Today, we have the honour of speaking with Mr. Ramon Fernandez, President and CEO of Fercon Group. Ramon is a multifaceted professional whose career spans various domains including engineering, business leadership, academia, research, and the arts. With a robust background in civil engineering and a dual MBA in Strategic Business Management and Technology and Innovation Management, Mr. Ramon has seamlessly integrated his technical expertise with his passion for the arts, reflecting a balanced and holistic approach to life and work.
Mr. Ramon's journey in the industry began over three decades ago, and since then, he has designed, deployed, and directed hundreds of projects across 19 countries on four continents. His extensive experience includes working on structural steel for major infrastructures like bridges and high-rise buildings, and leading Nondestructive Testing (NDT) initiatives, where he has trained and certified over 500 professionals. His contributions to the field are not limited to practice; he has also published research accessed in over 82 countries and lectured internationally.
In this interview, Mr. Ramon shares insights from his illustrious career, discussing the challenges and triumphs he has faced, the evolution of his professional path, and the innovative approaches his organization adopts. He also emphasizes the importance of diversity and inclusion in the NDT industry and offers valuable advice to those entering the field. Beyond his professional achievements, Mr, Ramon reveals his personal interests and the core values that drive his relentless pursuit of excellence and positive impact.
Join us as we delve into the life and career of a visionary leader whose work continues to shape the future of engineering and strategic management.
Hello Mr. Ramon, Hope you are having an amazing day. Let’s get started, shall we? Could you introduce yourself to our audience?
My name is Ramon Fernandez, President and CEO of Fercon Group. I am an Entrepreneur, Engineer, Business Leader, Professor, Researcher, Volunteer, Author and Independent Board Member.
I am a civil engineer with a major in structural design, I also have a Dual Degree MBA with specializations in Strategic Business Management and Technology and Innovation Management (Left of the brain) but since I was a small boy I am also passionate about arts in general (music, literature, theatre or architecture) and particularly after my adolescence in visual arts including painting, photography and cinema (right side of the brain).
Since 1986 I have had the privilege to design, deploy and direct hundreds of projects that involve process optimization, quality improvement, automation, and innovation management located in 19 countries on four continents. In construction, my experience covers over 350,000 metric tons of structural steel for bridges, power generation plants, industrial buildings, commercial buildings, high-rise buildings, and offshore platforms.
36 years of experience in Nondestructive Testing, including 30 years as a Certified Level III by the American Society for Nondestructive Testing in UT MT PT VT and LT. I have provided training and certification support for over 500 NDE practitioners, sharing NDE knowledge with more than 2,100 professionals and leading NDE consulting interventions in more than 120 organizations. I also have 34 years of experience in Welding Engineering and 32 years of experience in quality management processes.
Training and certifying hundreds of new NDE professionals and expanding their competencies based on state-of-the-art knowledge constitute one of our core competencies
Aiming to share the knowledge and experiences generated by our collaborative professional work and my passion for teaching, I have published academic articles and research results that have been accessed in over 82 countries in four continents and lectured about them at forums in Mexico, the United States, Chile, Brazil, France, Germany and Switzerland.
… well, that’s great. Mr. Ramon, you have over 30 years of experience. Can you briefly describe how this entire journey has been? And how did you decide to join this industry?
Since my early infancy, have always felt the yearning to not only understand how the physical world is constructed but also why and how it functions. Although mathematics, chemistry, physics, and information systems were my favorite subjects, and professors encouraged me towards a professional career in science or engineering, in high school and undergraduate studies I never had formal contact with any NDE disciplines.
As I have written before, in a post for ASNT’s PULSE Blog titled “Professional reinvention is not an event but a culture”, the vocational advising process in high school for me was an unmitigated catastrophic experience. Although I was able to decide in my junior year of high school to follow an engineering preparation path in my senior year, in the queue to pay my inscription fee for college I was paralyzed with the indecision of whether to study medicine, philosophy and literature, mathematics, or civil engineering. Finally, my passion for seeing abstract notions converted into tangible useful elements helped me decide on civil engineering studies. But even after completing my undergraduate studies, the uncertainty of having made the right professional decision prevailed.
