Command Alkon, the leading software and solutions provider bringing together technology and people, shared its commitment to support the heavy building materials community with a refocus of its strategy in the ready mix, aggregate, and asphalt markets through solutions that help drive customers’ business.
“I believe that great success comes from laser focus; we are getting back to the basics, and one of the ways to do that is to clarify our focus as a company,” says Martin Willoughby, Chief Executive Officer at Command Alkon. “This can be remembered as our ‘1-2-3-4 approach.’ We are one united, global company with two listening ears that serves three core markets (ready mix, aggregates, and asphalt) by delivering value through four product suites.”
Over the last year, the company has worked to make active listening – two listening ears – a tenet of its culture to strengthen relationships internally and externally. This correlates directly with customer feedback and reviews.
“I believe listening isn’t just about hearing words; listening is seeking to be changed by the other person,” said Martin. “The best way to serve our customers is by continually listening to them to discover the most pressing priorities in their business. In this spirit, I regularly visit customers seeking to understand what we’re doing well and what we need to improve. There are several key themes which our strategy addresses. The customers that we serve want us to be easy to do business with, deliver consistent services, be a true partner, and deliver on our product roadmaps.”
The company’s redefined culture and strategies are aligned to drive improvements in these areas.
Building a Relentless, Customer-Driven Team
Command Alkon’s mission is to bring people and technology together to advance the heavy building materials industry. To accomplish this mission, we are partnering people with years of expertise in the heavy building materials industry with people with years of software industry experience to build a modern, high-tech company.
The team has been purposefully crafted this way to ensure that the company can leverage decades of experience and learnings when developing solutions that drive meaningful results for materials supply operations all around the world.
Partnering with Customers to Drive Innovation
To help achieve this goal, the company has set up a customer advisory board which will help guide the evolution of solutions and services, provide a structure for questions, concerns, and issues to be raised, and engage on important industry topics.
By partnering with customers to understand their unique challenges, the company can develop innovative solutions that are easy-to-use, faster, and more accurate than ever before.
Leveraging Framework to Unleash Untapped Product Opportunities
When developing products, Command Alkon aims to uncover the underlying goal that users are trying to achieve by leveraging the “Jobs to be Done” framework, implemented by new Chief Product Officer, Ranjeev Teelock.
“Our product managers are partnering with customers around the globe to gain feedback on their existing products and discover how best to optimize their business operations,” said Ranjeev. “We are quickly iterating solutions based on the feedback received to ensure that products are driving meaningful results.
Aligning with the company’s core value of integrity, it is transforming its approach to product development and bringing products to market through complete transparency into product roadmaps, progress, and timelines.
To deliver world-class products, the company is laser-focused on four core product suites.
“There is beauty in understanding that you don’t have to do it all; to be a valuable partner, we will stay focused on four key product suites,” said Martin. “We want to make sure we are delivering the excellence that customers are looking for around our production and quality, dispatching, trucking solutions, and new products that we will be rolling out for back-office operations. Focusing on these four core areas will allow us to innovate faster and deliver better for the people that we serve.”
As the company delivers cloud-enabled core products, customers can securely connect with their own software or third-party tools. The company’s cloud-based platform is secure, scalable, and ready for real-time, mission-critical operations. The platform sits on top of Amazon Web Services and security measures are taken to the next level through NIST audits.
Listened and Learned
The company is hard at work releasing new iterations of existing products based on feedback:
Better user experience for TrackIt – Customer feedback reflected that the company’s TrackIt solutions needed to deliver a better experience for users. In response, the company is rolling out many changes, including new dashboard containing key charts and productivity indicators.
Cloud-Based Dispatch – A consistent theme amongst customers was that they needed dispatch operations in the cloud. Command Alkon listened, prioritized, and in record-time developed and released the first version of cloud dispatch. This product is rapidly evolving to meet customer needs from a dispatch perspective.
Customer feedback indicated the need to easily integrate Command Alkon Solutions with existing solutions of their own to replace slow and error-prone manual handling of information with seamless, automated workflows.
The company is simultaneously focused on partnering with other software developers to provide an open API for simplified integrations to make it much easier for customers to utilize data from their Command Alkon solutions.
Customers can securely connect to their own software tools to share data with customers and with partners, including governmental agencies. This shift will help the industry continue to share information and link common systems together for ease of use.
This new API approach will enable integrations with other applications so that Command Alkon can help drive data-driven decisions and take productivity to new heights.
Aligning Team and Product to Deliver World-Class Customer Experiences
Customer-Driven is Command Alkon’s core value that promotes the culture of world-class experiences across the organization.
Command Alkon customers have access to experts with deep product, industry, and technical knowledge to help them across their full lifecycle – from planning through implementation and ongoing success.
The Professional Services organization has redefined success as delivering exceptional experiences and valuable outcomes for the customer. Under the direction of Brett Bertz, Command Alkon’s Global Professional Services team is designing and executing strategies that ensure services are efficiently meeting and exceeding customer needs during implementation.
“We listen to our customers and use our expertise, leading practices, and technology to advance the heavy building materials industry,” said Brett Bertz, Senior Vice President of Global Professional Services. “We solve problems, improve processes and deliver value with innovative solutions and exceptional customer experiences.”
Command Alkon’s Support Services organization is now led by Bob Holbrooks, a 20-year veteran of the team. “We understand the important role our technology plays in our customers’ operations, so we are focused on the continuous improvement of our customers’ experience with support,” said Holbrooks. “We are committed to taking the necessary steps to improve collaboration and processes within our team and other functional teams, empowering staff with the knowledge needed to offer support 24/7, and acknowledging critical issues quickly to ensure customers can get back on track without significant delay.”
Additionally, the company has formed a new Customer Success team, led by Steve Cox, to execute on the company’s value-driven customer success strategy, ensuring clients get the most out of their investments with Command Alkon.
"Throughout my career, I’ve developed a passion for serving the people in this industry,” said Steve Cox, Vice President of Customer Success at Command Alkon. “You won’t find people better than the ones that we work with in any other industry, and I’m grateful to be in a position where I can help to ensure that their engagements are meaningful and that we are partnering for success.”
