Alfa Laval To Redeploy Staff From Pune Hq

Alfa Laval India, the Indian arm of the Swedish engineering giant, has decided to redeploy staff from its Pune headquarters to some of its field offices across the country.

According to Satish Tandon, managing director, Alfa Laval, "With the change in our strategy we have decided to lay greater emphasis on sales and marketing and are therefore shifting people from here into marketing operations. Accordingly there has been a re-orientation and redeployment of staff from our headquarters to some of our field offices."

Alfa Laval currently has a staff strength of about 900 people with 700 of these currently posted at the Pune headquarters.

 

"We are also providing sufficient incentives to our people who are willing to make this shift to the field offices from headquarters. The idea is to make Alfa Laval a more sales and marketing oriented company," Tandon added.

Last year Alfa Laval India had embarked on a consolidation-cum-restructuring exercise to reduce overheads and had reorganised its business units according to market segments from the earlier focus of business segments.

Earlier the company used to sell individual products with different sales people at times addressing the same customers. To overcome this lacuna, the company reorganised itself into 10 different customer segments with each addressing specific segments which include, sugar, power, marine, biotech breweries etc.

The company has also shifted its focus to project-based work as opposed to component-based work with a sizable chunk of the companies in its target market space going in for expansions.

"We have also decided to do more high value projects and to undertake work where the net margins are at least 15 per cent. This we feel is not a difficult proposition considering the market position and the premium we command in our market space," said Tandon.

The company has also integrated its three main businesses of heat exchangers, separation equipment and flow equipment comprising pumps and valves in a bid to focus on customer needs and step up sales.