Standing at the Home Base location at the Phoenix’s Diamondbacks Baseball Stadium.
We participated at the quality control process for the fabrication of a portion of the structural steel for its retractable roof.
My initial contact with NDE arrived as part of the mandatory skills needed to perform my duties as a quality inspector of manufactured components. At the time, I was working part-time (while in college) for a company that produced highly specialized castings and precision-machined components for the sugar, oil and gas, energy generation, and offshore construction industries.
The confluence of science, mathematics, and engineering that is inherent to NDE, combined with the support from two professional mentors and personal role models, allowed me to diversify my proficiency in several methods in a short period of time. I also connected the acquired NDE knowledge and experiences with supplementary subjects such as material sciences, engineering design principles, manufacturing processes or quality management models that allowed me to solve increasingly complex technical problems.
The solutions I was able to build, first individually and later as leader of a team generated good results and as a consequence the scope of my responsibilities within the company grew and diversified to new areas where I faced increased complexity and uncertainty that I was able to cope, most of the times with support elements such constantly researching for state of the art knowledge, converting that knowledge in every-day use practical tools and integrating teams with a multi-disciplinary approach where I invested time and effort in personally training the collaborators and colleagues and exploring options to build alliances with other companies and institutions.
At the same time, I began incipient entrepreneurship efforts as a one-man consultancy in information management systems.
After completing my degree in civil engineering, I migrated from the complex castings and precision machining industry to the structural steel fabrication and erection industry where I found not only new challenges aligned with my academic formation but also the trust and support from my directors to become certified as a ASNT Level III while facing increasingly complex tasks leading teams of collaborators widely dispersed geographically. While facing these new challenges, I realized that technically focused solutions may be profoundly impaired if human factors such as communication, motivation, gender equity or work-life balance are not analyzed and taken into account; also that technically sound solutions grounded in a profound consideration of human factors may become worthless without a clear strategic approach. This is how the seeds of the Multi-Layered Solution Construction Model that is at the core of the solutions we build for our customers were integrated (See figure below).
Fercon Group’s Multi-Layered Solution Construction Model and its associated Validation Approach
– How we build our solutions. Created by the Ramon Fernandez
… you might have had so many amazing experiences in your professional life. Could you share one positive and one negative experience with our audience?
Most professional experiences have both the affirmative potential to be enjoyed and shared with others but also adverse situations that need to be managed individually to derive growth and valuable learning elements from them. Harnessing enjoyment but also growth depends on your mindset, and here is an example:
In the last days of professional activity before the holiday break in December of 2019, while exchanging coordination messages with customers, strategic partners, and colleagues in several geographic regions, we witnessed with increasing concern how some of our peers in Asia were already facing the profoundly severe human, sanitary and economic consequences derived from an alarmingly contiguous new respiratory infection. Already immersed in mandatory confinements they talked in unaccustomed terms for us such as “social distancing”, “accumulated incidence”, or “sentinel models” while in Europe our colleagues in sectors such as health services or aerospace were profoundly concerned about the potential personal and professional impact.
January and early February of 2020 were a surreal time in our country; while we monitored how the impact of the pandemic was exponentially soaring in countries such as Italy and Spain and which best practices should be adopted to minimize the health risks associated with the disease; sustain the physical, mental, emotional and social health of our collaborators and families and to adapt our operations to a new reality, our everyday experience out of the workspace contrasted with most people conducting their everyday activities in a business-as-usual fashion, while we were consciously putting in place a series of preliminary new work standards supported by some of the very early guidelines published from sanitary authorities abroad.
As a company devoted to providing highly specialized engineering consulting and strategic management mentoring, a close and continuous personal interaction at all levels within organizations is an essential part of our values and corporate culture; therefore we clearly understood that we should be proactively bracing for the profound impact and potentially catastrophic effects that the pandemic could have in our people and our operations.
