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Customers—Programs & Actions
Growth & Market Strategy Team
Our Growth & Market Strategy Team exists to lead Alcoa in taking broader, cross-business unit views of existing, emerging, and potential customer needs; next generation market opportunities; and emerging geographies and megatrends—all in a highly disciplined fashion. This mission includes working with our businesses to share best marketing and customer practices, institutionalizing and spreading our ability to generate growth, and defining clear metrics and scorecards to enable and evaluate our performance.
The group focuses its efforts in four primary commercial areas: market sector teams, growth practice, talent management, and the Strategic Marketing Analysis and Reporting Tool.
Market Sector Teams (MSTs)
Our five market sector teams —Aerospace, Ground Transportation, Defense, Sustainable (Green) Infrastructure, and Oil and Gas—bring together our global marketing and application engineering capabilities to focus on particular sectors where our value propositions are compelling or soon will be.
These teams:
- Create, interpret, maintain, and distribute best-available market sector intelligence;
- Identify growth opportunities within given sectors and drive development of new offerings that provide clearly differentiated value propositions to our customers;
- Develop market sector strategies and
- Initiate growth opportunities that bridge multiple business units and surface those that are not covered by the current business structure.
In short, MSTs join capabilities from across our businesses in new ways so our customers can better leverage the breadth of capabilities within Alcoa. They help our businesses uncover and sell more advanced solutions that are profitable for the company, creating highly-focused, systems-oriented solutions.
MST Successes
As society’s concern about carbon footprints, carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions, and overall energy consumption mounts, it is prudent for us to evaluate our businesses and align appropriate product portfolios to help customers meet emerging, environmentally astute needs.
That said, we are leveraging and expanding our competencies, technologies, products, and services to benefit our customers. We believe world markets will increasingly demand and pull for authentically green products—from those made from alloys high in recycled content to smart building systems that facilitate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification to new in-field applications that alter the way oil is extracted from previously unreachable deposits. We also believe that we are well-positioned to “do the right thing” for the environment and for our shareholders.
It was thinking like this that led to the formation of the Sustainable (Green) Infrastructure MST in 2007. Its initial mission of evaluating, assembling, and branding the product offerings of our successful global building and construction businesses morphed and grew to include pursuit of opportunities in renewable and alternative electric power generation; clean water supply; and waste segregation, collection, and remediation.
Through this expansion, we continued to grow our portfolio to include more energy-efficient products.
The first half of 2008 was dedicated to defining and marketing our broad green building offerings, concentrating on energy-efficient facades, integrated photovoltaic systems, and daylighting. Greener buildings have been shown to foster more satisfied, more productive, and happier employees.
Recent MST successes include extensive participation in the Joint Strike Fighter and new tactical vehicle programs (aluminum makes it lighter, stronger, and safer); the development and current prototyping, with an in-country partner, of a lightweight, aluminum-intensive, energy-efficient, next-generation city bus for the Chinese market (which will deliver reduced CO2 emissions and greater fuel economy); and new-to-aluminum applications of products and systems that transfer “aerospace-quality” technology to underground and undersea oil exploration venues (strong, weight-saving aluminum overcomes drilling hurdles).
Growth Practice
We continue to aggressively infuse the standardized Alcoa Growth Process (AGP) discipline and supporting tools into our business units and market sector teams to develop market-validated value propositions, create customer plans, and help the enterprise move more quickly and intelligently to capture profitable growth.
A key deliverable of the AGP—the value proposition—is a clear, concise description of how we create unique, relevant, and credible value for customers. That all-important proposition is supported by statistically significant, customer-backed data, and it crowns a framework that provides guidance for all future activities and initiatives related to how we achieve and validate market success.
A sound, integrated business strategy prioritizes resources and investments by streamlining objectives, goals, strategies, and metrics that tie back to the value proposition. Customer planning provides a systematic roadmap to ensure we are targeting the right customers, growing with them, and doing so in a way that smartly aligns with their priorities.
Since its creation in 2003, the AGP has been used by our businesses to identify and validate more than US$8 billion in profitable revenue and help capture profitable growth opportunities of US$1 billion. In 2007, AGP was used to complete significant work in oil and gas, Chinese ground transportation, green infrastructure, and facility-based photovoltaic solar energy systems. Overall AGP efforts in 2007 that touched sustainability-related issues and opportunities accounted for about 20%, with even more work underway in 2008.
Talent Management
In addition to having the will, strategy, teams, and tools required to grow, we are more fully developing the commercial capability within our sales and marketing employees. We are deploying standardized processes and tools that enable our businesses to hire, train, and develop marketing and sales professionals more effectively.
The foundation of these talent management initiatives is formed by a set of competencies that define the core capabilities of our commercial professionals. Anchoring our selection, development, and succession processes in these competencies helps us build the stronger capabilities needed to achieve our business goals. These competencies articulate not only what is needed today, but what is needed for us to grow sustainably in the future.
Strategic Marketing Analysis and Reporting Tool (SMART)
SMART provides key customer and profitability data to support commercial decisions, customer planning, reporting, and profitability analysis. This valuable tool offers our commercial and financial managers the ability to extract, analyze, and report on data by specific customer, product, and market designations. Company-wide deployment of SMART began in 2006 and will continue into 2009.
Commercial Systems
We offer digital marketing (eBusiness) processes and tools that create competitive advantage through reduced transactional costs and improved customer service. Primary platforms are AlcoaDirect, Alcoa.com, and direct customer systems integration.
Connecting with our customers electronically is a key element of our growth strategy. These digital linkages provide customers faster, 24/7 access to the information and services they need to conduct business. Sustainably speaking, they also eliminate administrative paperwork, lower travel and other costs, and improve productivity. Among our customers, 60% characterize our eBusiness as “vital” to their companies.
Like our customers, we also reap benefits and competitive advantages. These include:
- Cost savings and productivity gains, since customer service employees spend less time on routine administrative tasks;
- New growth through existing and new customers who prefer the ease and convenience of transacting business online;
- Greater customer retention;
- Increased customer value by bundling knowledge and services unique to Alcoa; and
- New technology for customer connections that are leveraged to all business units at little or no cost.
In 2007, productivity savings from driving work to this self-service environment increased 49% over 2006. Nearly every one of our business units posted record increases in online customer activity.
Case Studies
Alcoa CSI Colombia Earns Highest Social Responsibility Rating from Coca-Cola
Alcoa Growth Process Serves as Primary Growth Generator
Understanding, Delivering on Customer Needs
From Cash Draining to Profit Generating
Uncovering Market Growth, Customer Needs
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