We are delighted to welcome Marc Brindamour, who works in ISE Metal’s Aquanox Fountain division, for an interview. As part of the SIPEM program, we present a concrete case study that illustrates the benefits of both program components.
Automate the search for business opportunities
- Tell me a little about the company you work for? What’s its business sector?
ISE Métal is a family-owned Quebec company, established over 90 years ago. Headquartered primarily in Sherbrooke, it also has plants in Saint-Jérôme, Granby, Ontario and Mexico. Specializing in subcontracting and metal transformation, ISE Métal offers services such as sheet metal cutting, bending, welding, machining and stamping.
The Aquanox Fountain Division is the only division with a proprietary product that manufactures stainless steel wall valves for water flow control in wastewater treatment plants. It distributes its products throughout North America, and has branches in Brazil and Singapore.
- What steps did you take to identify your challenges?
The Aquanox Fountain division has been part of ISE Métal for about ten years. On the whole, ISE Métal supports all strategic planning and continuous improvement initiatives, and the division is no exception. In this logic of continuous improvement, we work a lot with a logic of managing bottlenecks well, identifying our issues, we do constraint analyses, what are our threats, our opportunities, our strengths and weaknesses, we do this kind of analysis regularly. We moved our plant from Magog to Sherbrooke, we reorganized and optimized, and we implemented a whole performance management logic on a daily basis, using software to support us in all this.
Subsequently, we continued our development and digital transformation across all our activities. We automated some of the designs generated by our engineering team, and also invested considerable effort in production and robotization.
However, one of the challenges we faced concerned the sales departments and their search for business opportunities in the North American market, which can be complex. We asked ourselves some key questions: “Have we correctly identified all our opportunities? Are there opportunities we’ve overlooked that could have been even more interesting than what we’re doing now?”
The search for opportunities requires consulting a large number of documents. In our North American market, focused on the construction of water treatment plants for municipalities, we work with plans and specifications prepared by engineering firms. The tendering system is well established and operates efficiently in North America. However, for our commercial services, this means reviewing a considerable amount of documentation.
When a tender is issued for the construction of a water treatment plant, it can represent a significant value, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars. However, of all these documents, less than 1% relate specifically to wall valves. We find ourselves in the mechanical section, where finding all the information within this mass of documentation is a laborious exercise. This reality represents a technological obstacle that limits our ability to carry out more in-depth consultations.
- How do these issues impact your business?
At present, the search for opportunities is carried out by members of the sales team who have solid product knowledge and several years’ experience. However, this reliance on the human factor has its drawbacks. The technical skills required and the workload associated with this task are obstacles to staff retention and complicate recruitment. What’s more, it creates a bottleneck for the company as a whole. As a result, we are limited in the amount of information we can gather.
We realized that there were artificial intelligence tools specifically designed to handle large quantities of information. At that point, an opportunity presented itself, and we began to assess the feasibility of a specific project: a business opportunity search tool based on a recognition algorithm. However, we quickly realized that this project was costly and carried a high level of risk, with no guarantee of success.
Innovating with the SIPEM program
- How did you hear about PROMPT’s SIPEM program?
When we realized that the project was going to be very expensive, we simultaneously examined the various financing options that could help us. Our consultant identified SIPEM as a potentially suitable program to evaluate the project.
- In what ways do the expert’s recommendations reassure you in your decision to innovate?
As part of the SIPEM program, a third-party expert is called in to draw up the technological specifications. This independent expert provides an in-depth assessment and an impartial view of the project’s feasibility, which is a particular feature of SIPEM. Unlike the project consultant, the third-party expert is not directly involved in the execution of the work, which also helps to de-risk the project.
SIPEM’s unique process offers a number of advantages. For example, we collaborated with VOOBAN, who provided us with an assessment of our specifications. This is extremely interesting, as it assesses our position within the division, but also on a global scale. Before we embarked on artificial intelligence, the expert made sure that we had properly fulfilled our preliminary duties.
- How did the content of the SIPEM specifications help you write or develop a technological project that you presented to SIPEM?
Everything established in the exercise and in the PROMPT portal to justify the project remains coherent, compatible and relevant. It describes 99% of the project that should take place, so development is less cumbersome.
