The view from the top

Terex took over German Demag Mobile Cranes in August 2002. Fil Filipov, president of Terex Lifting spoke to Phil Bishop about the newly acquired company, saying, "It's really a new nice place, good people, good quality product. Okay, the company is slowing down and customers don't have the money, but we have made the right decision."

The US company had been working to trim costs at Demag's Zweibrücken, Germany, facility. Terex's other acquisitions, like American Crane, had been a little down on their luck, Bishop noted. But with Demag, this wasn't the case: "It is not slash and burn," Filipov said, "We are just adjusting it."

Fil's son, Steve Filipov, had been appointed Terex Cranes group president, Europe and International. He said that a subsequent dispute with German union IG Metall was fairly tame: "It's always a negotiation. IG Metall have to do their job, and we have to do our job."

As well as reorganising the new Demag plant, Terex was looking to flesh out its crawler line with a mutual distribution deal with Japanese manufucturer IHI. Still to decide was the fate of Demag's US manufacturing operations: whether to keep on manufacturing telescopics at Ladson, South Carolina, or whether to move them, with crawlers, to Terex American's plant in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Manitowoc had also been shopping, buying up Grove. The newly appointed president and general manager of Manitowoc Crane Group, Glen Tellock, was the subject of a profile. Unlike his predeccessors, Rob Giebel, Ron Schad and Jeff Bust, Tellock wasn't from manufacturing, engineering or sales, but from the financial side of the business. Manitowoc Company president and CEO Terry Growcock explained: "We assessed the organisational needs required to run a billion-dollar crane segment. Glen was intimately involved in setting the strategic direction for the company. His in-depth knowledge of the managment principles of EVA (economic value added) will help our crane group realise it's full potential."

Tellock was keen not to be seen as just a financial strategist, saying he wanted to "Get in front of customers, not sit back and run the business from the office." That year, he'd met with Crane Today's Phil Bishop at his first SC&RA conference, in Denver.

His aim for the end of 2002 was to complete the integration of Grove with Potain and Manitowoc. Like Terex's acquisition of Demag, there would be some need for cost cutting.

One of his first decisions had been what to do about a Department of Justice ruling to sell off one of its truck crane businesses: he opted to keep bigger-selling National Crane, and sell Manitowoc's truck crane business.

One feature of the integration was a new structure, splitting Manitowoc Crane Group not by type, but by geography, with Marty Lakes in the Americas, Jean-Yves Bouffault in Europe and Eric Etchart in Asia reporting up to Tellock. At the time of the interview, Tellock was looking at how to make the most of crawler production: whether to move elements of this side of the business to Germany, and whether to offer a smaller crawler for the region.