4 Ways Strategic B2B Partnerships Benefit the Hydraulics Industry
As B2B providers, it’s our responsibility to ensure that the partnerships we build offer the best outcomes for our customers.
At BOA Hydraulics, this means working with globally recognized manufacturers and suppliers to deliver the best tools and products in hydraulic hose management. To do this we have partnered with some of the best including Yokohama a world class supplier of matched hydraulic hose and fittings, as their preferred New Zealand partner.
Through this strategic partnership and many others, we can offer customers a level of excellence giving them confidence in the product and the service offered.
It is always a great opportunity to think about how partners and strategic relationships, can help you grow as a company, bringing new opportunity and innovation.
When choosing your next strategic partner consider the following elements:
1. Partner for quality
Assure elevated quality and consistency by partnering with credible agencies, suppliers and manufacturers whose offerings have a proven value-add to a customer bases like yours.
Ask yourself this - Is there a ‘best in business’ supplier whose reputable product and brand can lend further credibility to your own? Are your current product or service offerings experiencing a challenge in the market that an adjacent supplier or provider may be able to solve?
Look for a partner who shares a similar target market to you, but has established its own separate, strong customer base. A partner with a proven track record of satisfaction among their customers would offer the relationship benefits on both sides.
BOA and Yokohama
A great example of this is our partnership with Yokohama where trust and quality is at the core. Yokohama’s best-in-class OEM hose products deliver better experiences for our end users. Their rigorous testing process, developed over 100 years, generates quality hydraulic hose and fittings that can go the distance, in industries where hoses often bear the brunt of rough activity, such as logging and demolition.
During a visit to Yokohama’s testing facilities in Japan, the BOA team watched over 80 different test rig machines testing hydraulic hoses for a number of extreme conditions: hot/cold temperatures, elasticity, extreme pressure, excavator simulations, extreme pulsation, burst pressure, flexibility and more.
It’s no coincidence then that Yokohama are Tier 1 suppliers to over 30 different brands of heavy machinery, including brands such as Hitachi, Komatsu, and Kobelco.
Yokohama have perfected the art of manufacturing the world’s best hydraulic hose products – and in bringing those products to our customers through this strategic partnership, we’ve been able to help many reduce their hose bills by between 40-60%.
2. Be agile in evolving industries
Be more flexible and agile by partnering for increased access to cutting-edge developments in your industry.
Rapid technological advances can quickly back businesses into a ‘sink or swim’ situation. Businesses must adapt, and they must be able to do so quickly.
Think proactively about where new technology is leading your industry, and what your business will need to meet changing customer expectations. Consider a strategic partnership with an agency or contractor who can help you achieve continued growth and stay competitive in changing times.
At BOA, our mission has always been to help hydraulic machinery operators reduce downtime. According to the University of Wollongong Australia, 37% of machine downtime is due to hydraulic hose failure. While this information points more specifically towards the mining industry, we gained an appreciation for what that amount of downtime could be costing New Zealand companies. And we wanted to help.
Partnership: Product designers for the BOApod
A strategic partnership with the right technology partner allowed us to bring our BOApod innovation to life.
The mobile, all-terrain facility supports contractors engaged in a range of operations – in forestry, demolition, mining, civil construction, quarrying, and agricultural contracting – to safely and competently service their hoses on their hydraulic machinery. The BOApod reduces downtime on the job for these operators, getting machines back online in under 30 minutes.
This partnership saw the combination of years of learning and listening to customers along with engineering excellence to create what customers were asking for, “autonomy of their own machines and control of their downtime.”
This technology partnership meant state of the art design combined with on the ground practicalities.
3. Diversify your product and service offerings
Bring a new offering to your customers with a strategic partner who can help you provide or develop it.
A great way to know if your business is ready to diversify is to record and review questions your current or prospective customers are asking. Are you receiving frequent requests for a product or service you aren’t offering yet? Is there a way to source it through a trusted supplier or contractor to satisfy your customer base?
At the very least, a strong partnership with a provider or supplier who can help you diversify your offerings in the short to medium term can go a long way with customers. This is an option for businesses looking to bring a new service inhouse over the longer term, but want to demonstrate to customers that they’re willing to partner with the right agency to offer immediate support.
In other cases, partnering with a top-ranking supplier in their respective industry can be a sensible permanent solution to ensure quality (as mentioned above) and strengthen your business’ credibility – doing what you do best and partnering with other top-notch players can be an equally formidable strategic move. Sometimes knowing your strengths and the strengths of others can lead to your greatest success.
4. Deliver unique support and information
New Zealand’s primary industries are consistently under pressure to perform and remain productive as a crucial element of the country’s economy. For those using heavy machinery in these industries, significant challenges to productivity include machine downtime, access to and transparency of hydraulic support, and automation.
At BOA Hydraulics, we understand the need to address these challenges and solve problems for these operators by offering new information and support. And we can’t do it alone.
The issue of downtime affects all heavy machinery operators and reducing the severity of its impact on productivity requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Our objective is to help companies understand the concept of ‘Hydraulic Uptime,’ and establish a roadmap to achieving it.
The BOA team partnered with web developers to create a trailblazing tool for identifying and solving problems with productivity and profitability for hydraulic machinery operators: the Uptime Calculator.
With this tool, operators can now understand the full costs of the downtime incurred on their machines or fleet – including those lesser visible costs, such as regular oil spillage – and their potential savings with BOA’s Integrated Solution. This solution addresses how the products of our partnerships, such as top quality Yokohama hose and fittings products, and our technological support, can significantly reduce downtime by up to 85% for customers.
A key pillar of this solution, the BOAhub, is a first-of-its-kind multidevice application that supports heavy machinery operators to manage their inventory and seek support from a local hose technician through geolocation tracking.
What these tools show operators, is that one of the best ways to reduce hydraulic downtime is to schedule proactive hydraulic hose maintenance. This can be done outside of operational hours, with support from the BOA team, and with quality products that last longer in the field.
Here at BOA we often think of the say “Just one great partnership with the right person or company, can have an incredible impact on your business success.”
Keep an eye out all the time for your partnership opportunity!