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Baumann UK Beno Latest News Public Relations

PaxLift Prepares For Take Off

PaxLift, a new PRM transporter from Italian manufacturer, Baumann, has been granted a new European patent status ahead of its launch in early 2017.

The machine is the first purpose-built GSE machine of its type and has overcome the disadvantages of traditional modified ‘Ambulift’ vehicles.

Raising passengers smoothly and without a pantograph, stabilizers, mast or chains, the PaxLift utilises three lifting columns to provide a smooth, safe lift, with fully hydraulic suspension for maximum comfort during driving.

The solution avoids the inherent problems associated with adapted PRM vehicles, such as chain maintenance, slow loading times and uncomfortable, often manually intensive, experiences for passengers. There’s also complete free movement with the cabin raised.

“We saw a need for a high quality passenger cabin with lifting capacity from ground level up to 8,000mm,” says managing director, Klaus Pirpamer, “something which does not require steps nor an additional lifting platform, offers easy access and great manoeuvrability to reach the airplane door, and is in keeping with the Baumann ethos of quality and reliability.”

Baumann has almost 50 years of experience in development, design and production of industrial vehicles. Its award-winning industrial sideloaders are recognised around the world as brand leaders, offering exemplary performance.

The in-house design team first developed and produced a machine for PRM over a decade ago. In recent years the company has won awards and recognition for its innovation in the sideloader market, where turning circles, lift heights and travelling distances are also key product facets.

Technical director, Riccardo Bove, masterminded the company’s latest award, the 2016 FLTA Award for Innovation Excellence, and helped develop the new thinking behind the PaxLift. Says Riccardo: “Our previous experience in aircraft ground support and our work with industrial equipment gave us the insights to design the next generation ‘Ambulift’. One that gives precise control and maximum comfort within a small footprint – just 2550mm wide, and 3,100mm high when travelling.”

Since 1969, Baumann has remained privately owned and based at their specialised manufacturing facility in Cavaion, on the shores of Lake Garda.

A family company to this day, Baumann now sells its 3 to 50 tonnes sideloaders worldwide through 106 dealers in 76 countries, offering professional technical support, training and parts supply to customers and distributors.

“The evolution of PaxLift was a natural consequence of our earlier work in this field,” adds Klaus. “We began collaborating on ground support equipment when we worked with Lufthansa Leos and Catcon to produce the first sideloader-based trucks. Whilst this type of equipment is still on the market, our experience with raising and transporting materials led us to look at new and better ways of providing safer, smoother and more practical ways to transport PRM and VIP passengers.”

With a proud and distinguished history, combining generations of engineering expertise, modern craftmanship and a spirit of innovation, Baumann believes their equipment has to present a high standard of quality.

“Our starting point for the PaxLift was comfort, convenience and reliability,” says Klaus. “Having exhibited at ground support equipment and airport passenger transport events on both sides of the Atlantic, the dedicated design and high lifting capacities (up to 2,000kg) has created surprisingly high interest. With a tighter turning circle, clearer view and smaller footprint, we believe we have the safest option available. Integrated suspension makes the operation fast and smooth, whilst the hydraulically powered steering axle ensures continuous reliability and performance.”
Our philosophy of high service levels, world class industrial vehicles and reliable innovation neatly fits the needs of the airline and GSE industries. We understand that safety and the punctual departure of the aircraft is paramount.

Standard trucks are fitted with a Stage 4 Final Diesel engine, electric trucks are manufactured upon request. Orders for 2017 demonstration units are now available, with the first deliveries expected in Spring.

For further information visit www.paxlift.com.

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Beno Latest News Public Relations Swisslog Video

Elf To Shelf

Team Beno is delighted to have played a small part in the creation of the 2016 Swisslog Christmas video. John Lewis better watch out…

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Beno Latest News TB Marketing

The 23 things we learnt at IMHX2016

20,000 visitors (really?!), 400 exhibitors and a lot of hard work… you would think we’d have learnt a lot of important things at IMHX this week.

1. Wherever you are at the NEC, it’s 1,000 yards to the nearest toilet.

2. Getting people to attend exhibitions is hard. The organisers did a great job at promoting the event, but…

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Beno Latest News Public Relations TB Marketing

Tweet This!