On March 17 2020, after over a month of intense preparations and developments, and two weeks before any sanitary contingency was declared in our region, we communicated to all our customers worldwide our revised collaboration standards where all the presential interactions were entirely substituted by telepresence process supported by a suite of different telecommunication platforms. Internally, a reinforced Massive Transformative Purpose or MTP was established for our organization, centered on providing a clearer perspective to our staff and partners for the scope of our daily activity moving forward. This MTP is: “We are purposefully devoted to generate innovative mindsets and to create reference frameworks, platforms and support ecosystems that are able to empower our customers in their strategic choices that allows them advance decisive outcomes by creating substantial value in projects that we are passionate about.”.
Those two elements became essential to protect us and to address the massive operations increase in the following months derived from our telepresence capabilities which allowed us to participate in training, mentoring and certification initiatives in a more diverse set of geographic regions and industries. As one customer in the education sector told us in the following months, “Your company has had a Digital DNA since day one, and that is why you were able not only to pivot your operations in a couple of weeks but also to profoundly transform your processes and reinforce your value proposition while facing extremely uncertain times”.
… can you describe some of the most challenging projects your organization has worked on, and how did you successfully overcome these challenges?
As a leader of Fercon Group but also as a personal mentor, every day we are facing challenging projects, or as we call them internally milestone projects. Having the internal competencies and external alliances to face them is a fundamental part of our competitive advantage. On the cover page of our corporate brochure, we initiate the description of what we do with the phrase: “It’s 2:45 AM and you are still awake?... In your most critical decisions, you require the strategic support that empowers you to move forward.”
In 2022 we were invited to Zurich, Switzerland for the International Symposium on Nondestructive Testing for Civil Engineering (NDT-CE) to talk about a couple of these “one-of-a-kind” milestone projects that, at the time of its construction, comprised a series of unprecedented characteristics or challenges in a sector or a region. These projects were :
The Baluarte-Bicentennial Bridge (The tallest bridge in the world at the moment of its construction). The project offered unique challenges to all participants in many aspects that ranged from accessing the construction site, structural design, wind resistance, seismic resistance, construction sequencing, or remote monitoring technologies among many others.
The Baluarte-Bicentennial Bridge.- Fitting process for a structural steel segment of the bridge’s main girder
The Otay-Tijuana Cross Border Xpress Bridge (A 120 m long and 10 m wide pedestrian bridge located at the United States–Mexico border that connects passenger terminals between two countries). The CBX is the first pedestrian bridge in history to connect a building in the U.S. directly to a foreign airport terminal to form the first binational airport system in the American Continent.
As a strategic facility that hosts U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operations and Mexican Immigration Authorities, there were important safety guidelines to be addressed.
In parallel to its operation, the construction process involved a profound international collaboration of multinational, multicultural and multi skilled teams of professionals, companies and supervising authorities in both countries.
Installing the first bridge span – connecting with Tijuana airport of the the Otay-Tijuana Cross Border Xpress Bridge
Some of the key principles that we use to contribute to the success of this kind of project are :
- Identify early and clearly the milestone characteristics of the project you are about to face.
- Wide collaboration and open communication are key for successful milestone projects.
- There are no small voices - listen to everyone who can provide insights to address milestone characteristics.
- Research all over the world for previous experiences or current research in progress in specific challenging characteristics of the project.
- Research for solutions out of the box – not only within a single specific industry.
- Experiments on models and simulation of physical characteristics of the project are invaluable tools to address especially challenging characteristics.
For any of the readers interested in acquiring more insights about facing milestone projects, they can download the poster that we created for our presentation at NDT-CE by scanning the following QR Code:
Mr. Ramon, what is that one thing that you think needs to be changed in the NDT industry?
We shall redouble our efforts and revise the current professional development support systems we have in place to provide more ample education, employment, professional development, and personal advance opportunities for women and talented but underprivileged individuals into NDT.
