The North American operating division of automation supplier ABB welcomed a new leader today, as 30-year company veteran Enrique Santacana took the reins as region manager of North America and head of ABB U.S.
Santacana fills the position vacated by Dinesh Paliwal, an ABB veteran who last month left the company to become president and CEO of Harman International Industries, a maker of speakers and other audio products.
Santacana, who most recently was the region division manager for power products in North America, joined ABB in 1977 and has worked his way up on the power side of the business, which is split between power and automation units. In his first interview since stepping into the role, Santacana told Managing Automation that he sees opportunities for greater synergies between the two groups.
On this, his first day on the job, Santacana predicted that his learning curve for the automation side of the business would last a few months.
That said, he noted, "I'm not going to become an expert in process automation technology — low-voltage or medium-voltage drives, high-efficiency motors," he said. "My expertise is in high-voltage breakers, transformers, medium-voltage breakers."
That limited ground-level view kept Santacana from commenting on the technology improvements that customers can expect in the division's core 800xA distributed control system, other than to proclaim, "That's our platform for the future." Still, the new head of ABB North America has a firm grasp of the high-level strategy, which involves a further meshing of the process and power divisions.
After years of emphasizing the productivity of plant assets to the exclusion of other efficiency concerns, Santacana said, North American companies are beginning to see the energy efficiency of those assets as a factor in the health of their plants, he said. The broader focus means that "now there's this new need for also making sure that the assets that are being productive also are energy-efficient."
This trend, he said, is situated at the intersection of the automation and power divisions of ABB. Among the installed base of customers, the surge toward energy efficiency will take the form of retrofits, refurbishments, or replacements of existing systems and hardware.
"We have been calling this the sweet spot of the business — our two core businesses converging on reliability, on efficiency and productivity, and, at the same time, on sustainability of our environment."
In particular, he said, the oil and gas industry — one of ABB's core markets — should drive improvements in ABB's North American orders and revenue. As companies ramp up efforts to extract oil from Canada's tar sands, for instance, automation providers such as ABB will be in demand, he said. The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 will also provide impetus for companies to increase their investments in power and automation products as they seek to improve the country's electrical transmission grid.
"Our automation process division [and] automation products division are going to be major beneficiaries of all of this investment," he noted. "And electrical Balance of Plant [BOP] will also be required for that new infrastructure, so our power business will also benefit from that."
A related area of increased focus will be the company's strategic account management initiative. Implemented two years ago, the project has two phases, Santacana said. The first involved deploying account managers to customer sites in North America to learn the needs of those end users. That phase, in most cases, is complete.
"The first phase was understanding the customer. Now we are ready to deploy with actual value-added offerings" from both the automation and power systems divisions, he explained.
The financial goals he will pursue mirror those of the global ABB organization, he said: better profit margins, cash flow, and return on capital employed. In pursuit of those goals, Santacana plans to run a tight ship. "I'm a very strong believer in lean enterprise, which means continuous improvement on cycle times — we can ship faster and faster to our customers ..."
Santacana assumes the North American post at a time of resurgence for the parent organization. After faltering under the weight of asbestos liability lawsuits earlier in the decade, ABB has returned to the black and grown revenue.