"When Cultures Collide"

Great Britain, Canada and the United States all have a saying...that we are separated by a common language. While there is humor in that, there is also an uncomfortable truth.

This is the difficulty with cultures. And it is a common issue with global automation companies, now that they are acquiring other global companies.

In July, I was invited to visit a new acquisition of Honeywell Process Solutions—the German gas measurement company, RMG. And while I was in Europe, I also had a chance to visit another European acquisition of Honeywell’s—Enraf in Delft, Holland.

First, RMG in Butzbach and Kassel, Germany. RMG is short for Regel Messtechnik, and has been making control valves and flow meters for many years. They also make packaged gas metering stations from huge ones for gas pipelines to the kind of gas metering station one finds in a service station in Europe, and increasingly, in America.

RMG is a brand new acquisition of Honeywell and it shows. People are still figuring out the new marketing messaging—in Europe it will be “RMG by Honeywell” at least for a while, while in the U. S., because RMG is not so well known, it is likely that the products will carry the Honeywell brand from the beginning. Like any new acquisition, there are sharp edges being rubbed round, and work practices being modified and adapted.

Throughout all of it, though, the products, and the systems, that RMG produces have continued to be of the highest quality. You always hear about the legendary German craftsmanship, but to actually see that craftsmanship applied to something as simple and everyday as a turbine flow meter, or a pressure regulating valve, is quite another thing. From the castings, to the machining, to the paint on the products, you can see the quality and craftsmanship that RMG brings to the Honeywell fold.

And Honeywell now owns a valve company.

And now Honeywell owns a flow meter company, too.

Honeywell has never before been a valve or flow meter manufacturer. For years, the control valves and flow meters Honeywell sold were manufactured by Yamatake, and brand labeled by Honeywell. In the past few years, Honeywell has decided they needed to have more field sensors than the famous and venerable pressure and temperature transmitters and the wet chemistry sensors and corrosion monitors they’ve been building for years. A few years ago, they acquired Enraf, the leading tank radar level gauge manufacturer, and put a strategic alliance together with Krohne for flow and level products.

But the longtime Honeyweller who’s been named the ringmaster of this potential culture-clash circus, Henri Tausch, thinks differently than many executives about the products he’s been given. “I don’t want to sell products,” he has told me several times, “I want to sell solutions. That’s why my business unit is called Honeywell Field Solutions. We are buying companies that make products, yes. But we want to make solutions out of them.”

Tausch is European, lives in the Netherlands, but has worked for most of the last twenty years in the U.S. and South America. As such, he’s more practiced with handling the melding of different cultures, languages and work practices than most American executives. He seems to move smoothly from language to language, and you can even see his mannerisms change subtly between Holland and Germany, and even in the U.S. Tausch is a most impressive leader.

And from a cultural point of view, Henri Tausch has hit the bull’s eye. Honeywell Process Solutions (note the name) has never been a product-oriented company. The internal joke within HPS is that if it costs less than $100,000 they can’t sell it.

So what will Tausch do with these two product companies? Well before their acquisition by Honeywell, both Enraf and RMG were already developing their products into solutions. Enraf was producing complete tank level monitoring systems and blending systems, and RMG was building complete gas monitoring stations with metering, calibration and even chromatography installed in a rugged and portable skid mounted building. RMG was the first to produce a significant multipath transit time ultrasonic flow meter for gas measurement, and they produce sophisticated metering skids on which to mount them. Systems, not products, always systems.

Enraf, too, has long been a systems oriented company. Making inventory tank level devices for decades, they understood early on that these devices were, in themselves, of limited usefulness, and when they developed the first modern tank level radar device, they recognized the need for at least a limited SCADA capability. Twenty years ago, when I was competing with Enraf at Texas Nuclear, they were considered the “gold standard” for tank level measurement. They still are. As a former competitor, I was fascinated by the plant tour. I was also fascinated by the kind of high quality design I saw applied to the devices and their transmitters themselves. This is world-class product design…not the normal round or square box with a set of circuit boards jammed into it.

In recent years, Enraf has expanded beyond simple SCADA networking for their level gauges. In the product department, they’ve produced one of the very first wireless level gauges, part of Honeywell’s One Wireless family. And in the systems department, they’ve produced complete loading and blending stations for fuels and chemical additives of a variety of kinds.

Enraf has been part of Honeywell longer than RMG, and the intermingling of cultures shows more clearly at Enraf. There are Honeywellers from the U. S. in Delft, working as engineers with their Dutch and German co-workers, and the company culture is much less insular than RMG’s is now, and more like what RMG will become in the next few years.

RMG and Enraf both are using the global reach and power of Honeywell to grow significantly. As integral parts of Honeywell Field Solutions, they expect to be able to take their products into plants and engineering firms all over the world at a far higher level than they could have hoped to do as small, niche instrumentation companies. They’ll do a lot of embracing of the Honeywell culture in order to achieve that growth.

That’s the upside of global culture clash. Both RMG and Enraf clearly believe it is worth the effort to be integrated into the global Honeywell community.

Both the two companies I visited, and the business unit, Honeywell Field Solutions, that I visited bear watching.