WHILE some players in the building and construction sector are struggling to keep up with unprecedented industry demand, construction materials supplier Lafarge South Africa is taking the opportunity to look ahead.
Lafarge’s business in the Western Cape centres around 11 strategically placed readymix plants and four aggregate quarries. “In line with our operations around the country, our Western Cape business aims to maintain its leading share of the booming market,” says Brent Paterson, Cape Town based product specifier for Lafarge.
“While we are growing our operations to ensure that we can meet demand for concrete throughout the boom period expected up to 2010, we are also focusing on building strong customer relationships through service excellence for the longer term.”
This year will see Lafarge taking steps to improve order lead and delivery times, staff expertise, the quality of its products and innovations to meet a variety of new market demands.
“We will try to maintain the right level of resources in terms of people and infrastructure to remain consistent with market trends,” says Paterson. “Order lead times and management of deliveries are being overhauled, together with the administration involved in processing orders and invoicing. These issues are being tracked and measured.”
Paterson adds that following intensive interviews and focus groups with businesses in different segments of the industry, Lafarge is developing a differentiated offering in terms of products and services to targeted market sectors.
Strong brand recognition is developing around the company’s Artevia range of decorative concretes and its Ultra Series of value added products, including pool, fibre, flowable foam, industrial floor, waterproof, aqua and accelerated concretes.
These ranges are being further developed and new innovative products are in the pipeline. In March this year, a unique self compacting concrete for vertical and horizontal applications will be launched. “We are also developing market awareness of our specialist ranges to specifiers and architects,” says Paterson.
As part of its drive to improve customer rela-tionships, Lafarge has embarked on product training for its frontline personnel, introduced more technical experts throughout the country and launched a sales development programme involving selling skills training and coaching to reinforce the quality of its sales personnel.
“Through these endeavours we hope to maintain strong relationships with all our cus-tomers well beyond the current industry upswing,” Paterson concludes.
