Weir Minerals Africa is evolving from a slurry pump organisation into a solutions provider. “It is no longer sufficient to just sell an item of equipment and to provide spares. You have to do a whole lot more. There is a growing requirement to back up the sale with service and advice, in addition to ensuring that the equipment operates optimally throughout its lifetime,” Gavin Dyer, newly appointed Regional Managing Director, Weir Minerals Africa and Middle East, says.

“This has underlined a lot of our success to date. We have been prepared to invest extensively in service infrastructure and will carry on doing so. We are prepared to engage with service that is infinitely flexible. We will design a service package for a customer to meet their specific needs, even if such a service package requires specific investment,” Dyer says. “Given the tough times our customers have gone through, we are there to support them and make sure we understand their needs and that we keep on designing the most appropriate solutions for them. “We bucked the trend experienced by a lot of other organisations during 2013 through a sheer focus on our goals, hard work and significant investment into our operational platforms, supply chain and value chain. Growth is not just about opening new branches, but also about evaluating our current branches to ensure that they are structured appropriately and that they offer the right products and services into the industry,” Dyer says.

“Our strategic focus is well planned and documented, and it serves as a roadmap for the company. These actions are tracked, reported on and managed throughout the business not only to ensure a focused approach across business units and functional areas, but also to provide a medium term view of capital investment and resources that might be required to realise our objectives.”

In May 2010 Weir Minerals Africa set itself the goal of diversifying across its complete product range. At that time, most of its revenue was derived from the sale of slurry pumps and the company had entrenched itself as the market leader in slurry handling equipment. There are a host of customer case studies that bear testament to the market acceptance and successes achieved across the non-slurry product lines. The next goal was to improve performance at both branch and product level across Weir Minerals Africa’s geographical footprint and to address the issue of product replication.

“The market is realising that a cheaper product is not always better in the long term and it certainly does not offer the lowest total cost of ownership, which is what most mining companies are now trying to achieve,” Dyer says. “We have made massive inroads into companies who largely made use of replicated equipment in the past, particularly in the gold sector, where we have proved conclusively that our products offer the lowest TCO. In fact, some of the results our research has yielded indicate that our products achieve as much as 50% less TCO than the replicated equivalent. “We have also recorded some milestone successes. In 2013 we entered into a Global Framework Agreement with Anglo American, one of the world’s largest mining companies, which will see the roll-out of our products to its global operations, helping improve energy consumption and lowering maintenance requirements. This strategic alliance recently won the prestigious External Collaboration Award at the 2014 Procurement Leaders Awards held in the United Kingdom, paving the way for a number of successful installations of CAVEX® hydrocyclones in classification duties throughout its operations.
“Our business has evolved to the point where we now deliver and support a wide range of slurry equipment solutions including pumps, hydrocyclones, valves, dewatering equipment, wear-resistant linings, rubber products and screens. All these achievements are taking us to the next level, but we are acutely aware that this will require us to increase our growth in a market that is almost static and in some commodities, has declined.

“However, based on our past performance, we are confident that we can achieve this goal. As we build towards our vision of becoming the customers’ trusted partner of choice, we will continue to leverage our slurry pump installed base and focus on increasing our service business. We will also be taking a long, hard look at the products in our portfolio and growing these exponentially, which we have been able to do in the recent past. This is the kind of consistency we have achieved in our company so that the strategic objectives we set at an organisational level translate to the same steps and actions at country and branch level. Every branch, every country and regional manager has the same objectives,” Dyer concludes.