With over 20 years’ experience in delivering aftermarket solutions for prestigious automotive brands, San Caraballo looks after Wheelabrator customers and aftermarket teams across North America. We sat down with San to talk about what’s happening in today’s market, and why it helps to be a global force.
“Customers are cost-conscious at the moment but that’s when aftermarket support kicks into high gear.”
San, tell us a little about what you do.
I lead strategic planning and execution for Wheelabrator and its sister brands’ aftermarket portfolio, including service solutions, spare parts, field services, and digital. Aftermarket tackles everything that happens after our customers put a machine into operation. With our equipment, that point marks the beginning of a very long and very important relationship. We want to make sure that the original machine delivers the best quality and production for its lifetime, which in many cases can be over 30 years!
Our OEM parts can improve production runs on older machines to run like new--for example, our EZX wheel upgrade for shot blast machines. Customers have confirmed that an EZX wheel replacement doubled their production output! That’s an impressive stat!
As a leader, I have two jobs. One, develop our people, two, deliver results. Every time I walk into our base, I ask myself, how will the changes I make today affect tomorrow – and the decades to come?
Talking about change: how is Wheelabrator’s aftermarket offering in North America changing at the moment?
We are making significant investments in infrastructure to improve our supply chain and logistics. Our warehousing is undergoing a dramatic transformation right now, here in Atlanta and in Mexico too.
There’s a lot happening under the hood that may sound unexciting but will make a real difference to our customers.
We’re also boosting our headcount with some key leadership additions across supply chain and engineering. Plus, we’re increasing the size of our teams in the field. All of these investments will make us much more agile in responding to our customers and speed up parts deliveries.
Does Wheelabrator's strong network help customers in other ways?
Parts availability is of foremost importance to our customers, so our large North American inventory and quick delivery is very attractive to them. You will lose your customers if you don’t have the part when they need it. We understand how uptime is everything to our customers to run an efficient foundry operation.
Obviously, our customers are very savvy and have their own engineers and technicians who can work out the replacement parts that they need. But we find the best results come when we work very closely with them on analyzing wear behavior, managing maintenance schedules and plan part replacement. Our ability to step in and provide expert technical support on-site or remotely is something our customers really value.
What are you seeing in the market at the moment?
Today, more than ever, customers are cost-conscious, but that’s when aftermarket support kicks into high gear.
It helps you do more with what you’ve got for a lot longer. That could be maintaining an older machine to keep it running effectively or upgrading existing equipment for much less than the cost of replacing it, or diagnostic services that will tell you which specific components you need to replace to get your machine back to optimal performance.
"We partner with customers to deliver digital projects quickly and successfully"
Do you see digital uptake growing amongst Wheelabrator customers in the US?
Any machine gives the best output with correct, timely maintenance. Digital gives you the information to drive that. You can monitor the health of your blast machine and catch a required repair at the right time, before it causes damage to the machine. With the labor shortage in many of our customer industries, anything that takes the pressure off maintenance teams manually monitoring machine health is a huge help.
We encourage all our customers to use our digital solution, Monitizer | DISCOVER and all the diagnostic tools it offers, with our experts on hand to show you the best ways to use digital in your business. We partner with customers to deliver digital projects quickly and successfully, most recently with Grede here in the US which has already reported great savings in production efficiencies and their bottom line.
San – thank you for your time!
San and his team will be at CastExpo in Atlanta April 12-15 2025. Catch him at the Norican Group booth 1936.