In this letter we will discuss what conclusions have we drawn to improve the ways we interact with you, our customers.

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Moving on

Welcome to the second letter in our series we are calling ‘Strength of Steel’. Over time, we intend to use this letter to build a resource full of useful information. We also hope to open a communication channel that enables you to ask your own questions, and we will do our very best to answer them.

In future letters, we will be pleased to discuss topics such as: the steel supply chain, steel properties, how we can collaborate better in the steel and engineering industries, quality control, delivering value in specific applications, customer relations, competence development, technical trends and more. Our ambition is to provide you with something new and interesting every month. You can always unsubscribe. But we would of course be delighted if you stay on and share Strength of Steel with your colleagues and encourage them to subscribe.

All in the spirit of sharing and building the Strength of Steel.

Heating steel with hydrogen?

As part of our sustainability efforts, we have worked for a long time to modernize and improve the efficiency of Ovako’s furnaces. Thanks to investments made in recent years, including upgraded control and automation systems, we are now ready to take the next step. That is to use hydrogen as a heating fuel, because it can have a very positive effect on the environment since the only emission generated during combustion is water vapor.

In collaboration with our partner Linde Gas AB, we conducted a trial in which steel was heated using hydrogen before rolling at the mill in Hofors. The hydrogen is produced by electrolysis of water, so it represents a green alternative to the fossil fuels used today. The trial was successful and under the right conditions, we could therefore introduce hydrogen heating for furnaces at all our rolling mills. This would drastically reduce Ovako’s already world-leading low carbon footprint from cradle to gate.

Steel Times International wrote an article about the trial. If you want to read it you will find it here, page 31-33

Steel Times International

Customer survey 2020 part 2

The people side

Thank you again for your participation in our recent customer survey. In the previous Strength of Steel we discussed some general findings and this time we would like to give you feedback on the “people side of our interaction”.

We are using the responses from the survey to try to understand how we perform in three areas: These correspond to a) Emotional = the commitment and integrity of our people, b) Added Value = their ability to act as trusted advisors and c) Functional = the basic transactional interaction with customers.

We were pleased to note that in all those areas the scores improved from our previous survey, in 2017. The biggest improvement was in the functional area.

The single biggest improvement relates to the question of how well we “respond quickly to questions”. This is especially encouraging since we have invested a lot into a new way of working in making price estimates and lead time offers to our customers. Working this way has measurably reduced our lead times very significantly at our production sites and also freed up time to deal with many other types of customer questions.

The second biggest improvement relates to “understanding your company’s needs”, which is of course a very important and fundamental ability that helps us to be close to our customers. This is also what ultimately will help us to deliver more added value in the business relations we enjoy. Going forward, we will work much more on how to enable our sales representatives to truly be a source of added value for our customers.

In the next Strength of Steel letter we will let you know how we evaluate the ‘organization’ side, where we have seen particularly big improvements in the brand affinity of Ovako.

Until then, best wishes for good health and an improving business climate!

Mathias Tillman
Head of Group Sales
Ovako

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