Staying ahead of a dynamic business
Weir Minerals’ Jerome Rodriguez focuses on developing efficient solutions to support and optimize processes
What is your position and what are your responsibilities?
I am the director of sales and business development for our Comminution division at Weir Minerals Canada. I oversee the sales and growth of our comminution products (crushing, screen, washing, dewatering systems, etc.) into the sand and aggregate and hard rock mining markets across North America. This includes our equipment, aftermarket products and engineered-to-order solutions.
What is it about your job that other people wish they got to do?
The travel and site visits are certainly the most rewarding part of my job. I get to see our ‘toys’ in action and work closely with customers on solutions to support and optimize their processes. Not to mention building relationships with clients in various markets and communities across the continent.
What do you find most challenging in your work?
Staying ahead of an extremely dynamic industry. As a premium equipment manufacturer in the aggregate world, it is essential that we remain responsive to the day-to-day needs of our customers, large and small, while also ensuring we have a business that is constantly innovating in order to respond to the needs of our customer base. In short, we need to help our customers be more efficient than they were yesterday – so if that’s improving the throughput they’re getting on their equipment, their access to parts, or the hands on field support they get from our service team, we need to always be in a position to respond quickly and effectively.
Describe your typical day on the job and how the work you do contributes to your company.
The best part about my job is that there is no typical day. Today I could be working with our customer service team on a new pricing strategy to help drive our aftermarket sales; tomorrow my focus will be working with our product managers in fine tuning a project bid package; and the following day I could be onsite with a customer looking at a new opportunity where our products could support a new solution for their process. My day-to-day remains as fluid as the industry we work in, and it is certainly never boring. I am still learning new things all the time.
How did you get interested in this work?
Initially, I found myself in this industry just by chance. I graduated from my mechanical engineering program during the 2008 global financial crisis and the job market was tough, to say the least. I started with a smaller OEM, and it was all brand new from the get-go. As I learned more about the resource industry and the importance of our role in an economy, while also (literally) getting my hands dirty in developing my skillset, I became quite ambitious in wanting to learn more and grow my career in this field. I enjoy both the technical and commercial aspects of looking at an application and working closely with our customers to develop a solution to produce a tangible result.
What sort of education do you have that is relevant to your job?
I have a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Toronto and an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University. Certainly, having the technical foundation gave me the ability to grasp “how stuff works” – from being able to understand the inner workings of our equipment to being able to decipher the numbers of what’s happening in a material processing application. This gave me a jump-start on the learning curve early in my career, when I was very green in this industry.
I felt like I really rounded out the fundamentals when I completed my business school training. That helped me enhance my ability to think more commercially when it came to taking on new functions and responsibilities in areas such as strategic planning, product development and sales channel management, to name a few. Having the technical and commercial training also prepared me to be able to interface with cross-functional teams across our business and “speak the lingo” in different business settings.
Where do you see the industry going in the next few years?
The technology is more efficient; the operation has to be leaner; and our environmental footprint needs to be smaller. That is the case in every industry, and the aggregate world is no different. As a business, we’ve transformed ourselves over the last few years by focusing on integrated product solutions that are leaner and more modular, with simpler installation. This has been key in supporting a customer base that is looking for optimization and scalability, while working within the limitations of an existing operation. At the same time, our customers are more cognizant of the environmental impacts and cost burdens of issues such as tailings management, and work a lot closer with companies like Weir in developing efficient fines recovery solutions.
On a more local level, it will be interesting to see how the aggregate supply chain evolves in Ontario specifically. Housing and construction in the province will no doubt continue the trajectory of years (and decades) gone by, and a robust aggregate industry with the ability to maintain a close to market approach will be essential to supporting this growth. Cost-effective solutions and environmental responsibility in this regard will remain a hot topic for policymakers and industry leaders in shaping the future of the aggregate industry in the province.
What advice would you give to others looking for a career in the aggregate industry?
Keep your ear to the ground and stay open-minded to the many opportunities out there in such a dynamic industry. The sand and aggregate sector is so vast and ever-changing. There is not one particular skillset or background that defines how successful you could be in the industry. As long as you remain adaptable and continue to learn new things, it’s quite easy to find yourself transitioning between various functions or across various sides of the business, because at the end of the day, the aggregate industry is also a very small world.