Some businesses seem a little confused about how best to use social media to promote their brand, particularly Twitter. The corporate world versus mere humans should be a mis-match, but so confused do some people get that at times it seems like grandpa versus the cool kids. Aside from its brevity, we try not to treat Twitter any differently from other PR tactics. These tactics should basically reflect the marketing objectives, which in turn reflect the overall aims and objectives of the business and be informed by a clear and measurable strategy.

Most corporate Twitter users adopt a fairly ad hoc approach to disseminating information. Some use it to enter into a dialogue, which usually helps grow the sphere of influence through re-tweets and larger number of followers.

From a PR standpoint, we prefer to have overall messages agreed, by which we mean the tone and purpose rather than, necessarily, the exact wording, which are clear and concise and readily understood.

Determining what these messages should be is usually a three stage process (hat tip / apologies here to PR guru Anne Gregory):
– Review: Look at existing perceptions. Are they correct? What needs to be changed?
– Consider: Can perceptions be shifted? What facts can we use to back up our view?
– Persuade: Identify the elements of persuasion, using those facts to demonstrate our point

You may find considering what brand advertising would look like helpful as this helps you to boil down your message to its essence.
It may also help to think about topics from the point of view of the other PR and marketing tactics available (research, conferences, news releases, sponsorship, direct mail etc.) i.e. what messages would we deliver via these tactics and how? Or it may help to consider common subject matter. Most organisations’ news falls into four very broad categories

– People – appointments, personal achievements, promotions, profiles etc
– Plans – announcements, targets, acquisitions, growth etc
– Performance – achievements, awards, case studies (e.g. the monkey wins)
– Products – services, innovations, what most people equate to ‘good pr’

Get a list of topics together under those headings and you’ll not go far wrong. There are also lots of good examples of corporate social media guidelines on the web which may also help. Some are fairly simple (i.e. Use your common sense. Beware of privacy issues. Play nice, and be honest.) others are more stringent. Adidas also helpfully point out at the end of their guidelines: “And finally. With all the blogging and interacting, don’t forget your daily job…”

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Beno Latest News Public Relations TB Marketing

The best way to predict the future is…

Like many great quotes that sum up a powerful idea, the line about the ‘best way to predict the future is to invent it’ has a number of claimants for it’s own invention.

It may have been Abe Lincoln, although the evidence is thin. It certainly wasn’t Alan Kay that first came up with it, but when the former chief scientist at Atari spoke of the research carried out at the famous Xerox PARC in 1982, (the Palo Alto centre credited with inventing laser printing, graphical user interfaces and the mouse, amongst other items) he used the phrase to describe the ethos of that organisation. It’s mission: to design a truly personal computer. Atari themselves used the phrase for an ad a year later, but it was management guru Peter Drucker that really took the message to the masses, being attributed with inventing the idea by many media sources.

But it is to none of these luminaries that we should perhaps turn for the origins of this inspiring message. In 1963, Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, Dennis Gabor wrote in his book ‘Inventing The Future’: ‘the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.’ A review in the New Scientist reprinted an edited version, and the phrase took hold.

Gabor truly did invent his own future, having fled from Nazi Germany in 1933 he established himself as a British citizen. Working at the British Thomson-Houston company, he broke new ground in the study of electron inputs and outputs, which eventually led him to the invention of holography – an achievement for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize.

But that wasn’t the end of Gabor’s amazing endeavours. As a Professor at Imperial College London, he gave PhD students tough tasks to complete, one such being the invention of the flat screen TV!

His patents were said to be remarkable, and his writings on the future were incredibly influential. He predicted the importance of automation, cautioning society on its impact on workers, whilst admitting in 1970: “No one can deny that automation is capable of liberating mankind of almost all monotonous drudgery, of mining with the pickaxe…and mind-numbing work at the conveyor belt.”

The prototype futurologist and technologist explained in his Professorial Inaugural Lecture in 1958: “ The first step of the inventor is to visualise, by an act of imagination, a thing or a state that does not yet exist and which appears to him in some way desirable. He can start rationally arguing backwards and forwards, until a way is found from one to the other”.

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Beno Latest News Public Relations Windsor

Does your business suffer from Parkinson’s Law of Triviality?

Best known for his adage, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” former 1950s civil servant, C. Northcote Parkinson, has passed into business folklore as a wry observer of corporate culture.

So much so that the law has even gone global, as Mikhail Gorbachev observed in 1986, when Alessandro Natta complained about a swelling bureaucracy in Italy, “Parkinson’s Law works everywhere“.

