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INtERvIEw – DON kENNEy<br />
12<br />
‘Let’s be Frank’ – A one to one interview with<br />
H a v i n g<br />
been with<br />
Franklin<br />
Fueling for<br />
21 years, Don<br />
explained that<br />
back in 2000<br />
they took a long<br />
hard look at their<br />
business and concluded<br />
that a company<br />
like theirs,<br />
selling just one<br />
particular product,<br />
a submersible pumping<br />
system, would not be<br />
able to remain<br />
the same and<br />
grow its businesssignificantly<br />
over the<br />
coming years. He<br />
explained “With a number of<br />
other manufacturers and the oil<br />
companies consolidating as much as they were,<br />
we still felt confident that our business would<br />
remain strong in the markets we operated in, but<br />
could not see how our growth could continue<br />
at the rate it had been doing over the previous<br />
five years”.<br />
Franklin was already a global player at that time,<br />
having first marketed its products outside the<br />
uS as far back as 1993. Don continued “My<br />
predecessor had a very clear plan, to venture<br />
into other regions of the world once Franklin<br />
was established in the US. Our achievements<br />
internationally have been down to careful<br />
planning, hard work and looking to work with<br />
customers, marketers, distributors and oil<br />
companies, wherever they may be. But, it was<br />
a very slow process; until that is we launched<br />
two new innovations into the market around<br />
about 1995 and then things really changed for<br />
Franklin Fueling”.<br />
since the turn of the millennium, Franklin Fueling has developed rapidly through a series of selective acquisitions<br />
and strong organic growth. Headquartered in wisconsin usa and as a leading manufacturer of<br />
fuel management systems, Franklin is now acknowledged as being one of the market’s key players on<br />
both sides of the atlantic. Meeting up with Don kenney at the automechanika exhibition in Frankfurt<br />
recently, gave me the chance to learn more about what the company thinking was a decade or so<br />
ago and to ask ‘frankly’ if everything has now come together as they had envisaged it back then.<br />
The first of these new products was a variable<br />
pipe length for submersible pumps. At that<br />
time, connecting a tank to a pump would often<br />
involve having to take the link pipe apart and<br />
re-fitting it on site, largely due to the fact that<br />
tanks vary considerably in shapes and sizes.<br />
Then there maybe the riser pipe to consider<br />
depending how far the tank is buried into the<br />
ground or the fact that some customers want a<br />
pump 6 inches off the bottom of the tank and<br />
others prefer them to be 10 inches off the bottom.<br />
With Franklin’s variable length pipe, the<br />
system allowed it to be set at the correct length<br />
and locked into position, without operators having<br />
to carry out a lengthy re-fitting procedure.<br />
Franklin’s second innovation was variable speed<br />
technology. Previously, a motor in a submersible<br />
pump would operate only at a constant speed<br />
no matter how many nozzles were being used<br />
at the time. This had the effect of producing a<br />
very high flow rate with one user, but a much<br />
slower one when multiple people were sharing a<br />
pump. With a variable speed motor and controllers,<br />
the motor would spin faster as the demand<br />
goes up, keeping the supply to the first nozzle<br />
exactly the same as it was when the customer<br />
first started pumping. Don commented “Prior<br />
to these two new initiatives being developed by<br />
Franklin, our business was purely submersible<br />
pumps, mainly in the US and Canada. It is fair<br />
to say that after the gateway to the rest of the<br />
world opened up for us”.<br />
internationally, Franklin first started out in the<br />
uK, where initially it won some business, before<br />
deciding ultimately to tie up with Gilbarco<br />
alongside its established product line. After<br />
that the company entered Austria, largely due<br />
to one of its partners, who was helping with<br />
the various approvals in Europe, knowing that<br />
market and speaking the language. i suggested<br />
to Don that getting approvals and certificates in<br />
the uS is a much simpler affair when compared<br />
to Europe, where in most circumstances the<br />
LatEst NEws, EvENts, jOBs ONLINE – www.PEtROLPLaza.COM<br />
legislation is Federal based. i mentioned to<br />
him that one of his competitors has a person<br />
spending 100 days a year receiving the various<br />
officials every six months from each one of the<br />
European countries. He quipped “Yup and that’s<br />
just for one product. At Franklin we have seven<br />
different product lines in all those countries<br />
which increases the work factor tremendously.<br />
But it is getting better. If you get your product<br />
approved to the EN standard you can go and<br />
basically sell that product anywhere. You still<br />
have to get local approval, or in Germany get<br />
special approval, which we have just received this<br />
week, but generally speaking the EN standard now<br />
works in many other countries around the world.<br />
Africa and Australia are good examples of this”.<br />
i put it to Don that the business potential for<br />
getting approvals in Germany for Polyethylene<br />
piping was surely limited, as it is a country committed<br />
to steel pipes. Why would the market want<br />
to change the habit of a lifetime? He answered<br />
“It’s still going to be a difficult sell in Germany as<br />
it is used to steel and they trust it, but now there<br />
are at least two manufacturers with the correct<br />
certification in place, our potential customers<br />
may not be so skeptical as they might have been<br />
when approvals had only been granted to one<br />
company. However our global contracts with the<br />
major M.O.Cs will automatically produce business<br />
in this region as many of them are committed<br />
to polyethylene pipes wherever they operate. In<br />
fact we have an installation going in with Shell<br />
relatively soon which is a good example of the<br />
point I am making”.<br />
So coming back to when it all changed for<br />
Franklin, i asked Don what happened after<br />
1995. He continued “At this time, FE Petro, as<br />
our company was called then, experienced a<br />
huge change. Between 1995 and 1998 our global<br />
market share for submersible pumps grew from<br />
10 percent to approximately 50 percent, mostly<br />
due to the two new innovations we had developed<br />
and the upgrades that were required at that time
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