not a document to gather dust on the shelf. In a family business, the culture is determined by the owner and they touch each employee regularly to inspire and impart their thinking. It is more challenging as the business grows or when you are in a large business. You have to work hard to build a consistent culture throughout your organisation. At Hanson - I have worked with the executive team to define the 1704CV11 culture and our brand - we then use many different mediums to share this with all our people. Tools like podcasts, videos, team magazines, splash screens are required to continually reinforce the message we want to convey. Most importantly, I find visible felt leadership has the greatest impact. Visiting sites, talking safety together with regular customer meetings ensures you keep connected to the business and ‘listen to the river’. To drive safety, we complete safety conversations with all of our staff, but of course the discussion invariably moves to how we could improve the business. Many ideas for improvement are generated from walking the floor. After leaving the family business, I worked in an organisation based in Australia that grew to be a large successful international company, Pioneer Concrete. One of the strengths I observed at Pioneer was the focus on people development, we ran a large graduate scheme with a two- year training program. Almost all managerial appointments were internal and gaps were continually filled from the graduate pool where young bright people were given quite senior, responsible roles early in their career. It led to a young dynamic team with a consistent company culture. I still enjoy the answer to the question, ‘what if we train our staff and they leave?’, the answer being, ‘what if we don’t train them and they stay’! The key for us to gain, is to buy into the vision and to act fast and implement effectively. We have employed a single ERP system across what was a somewhat disparate group of businesses. A single customer service centre was created last year - with the latest digital and telephony technology. We made the decision in March and by August when we had identified a suitable site, completed the fit out, installed the technology, hired over 80 new staff and switched over the whole UK business to take all orders and allocate all vehicles outside of London concrete. This provides us with the ability to service customers by providing live data on all deliveries, invoices and information via web portals. Clearly dealing with our customers online is a base level requirement for any business. A single service centre also enables the optimisation of a 1500 truck strong logistic fleet using optimisers, employing complex algorithms to deal with the minute by minute changes in delivery requirements of products like asphalt and concrete. I am pleased that our employees have embraced the change and I believe we carefully planned and implemented the change management and communication strategy to ensure we didn’t embark on this journey alone. We have a very proud workforce who can explain the benefits of why we are changing. We have engaged 23 graduates and
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