Perhaps less well known is his Law of Triviality, first mentioned in the 1956 book “Parkinson’s law, and other studies in administration.”

Parkinson outlines his idea with a theoretical committee’s deliberations on a nuclear power plant, contrasting it to deliberation on a bicycle shed. As he put it:

“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”

In other words, a nuclear reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it. So we assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions often withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed.

On the other hand, everyone can visualize a bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that they have contributed.

If that sounds familiar at least now you know why! Now, where did we put those bicycle clips…

Action Stations!

Classic quotes on the price of inaction…

“Never mistake motion for action” – Ernest Hemingway

“Well done is better than well said” – Benjamin Franklin

“A promise is a cloud; fulfilment is rain” – Arabian Proverb

“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned” – Peter Marshall

“If you only do what you know you can do, you never do very much” – Tom Krause

“Talk doesn’t cook rice” Chinese Proverb

“If your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt” – Henry J Kaiser
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Beno Fun Stuff TB Marketing

Mysterious Interweb Days

yorkshire post business cutting

It’s sometimes easy to forget how exotic and mysterious the Internet seemed just a few years ago.

Rummaging through the archives I found this little beauty from a 1997 issue of the Yorkshire Post business supplement, quoting me on my searching prowess.

Judging by the amount of fax-related ads in the issue, the YP were obviously a little behind the curve when coming up with this story. It came about when trying to get a bit of extra coverage for my old friends at Toyota, but the journalist was more interested in the magic box that allowed me to find a set of public accounts.

My reaction now, and probably then too, was something like “The Yorkshire Post! They actually ran this?! Wait a minute, ‘tech-head’?!”

Now I don’t know which comment to be impressed about the most, my sweeping generalisation about all of Japan (which I doubt I actually said), the ordinariness / between-the-lines amazement of it all, or the little mention of ‘friendly Yorkshire’.

Ah mysterious, happy days…

Web Untangles Japanese Mystery

Advisers and their clients may be on first-name terms in friendly Yorkshire but there’s no reason to assume this cosy informality obtains all over the world.

So when the top brass from Japan dropped in at Toyota Industrial Equipment (UK), Leeds, it was strictly “Mister”, both during the customary bout of bowing, card-swapping and handshaking and thereafter.

This presented a challenge for Charles Walls, the company charged with publishing the tour- how to find out the visitors first names.

No problem for tech-head account manager Tony Benson. He surfed the Internet and found that the men he had met days earlier were called Kanji Kurioka, worldwide head of Toyota’s forklift business, Takashi Matsuura and Toshiro Ishihara.

“Nobody is on first name terms in Japan, so we didn’t know what to call them,” said Mr Benson.

“I found Toyota’s annual report and accounts and assorted publicity material on the Web and accessed the English-Language version.”

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Beno Latest News Public Relations TB Marketing

Harris Keep On Trucking

4K Systems are delighted to have taken a new order for an electric counterbalance forklift from Harris Transport – the seventh such order in just 12 months.

On the anniversary of their move to larger premises and the introduction of a new fleet of six three-wheel electrics and two articulating Aislemaster WHE20 narrow aisle trucks, Harris Transport have added to the fleet to help keep on top of growing throughputs.

The new trucks are working 24 hours a day and are fitted with battery changeover systems and driver access key pads.

4K Systems’ David Scammell believes the equipment is performing well in what is a fairly demanding environment. “Electric counterbalance trucks can get a bad reputation for not being up to tough jobs, but with careful maintenance, modern battery chargers and the correct fleet management, they can prove highly effective at reducing costs.”

George Harris, of Harris Transport, stated that he was very happy with the support provided by 4K Systems and the electric trucks have been a good cost saving investment over the diesel powered Doosan equipment that they operated before the move.

“Moving can be a stressful process, as most people know, but we are delighted with the progress we’ve made and the benefits we’ve gained. We are also very happy with the service and support we get from 4K Systems – it gives us the confidence to invest and upgrade as we grow yet further.”

Harris Transport have been providing bespoke transport, distribution and warehouse services to business of all sizes for over twenty years.

With new, modern warehouse facilities and an expanding fleet of vehicles they offer a complete end-to-end service that includes short and long term storage, logistics service and transport.

