BY ALT Technologies | 06th February 2022
2022 is already providing us with many new and exciting opportunities, but we thought it necessary to reflect on the challenging year we left behind.
“2021 was another challenging year as we navigated through the storm, but we concentrated on growing the business through other important facets.” – Jean-Luc Verstraeten, ALT Technologies CEO, notes as he considers the year we have had.
No matter what adversities we face as individuals and as an entire company, we continue to focus on the essential tasks at hand. This includes being resourceful with our customer’s projects and sticking together as a team to develop the right action plans. In addition, we must assess challenges and opportunities to better prepare for future events as part of these developments.
In our 2021 Year in Review, Jean-Luc guides us through new developments, marketing actions, and goals for 2022 and beyond.
In 2021 we launched our first quarterly newsletter.
We had big goals for 2021 and beyond. We opened our Mexico facility in Chihuahua in 2018, but it was hard to implement the next steps for ALT Mexico due to the situation at hand. This standstill forced us to focus on our outside portfolios. However, we know COVID-19 and the chip shortage isn’t going to last forever, and we have a group of diligent workers in Mexico that are ready to ramp up when we can.
“If you want to grow, you need to invest; our company cannot be stagnant,” stated Jean-Luc. Due to the rising inflation costs, we also need to take care of cost increases while meeting the demands of our customers. Our focus on Lean Management means we continually eliminate waste and find techniques to provide cost-effective customer solutions.
Some may see it as a challenge, but we see the significant shift towards sustainable materials as a strict requirement to keep our carbon footprint down. Supply chain delays and closures might have interrupted our sustainability plan, but we’ve already made a start by installing solar panels to our Romanian plant.
“Growth with lots of opportunities usually comes from periods of all doom and gloom. It is just about surviving.” We bring a lot of energy to our work and live in a new world due to COVID. This might have posed production challenges, but we continued to adapt under the unique circumstances.
Despite being a driven lean company, we didn’t let go of any employees during 2021.
“We don’t manage the company by employee KPIs; we don’t push people to meet targets. Instead, we ask them to improve the situation or approach, work on their improvements, as we don’t want to put too much pressure on personal metrics,” expressed Jean-Luc.
“We kept everyone during this time; people can then trust you even in the most difficult situations.” There was no uncertainty about redundancy or lay-offs during this time, which only increased our team’s job satisfaction. We always strive to do the best we can for our employees first and foremost.
ALT celebrated many job anniversaries last year, including Gerrit van Grevengoed who has been with us for over 35 years now! We also hired new business development personnel to grow other areas in preparation for future growth.
While production may have slowed down last year, that meant we could double-down on our marketing efforts.
While we had the time, we implemented a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform called CAS CRM and upgraded our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. With these new systems in place, they will enable our teams to work efficiently and improve customer communications.
ALT Technologies has expanded its automotive offering to include electric vehicle (EV) battery protection solutions. We released this new product line in September of 2021 as electric cars are no longer anticipated to take over but are indeed well and truly here.
We received the following quality certificates in our global locations:
“The automotive industry is conservative because of the stringent specifications and precision. We are, after all, dealing with peoples’ lives here.”
As we strive for greener modes of transport, the automotive industry has to keep up. There have been tremendous shifts in how we’re quickly adapting to electrification. Major car brands worldwide are fast releasing their latest electrics models, so we must keep up. We need to send the right products to market and be ready for our customers’ demands.
We have started assessing all the viable KPIs we need to measure and provide to our customers. This includes being smarter with logistics, fewer carbon emissions, working on our infrastructure and focusing on sustainable materials per batch.
Overall, 2021 was a new and exciting year for us as the team got involved in the various marketing activities. Our teams kept their heads down, but spirits remained high as we focused on what we could achieve at the moment. We are now ready to drive on with our new initiatives and will share them with you as we go along.
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