This content relates to : NEW PRODUCT & SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
Mark Andreae
Clarke Power Systems
My name is Mark Andreae, I’m the Executive Chairman of Clarke Power Systems Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio and what I’d like to talk about today is innovation. Innovation is, is … has two things; it’s cultural and it’s process. In, in the beginning of the pandemic, we had a opportunity from one of our largest customers in our fleet maintenance group, InBev Budweiser, they had an immediate need to sanitize their trucks. They had to put sanitization bottles in the trucks and they had to separate out the two people in the cab. One of our people brought that idea to us. We put it through a process that we have called enterprise modelling that looks at the capabilities and process gaps. That’s normally a very long process for us, but because the customer’s need was so, so immediate, we addressed that, skipped some steps, reduced some risks. But we evaluated the risks; the risk was not significant. We were able to recognize where we didn’t have the expertise, we brought in additional expertise to speed up the process and as a result, satisfy the customer’s needs, build a better rapport with the customer who is an important customer to us and it gave him a lot of confidence in our ability to solve a problem quickly.
Mark Andreae, ’68
Executive Chairman, Clarke Power Systems