Operating out of Southampton and Rotherham, the family owned business is going from strength to strength, offering a high quality, flexible and secure service that is tailor-made to meet the demands of a changing market.

www.fourk.co.uk

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Beno Latest News

Latest MHE market perceptions

The latest (May 2014) survey of Logistics Manager magazine readers shows that about a third of forklift purchasers acquire their equipment on an individual basis, whilst more than a third (39%) rent or buy on a ‘per warehouse/depot’ basis. Just over a fifth (22%) make their purchases based on the needs of the entire fleet.

Possibly not a huge surprise to people in the industry, but perhaps what is a surprise is how these compare to commercial vehicle or van purchases. Only 16% of commercial vehicle purchases, and a paltry 11% of vans, are bought on a depot basis – why the difference?

Perhaps the most obvious is a forklift is largely situation-based. Vans and trucks have places to go, so customers don’t tend to see these as tied to their location, but each are significant investments and yet the fact is that operators tend to see commercial vehicles, vans and forklifts very differently.

Another fascinating aspect of the survey puts Toyota and a German manufacturer neck and neck in terms of ‘top 3 manufacturer’ status. Presumably to the chagrin of Linde,  that company is Jungheinrich – a big player, certainly, but less than half the size of Kion in terms of sales revenue.

Outside the top 3, Mitsubishi, Hyster and Cat all have a decent showing, with results that belie their lower positions on the global manufacturers list. Whether Cesab are happy, despite being last on the list, remains to be seen. Only 3% mark them out as top 3 manufacturer status, yet they are simultaneously both part of the number one group, Toyota, and a brand perceived above a host of other Japanese, Korean and Chinese names.

Compare and contrast 2009 brand awareness results from Redshift Research…

brand-awareness2009

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Advertising Beno Design Public Relations TB Marketing

Around The World In 80 Emails

tbmarketing-10-tips-working-for-overseas-clients

:Ten Tips For Working With Overseas Clients

A few years ago (okay it was 17), the ad agency I was working at belonged to a formal international network of agencies that would rely on one another if a client wanted work doing in more than one country. Well, that was the plan at least.

Perhaps the Chairman got a nice weekend break out of it, but otherwise it was impossible to maintain much of a relationship with 20-odd other overseas businesses, and as far as we could tell, the things we had in common, other than belonging to the same network, were nil.

Being able to produce consistently good work was tough, especially when the international work was like a French steak, pretty rare.

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Beno TB Marketing

Can’t find what you were looking for? Consider yourself lucky.

Great initiative worthy of your (and our) support…

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Beno Public Relations TB Marketing

Smile, Baby!

There’s something odd about the latest iPhone ad. It shows cute kids and quirky Asians taking pictures, ending with the line “Everyday more photos are taken with the iPhone”.

Nothing greatly odd about that you might say, but the copywriter in me was waiting for a ‘than…’

Mainly because ‘everyday more photos are taken with every type of smartphone’, and without the ‘than…’ it makes you think well, the next ad feasibly might say, ‘Everyday more calls are made on phones.’

Sure enough, the US version of the ad has a “than”, and a surprising one at that.

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Beno

Grandma & Grandad, Mum & Dad

Well that’s another first under the belt, my first ever Father’s Day as a dad. So far Phoebe seems fairly pleased with my progress, although to be fair it must be pretty hard to mess it up in six weeks. Hard, but not impossible as maybe suggested by earlier posts.

One unexpected aspect of Baby Beno’s arrival into the world was just how reminiscent she is of that other popular, influential and temperamental lady, Grandma Benson.

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Beno Fun Stuff

Lessons from Project Baby Beno Part 2

In Part One we learnt how raising babies is tough. Okay, so not much of a revelation there to anyone that’s tried it, but as Baby Beno is having an unusually long sleep, here are a few insights and tips from the early days…

1. Be on your guard as early as possible
At just one day old, Baby Beno was getting a lot of attention, from nurses, midwives, paediatricians etc. All as expected and all fairly routine. One surprise visitor was the Bounty pack woman.

Of course at that stage your relief juices make you happy to speak to just about anyone, which is good news for £50m+ company who’s representative wanders the maternity wards taking names, date of birth, email addresses, even nappy preferences, all in exchange for a couple of product samples and wedge of coupons.

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Beno Fun Stuff

Lessons from Project Baby Beno Part 1

Let’s get something straight first. I love my baby. Holding your firstborn in your arms is a feeling unlike any other. You instantly know that you’ll love, care for and coo over this creature for the rest of your life.

