August 24, 2006KIOSK Europe Up and RunningPete Snyder’s Mission to Europe Ends with New Facility, New G.M. for KIOSK KioskCom Source Article Detail Pete Snyder is back in the United States, and KIOSK Information Systems is still operating in Europe. “The plan was always to come back here once the office was established there and once I had trained a gent to take my place,” Snyder said from Colorado. The story is bit more complicated than that. Last summer, Snyder moved to Scotland intent on establishing a manufacturing and sales presence for KIOSK in Europe and the Middle East. At the time, he said he expected it would take up to 18 months to set up an organization and find a successor.
Now, after just nine months, Snyder says that mission has been accomplished, though there were plenty of bumps in the road getting there. And though he says he made some great friends, traveled extensively and saw amazing sites, he’s glad to be back home in KIOSK’s Colorado headquarters. As Director of International Sales, he’ll continue to oversee the company’s overseas operations.
“In the U.S., we are a much larger economic system,” he said, adding that he can sell 25 times as many kiosks here than in Europe. “They’re a lot more open to applications here than over there. In the UK, they like to wait in lines. In the U.S., they don’t. That leads to more opportunities for kiosks than in the UK.”
That’s not to say KIOSK is abandoning its European focus. On the contrary, Snyder said he was able to train his successor (Jim Dalziel) and set up a new manufacturing plant in Falkirk, Scotland this summer.
Last summer, KIOSK set up an agreement with Mack Industries Corporate USA in Scotland to manufacture kiosks. That plan was going forward fine until Mack announced in April plans to close operations there. Snyder immediately began working with Dalziel, who was the general manager of the Mack plant, to prepare him to take over Snyder’s duties. Turns out, he had four months to get the job done.
When Mack closed the plant, it let Dalziel go, and KIOSK immediately hired him to run the new plant owned by a Scottish firm, Kiosk Manufacturing Systems Ltd. Several former Mack employees experienced in the kiosk manufacturing operation were recruited for the new facility.
Once Dalziel was in place and the new plant was operating, Snyder packed his bags. He said his Scottish experience was a good one in which he learned a lot about differences in business across the ocean.
“The countries aren’t as large and the opportunities are smaller,” he said. “A big deal there is 100-250 kiosks. Here it takes 500-1,000 to be a big deal.”
He added that European countries typically want to work with a local company on kiosk deployments, adding to the importance of partnerships with local providers. He said KIOSK established contractual relationships in the growing Middle East market with two companies, APTEC of Dubai and Kiosk Technical Systems in Kuwait. In fact, the KIOSK web site lists companies in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine and Russia, Turkey and South/Central America which are resellers/partners with KIOSK. While the deals may be small in comparison with U.S. deployments, Snyder mentioned an ongoing project with Hewlett-Packard for a United Kingdom government agency as one of several contracts in place there. Posted by keefner at August 24, 2006 10:45 AM |