Multi-stakeholder strategy supporting Landia, a leading Danish OEM to win contracts, a case study by Rodin Genoff

Landia Workshop, left to right, Steen Buhl Larsen, CEO Landia with Rodin Genoff.

Partnering for excellence

Landia is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of chopper pumps and mixing solutions. It has subsidiaries in Germany, Norway, England and the US, and a sales office in China, together supplying customers in 40 countries. It prides itself on product excellence.

The company’s headquarters in Lem employs 95 people, including 20 engineers. And this is where the company gets its firepower: a talented engineering and sales team that has even won environmental awards across the world in Australia!

The challenge for Landia is that cheaper products in the global marketplace are now testing its reputation, born of years of hard work, with its investment in design and research leading to the manufacture of superior products.

So, too, has a new era of competitive tendering systems where price determines perfect fit rather than quality and full project life cycle analysis and investment in products “made to last”.

“The challenge is that our pumps are only one part of the project jigsaw puzzle,” says Landia Managing Director, Steen Buhl Larsen. “If the pump fails, the system fails. Some clients choose cheap pumps, but the customer ends up paying the bill, especially when they fail and they have to pull the whole system apart.”

Winning collaboration

This was the company dilemma that Winning Collaborations was ultimately charged to deal with. Steen Buhl Larsen and his Marketing and Sales Director, Thorkild Maagaard, invited their senior management and sales team to attend a number of workshops to break open this thorny issue.

The workshops focussed on Landia’s brand positioning in the marketplace and why it was doing well in some markets but not others; preparing for how to engage in new circular economy initiatives and, ultimately, how the company pitched and applied for tenders in a world where purchasing management decisions and processes are being digitalised. The meeting also explored the dynamics of pre-tender qualification processes for large public sector and multi-sector stakeholder infrastructure projects, and how a company such as Landia could achieve higher visibility and ensure its reliable product was not overlooked for an inferior one.

The result was strategic input into the company’s new business model that Landia will deploy in order to collaborate more strategically with its project partners when bidding on future infrastructure tenders that involve multi-sector stakeholders.

Company perspective

“What this project did for Landia was to bring our senior sales, management and engineering team closer together,” says Steen Buhl Larsen. “As a small company, we were reminded that we have the ability and expertise to work across different industry disciplines and quickly come up with new solutions. Developing this new model will help us win new tenders. This project has been very inspiring, motivating and educational.”

(Excerpt, see Winning Collaborations Publication)