Naturally, your firstborn is beautiful beyond all reasonable expectations; has a burgeoning level of intelligence that suggests a future Nobel prize or business empire; finds most of what you do funny, leading you to believe you’ll have the best parent/child relationship since Mrs Shakespeare said ‘It’s a boy!’ and thrashes around in a manner only seen by legendary athletes, world cup winners or Madonna backing singers.

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Beno

Death, sex and copyright

My friend died at the start of the year. He was found in a hotel room a few days before his 42nd birthday. It was a big shock. We’d worked together for a number of years and although our paths had strayed a couple of years back, we still spoke from time to time.

So there was a lot of sadness when I learnt of his death. It seemed such a shame. More so to the many people that were closer to him than me, and no doubt to his close family and father who a year earlier had seen his wife, my friend’s mum, pass away due to illness.

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Beno Doncaster Marketing TB Marketing

A Very Satisfying (ahem) Few Years

Yay! Today is my birthday, quite a big one too! Yep, thirty years old and I’m ver… sorry, what? Oh, okay, it’s bigger than that. Like most members of the big 4-0 club, I’m still in denial and the written number looks a lot bigger than the one rattling about my addled head.  That’s probably a good thing, as there’s a fairly slim chance I’ll start acting my age pretty soon (unless you count gardening, which of course, I don’t).

What with all the birthday shenanigans, the only-as-old-as-the-woman-you-feel –type clichés; the ‘I need to go home for a nap’ jokes (actually, not a joke) and losing my train of thought at precisely the wrong… where was I going with this… anyway, it’s natural to reflect on some of the top stuff we’ve done over the years.

In the past I’ve been involved in some great projects – Tomorrow’s World, National Superdome, Paul Eyre… but if I told you too much about them, I’d probably end up getting sued. Again. So here’s Birthday Beno’s guide to the Top 5 Most Satisfying Jobs by Doncaster’s finest marketing agency*.

Before we start, there’s no room for presentations, posters, mailers, exhibitions and loads of other stuff that didn’t make this list, but you can still see a shot of some of them here. Okay, here we go…

  •  Number 5: Our work for NAMTEC was simultaneously incredibly satisfying and very frustrating. Some nice design work by Pato, a bit of strategy from Beno and a lot of hard database work by our mate at Waspmedia meant this was the best confused job we ever did.
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Beno Design Doncaster Marketing Latest News TB Marketing

We are (lovin’) Rushlift…

Getting a lot of love for our latest Rushlift work. The guys at Rushlift may like to fly under the radar from time to time, but we think they’ve got plenty to shout about, especially the swanky new brochure!

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Aislin Beno Doosan Latest News

Teeing off 2012

It’s that time of year again! Two stress-tastic days culminating in 20 minutes of presenting to 100 barely-able-to-contain-their-excitement Doosan dudes!

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Beno Fun Stuff Latest News TB Marketing

Marvin & The Starlighters

 

 Fame at last! Great spot from our mates at Windsor… Can’t beat a bit of twist rock.

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Beno Doncaster Marketing Latest News

Two shows. One no-show.

Logistics Link North, DoncasterYou might wonder what possesses the organisers of two logistics exhibitions to hold shows in Doncaster on the same day, we certainly have.

Today is the second of two days for the Logistics Link North show (“an unmissable opportunity to test and compare“), held in a cavernous empty warehouse and the first of the two day Totally Logistics North show (“Redefining the Logistics exhibition experience“) at the home of our favourite jolly, Doncaster Racecourse. With our forklift-clients hat on, we’ve popped in to see what all the fuss is about and have to agree with our mate Mr MacLeod that they’ve put Doncaster on the map ‘for the wrong reasons’.

Still, the Racecouse show looks busy enough and the Link guys will probably find adequate reasons to do it all again. Judging by the quizzical looks on their faces, I’m not sure our clients will want to take part, at least until the organisers sort the timing out.

Our problem with these shows is that they tend to be done for the benefit of the organisers, not the visitors. That’s not to say they don’t try hard to advertise the events, but surely it would have been better as one good show, than two okay ones? That said, it does give us an opportunity to say hello to some of our friends and for them to go out in Donny, have a beer and be hung over on one of the nicest days of the year.

Sorry I missed that one. If it wasn’t for these damn clients keeping us busy…