For over thirty years, first as an individual effort, and more recently through our foundation we have been actively involved in reducing persistent barriers, generating clear work and professional development opportunities, documenting clear development paths into NDT, in providing mentoring support as a volunteer and using my voice within the NDT sector for this cause in all the forums where we participate.
… now, let's talk a bit about your organization. Can you briefly describe what your org does?
Fercon Group (www.fercon.group) is a highly synergetic set of seven business units with customers in 18 countries on four continents that range from single-person professional practices to 180,000 employees in multinationals. In two decades we have diversified to serve customers in sectors such as High-Precision Castings Manufacturing, NDE Services, Pressure Vessels and Process Equipment, Construction, Architecture & Engineering Services, Electronics Manufacturing, Biotechnology, Aerospace, Energy Generation, Oil & Gas, Robotics, Chemical Processes, Food & Beverages, Health, NDE Equipment Manufacturing, Technological Services, Software Development, Health, Transportation, Consumer Products, Commerce, Logistics, Agriculture, Media Development, Education, Government and Non-for-Profits Organizations.
Our technical services include 1) highly specialized general engineering consulting, including welding engineering, quality management, and third-party independent advisor for arbitration process; 2) NDE personnel training and certification services and NDE consulting on processes optimization and digital transformation, and 3) Structural Steel Fabrication and Erection Consulting including manufacturing process optimization and automation and guiding maturing quality management systems in order to obtain AISC certifications.
A synergic and flexible structure of business units constitutes the frontstage of our organization.
Our strategic services include 4) highly specialized strategic management mentoring that includes corporate governance, business-Owner Family Protocols for SMEs, Business strategy re-definition, business model revision and re-definition, organizational change management processes, support for business acceleration programs, and crisis Advising Services; 5)An Entrepreneurship Launchpad Platform devoted to New Business Models Experimentation, Business Environment Analysis and Business Hypothesis Testing that serves as a Corporate / Enterprise Sandbox for Key Customers and Allies.
Our six business units are devoted to Design, Art, Animation, Media, and Publications Development that nurtures and reinforces the communication processes of the previous five business units
Finally, our seven business unit is at the core of many of the solutions we build for our customers and is a Think Tank devoted to Research Initiatives and Intellectual Property Development created collaboratively with universities and research centres on three continents.
We have also created a foundation devoted to creating massive positive impacts by supporting a set of eight causes where we focus our action based on our inherent competencies and the collaboration alliances that we have been able to build. These causes are
- Creating education and employment opportunities for people with outstanding abilities in social and economic marginalization conditions.
- Preventing situations of violence, discrimination, and harassment on the grounds of gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, race, culture, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, physical abilities, learning styles, values, points of view, political preferences, physical appearance or disability status.
- Simplifying the access of elderly people to technologies that improve their personal condition and their quality of life
- Contributing to the improvement of manufacturing, construction, and inspection standards around the world.
- Promoting the knowledge and implementation of excellence models to create positive impacts in all kinds of organizations around the world, including private companies, government agencies and non-profit initiatives.
- Improving the physical, mental and social health of people from the spaces they inhabit.
- Reducing the digital divide among the communities where we participate
- Supporting the diffusion and integration of art disciplines, especially literature and visual arts, into the everyday experience of people
Our action in NDE-related volunteering with ASNT, ASME, ASME and ICNDT is aligned with causes I, II, IV and VII.
… how does your organization measure success, and what metrics do you use to evaluate your performance?
Since day one we have been focused on creating and nurturing long-term business relationships with our customers by providing agile responses, sound technical and strategic solutions and best-in-class service; therefore customer-centric metrics such as our NPS (Net Promoter Score) at each business unit and customer segments and learning and innovation parameters in our scorecard are essential.
Financial results shall have a sustainability perspective and be the result of this customer-centred focus, internal processes discipline and strong investments in innovation and talent.
For our foundation, we measure the results of the positive impacts we are able to create aligned with the United Nations’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
… after working so many years in the industry, what keeps you motivated?
