Derik Davis tells Jane Bordenave how IMI Cornelius is a leading force for innovation in the beverage market, and how being a global business can benefit and challenge a company.
Founded in 1931, IMI Cornelius is one of the leading manufacturers of beverage dispensing and cooling equipment in the world. With sales and distribution offices on every continent and a turnover in excess of $200 million per year, the company counts among its customers such food industry giants as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and McDonalds. It is owned by the UK-based company IMI, which purchased Cornelius during the 1980s.
“As a company, we offer a broad range of products such as fountains, juice dispensers and equipment for serving iced drinks,” says Derik Davis, vice president of product and business development. One of the effects of this is that the business needs a wide variety of materials to make its systems, ranging from basic commodities like sheet metal and plastic resin to specialist engineered components like compressors and motors. This results in a broad and varied supplier base that requires more than just a generic supply chain management approach. “We have a supplier scorecard system in place, with metrics around quality, performance and delivery,” says Davis. The firm uses cross-functional teams, covering commercial operations, engineering and supply chain to apply the costing elements of these metrics. “With regard to suppliers of strategic items, we try to build up a partnership approach with them,” he says, “whereas with providers of more basic items and commodities, we take a more market-led approach.”
These quality controls are global, so a client can be sure that no matter which branch of the company he is buying from or what location, the quality of product is universally high. This extends also to its corporate ethics. “IMI has in place a program called the ‘IMI Way,’ and our own formalized code of conduct is grounded in that,” says Davis. This code of conduct states that IMI Cornelius will pursue excellence and deliver to its customers, but that above all it will act with integrity. This ideal covers health and safety, sustainability and energy efficiency—things that the business can directly influence through its equipment. “While we operate in areas of the world that have varying attitudes toward these principles, we uphold ethical standards behavior globally.”
The firm’s varied product range and global footprint mean that its competitor landscape is also very complex. “What is unique about us is the breadth of products that we offer all over the world,” explains Davis. “Consequently, for each product category we’re in, the competitor set is nearly always different. Because we’re in so many different areas geographically, we experience regional variation in our competition too. A good example of this is the beer and spirits market in the UK and Europe. Here there is quite a lot of local competition because of the size and history of the sector, whereas in North America the number of competitors in the same market is minimal.”
Innovation in research and development is also particularly important to the business, in order to keep it at the leading edge of the field. “We do all our research and development in house, sometimes working with our sister companies in the IMI Group, such as Display Technologies,” says Davis. “One of our key areas for investigation and improvement at the moment is increasing the energy efficiency of our products. This is one of the major areas where we can deliver benefits to our clients from a green perspective, and it will deliver long-term cost savings too.” It’s also an area that falls naturally into the company’s corporate and social responsibility ethos.
However, even for a company as large and diverse as this one, there are still challenges, most notably the economy. “The economies of Western Europe are of particular concern to us at the moment, as it is still uncertain whether they are recovering or not, and how fast any recovery is taking place,” says Davis. “This is a strong example of the challenges of being a global business, and in order to overcome it, we need to coordinate ourselves in a way that makes the most of our global capabilities.”
While things may still be shaky in Europe, one of the advantages of being an international company is that it can make the most of increasing confidence in other markets. “There are early signs in the Americas of businesses being more willing to make investments, which is a key positive for us,” says Davis. He also notes that three regions that were lagging behind America and Western Europe—namely, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe—are growing more rapidly and showing greater economic strength than the rest of the world. “Demand is growing in these countries, and our customers are increasingly doing business there. Other emerging markets, such as India, are experiencing similar growth patterns and are also expressing interest in these products.”
While for the future both innovation and new solutions are top of the agenda, as well as increasing its global presence, Davis sums up what it means to work for IMI Cornelius. “Food and beverage is something that we as humans all associate with, and as we enter retail spaces and retail dining areas, we come into contact with these big brands—Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds—and it becomes part of the environment space we’re living in. For us, the association has added meaning: our products are associated with these highly iconic labels, and as we drive or walk down the street, we see billboards or outlets we can associate with on a personal level. This creates a real energy and enthusiasm inside our business, and it produces a hard-working culture that is passionate about working for our customer and our product.” www.cornelius.com
