The Razorleaf Corporation was founded in the year 2000 by Eric Doubell, and from the very start, the company was built on a foundation of strong values.
“They were simple, inspiring values,” recalls Nordine Marouf, Managing Director of Razorleaf EuroWest. “Treat people right. Take care of customers. Do the right thing. Eric’s goal was to create a lasting organisation that would be a great place to work. He wanted to offer work-life balance to employees and be a place where people would want to stay.”
It is a philosophy encoded in Razorleaf’s six core values – “Do the right thing”, “Be flexible but disciplined”, “Be exceptional but humble”, “Help others”, “Take a long view” and “Be self-motivated and self-aware”.
“We keep an open mind, always looking to learn more and stay motivated,” Marouf says.
With these values, Razorleaf has grown and established itself as a global vendor-agnostic systems integration firm that specialises in digital transformation for forward-thinking manufacturers around the world.
But from the very beginning, it was not just Razorleaf’s values that gave them an edge.
“Razorleaf was founded as a virtual company because our CEO recognised the flexibility it could provide to employees after working in offices for years,” says Juliann Grant Vice President of Global Marketing for Razorleaf says. “By 2020 we really knew how that worked, so when Covid hit it was still business as usual for us. We saw no big change.”
Of course, it is a culture that has become far more mainstream in recent years.
“A work-at-home environment is more popular now than ever, but it takes a special kind of person to be productive in our line of work as consultants,” says Grant. “The ‘Help others’ part of our philosophy is about helping each other as well as our customers. The collaborative nature of our team is just a unique environment to work in.”
This company’s well-established remote working culture is one of the reasons why the company’s employees tend to stay with the firm.
“Many founding members are still in the company, reflecting Eric Doubell’s core values,” Marouf says. “As the company began to grow globally, our priority was finding the right teams to fit our values. It was a priority to spread the culture of the company across the globe.”
At the Razor’s Edge
Razorleaf Corporation’s appeal as an employer is obvious, with the values-led, people-centric environment the company has created. But it has also established itself as a valuable partner to its clients.
“What sets us apart from the competition is that we have a wide geographical footprint supported by a broad domain expertise that includes everything from PLM implementation and integration to manufacturing execution system solutions,” Marouf tells us. “We have dedicated geoteams and an integrated engineering entity in Pune, India serving the entire group.”
As with the company’s staff, Razorleaf maintains long-term relationships with its vendors, with some working with the company for periods of 20 years or more.
“We have access to a global team of specialists,” Marouf emphasises. “If I need a specialist in the US, I can leverage the team we have there or our teams in the UK, the Netherlands, and India.”
The company serves a range of industries, with a speciality in the aerospace and defence sectors, while also serving the automotive, industrial equipment, energy, construction, and life science sectors.
“We are large enough to be relevant and small enough to be agile,” Marouf says. “We offer clients more agility and industry-specific relevance.”
A New Platform
Razorleaf has always adapted its strategy to be at the heart of its customers’ demands. As a global organisation, it provides deep engineering expertise to manufacturing organisations, bringing new products to market quickly and cost-effectively. The latest of those products is the CLOVER Integration Platform.
“We have the CLOVER Platform to support global needs,” Marouf says. “Often there are gaps in our clients’ data flows, and the CLOVER Platform is a way to potentially fill those gaps.”
The platform is designed aid green business transformation by facilitating a better exchange between systems. It helps clients build smarter, connected products that can meet the challenge of eco-friendly carbon-free solutions. CLOVER is more than just another integration and communication platform; it solves its clients’ most complex product operational challenges. The family of products enables product information to be exchanged across an organization, its partners, and suppliers. Organisations can use it to reduce development costs, streamline processes, and accelerate innovation.
“Data often contains a lot of relationships that are difficult to keep intact when that data is being moved around and displayed in different formats,” explains Grant. “Our platform provides ways for people to share that data outside of PLM and engineering. We have a way of passing data around different systems while maintaining its integrity.”
CLOVER is all the more important in an environment where businesses are realising just how valuable their data is.
“Clients are trying to do more and more with their data as they recognize the value of this Intellectual Property,” says Marouf. “CLOVER helps connect and coordinate multiple data sources to help companies build out a digital thread to ensure they have an accurate, consistent, and current picture of their data.”
This is only one of Razorleaf’s focuses. The Company has also launched an a “incubator business,” where Razorleaf can try out new business models. Among its latest achievements is the new manufacturing and execution business which Razorleaf will be taking out of the incubator and putting into the mainstream company in 2024.
“It is something we can maintain and build a team around,” Grant tells us. “It lets us test technologies out and be prepared. That model has worked out well for us.”
With these tools in its armoury, Razorleaf Corporation has big plans for the future.
“We want to pursue geographical expansion,” Marouf says. “As we recently launched our entity in France as a base for EuroWest, we are expanding rapidly in the Middle East to address a demanding market in terms of BIM and PLM technology. The future of the manufacturing, energy, construction, and life science sectors is exciting here.”
But Razorleaf is not expanding for the sake of it.
“Global expansion has been fast but planned. Eric takes a long look at the people before adding on different territories and regions,” Grant adds. We are going to be expanding further into the Nordic region, Germany, Greece and Italy.”
Razorleaf Corporation is also looking to expand more into the aerospace, automotive and even the AI sector.
“These are the industries that will be leading the manufacturing space going forward,” Marouf tells us.