NDE is a core constituent of the multidisciplinary solutions and support processes that we provide to our customers that blends state-of-the-art technical knowledge in many disciplines, human interaction with advanced strategic management models and hands-on experiences.
As I explained before, since my early infancy I felt a restlessness yearning not only to understand how the physical world is constructed but also why and how it functions; later, along my professional career I felt that same restlessness yearning to understand how the intangible world of human interrelationships and business strategy is constructed, why and how it functions. Also, I learned from my students and mentees that I am a competent teacher and mentor to share this knowledge and experience about tangible and intangible assets with others.
This thirst for creating and sharing new knowledge with others and collaboratively creating massive positive impacts in hundreds of organizations and in the professional path and personal life of thousands of professionals keeps me motivated.
Mr. Ramon, you have been in the management role for quite a bit, do you have any mantras for people who are new to the management role?
It is important to identify early in your professional life which is your innate leadership style and from this fundamental notion take conscious and active actions to enrich, diversify and mature it. Similarly is essential to consciously assume that as a leader you are as strong as the values you embody and the team you are able to build to help you face increasingly complex and uncertain business environments. Learning consciously how to cope with stress and anxiety is fundamental to protecting your physical, mental and social health.
Here I would like to share the set of quotes that is integrated into my email signature, not only to share with others but mainly as a constant reminder for me of my personal perspective:
On the focus of my action
"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing” - Albert Schweitzer
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
On how to see what is truly important
"On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux" - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
On the importance of a clear mind and purpose
"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." - Steve Jobs,
“Anyone can make things bigger, more complex, It takes a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E. F. Schumacher
About the importance of challenging the status quo of things
"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created."- Albert Einstein
… too many questions about work. Let's take a break. So, how does life look for you outside of work, Mr. Ramon?
The love of family constitutes my compass and their support constitutes my foundation.
At a personal level, art creation and volunteering in social causes provide the necessary balance to my professional life. I love writing, construction or art-related photography, cooking, helping friends with design-related projects, being a volunteer teacher, travelling to new places for vacation, and driving long distances to visit friends and family.
… do you have any advice to the newbies who are going to enter the NDT industry?
Make a mental map of your operational, strategic and development networks, and harvest the best value from them:
In recent years often, we have seen how the number of everyone’s professional and personal contacts, both in the presence and through professional social networks such as LinkedIn or ResearchGate, grows at an ever-increased speed, but for many of us, the ability to properly manage this relational capital is an ability that still eludes us.
It is an inestimable, and for many, an ineludible skill to provide a proper structure to those networks of relationships in order to obtain the most value from them. Hill and Lineback in their book “Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader” propose that instead of seeing your contact network as a single unit they suggest providing structure to them as follows: “create three related but different networks. 1) Your operational network comprises those involved in your group’s daily work. 2) Your strategic network will consist of those who help you prepare for the future by answering the questions, “What should we be doing? Where are we going and how will we get there?, and 3) Your developmental network includes those who help you grow and provide personal, emotional support when you need it. It can overlap with the others to some extent, but it’s also likely to have several unique members, given its personal nature and purpose”.
After you have completed your metal map, you may proceed with the following tasks:
1) Make a list of the most important insights that you have derived while constructing the map and use those insights in your favour.
2) Try to revisit periodically your map to update it starting from your operational network and try to obtain supplementary insights related to how your networks are evolving through time.
3) Use your strategic network as an assistance to achieve concrete professional goals in your development path.
4) Invest substantial and dedicated care in cultivating strong and lasting relationships with each constituent of your development network, particularly with your mentors, with respect, candor and gratitude.
… and finally, how do you plan to scale your org to newer heights?
Unrelenting innovation based on state-of-the-art knowledge and technology is part of our corporate DNA and it constitutes a core element of the scaffolding to build new competencies and enrich our portfolio of customer-centric services towards the future. A more ample geographic diversification in the action of our group of companies and in the reach of our foundation should be the result of this approach.
