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Dossier SolvayInnovationTrophy2006
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Like many other companies, Air Liquide has undertaken
a systematic cost reduction exercise. It now wants
to move beyond this with an efficiency and growth
system which draws its strength from human resources
and from knowledge-sharing. Its name is OPAL, short
for Operating Practices at Air Liquide.
Air Liquide
shares good practices
OPAL didn’t happen just like that. First of all it was felt
that successive competitiveness plans had gone as
far as they could. Second, Air Liquide’s geographic
expansion was placing it – despite its world leadership
in its market – in a challenger position in new
and highly competitive territories. All at once this was creating a
huge demand for transfer of knowledge. But whilst new countries
were hungry for knowledge, mature countries poorly understood
the need to share theirs. Finally, and logically enough, customers
were calling for more standardized procedures to guarantee identical
products across the world. Two years ago Air Liquide drew the
conclusion that it had to do things differently, and better. The
response was to initiate a discussion of good – and generally innovative
– practices and how best to transfer them.
From good practices to best practices
The OPAL philosophy can be summarized in four words: gather,
structure, share, implement.
This does not bridle innovation on the ground, which is vital
for creating and maintaining dynamism, but it standardizes
the way it is put into practice and makes it more accessible within
the group’s strongly decentralized culture. A five-stage approach
was introduced:
• international benchmarking to identify good practices;
• structuring practices so they can be communicated and
exchanged horizontally, between entities and between product
lines;
• implementation;
• measuring, consolidating and analysing the results;
• permanent appropriation by entities in a natural and autonomous
fashion.
The project’s success is due to the top management attention
focused on it. A specific investment budget was earmarked for the
purpose. A dedicated 5-person team travels to provide effective
on-site support. Two-monthly reports are submitted to a delegation
of the Executive Committee (Comex). Each country appoints
its own OPAL leader and horizontal ‘communities of practice’
segment the approach into topics: procurement, human resources,
legal, sales etc. In addition, good local practices and recommendations
can become best practices by Comex validating them as
mandatory procedures for the entire group.
“Airliquidized” innovation
Nothing particularly new in all that? Don’t be so sure of it. The
progress lies in the process of collecting, formatting and converting
the various stimuli and impetuses from the grass roots into continuous
improvement of results. This is a never-ending process,
with the underlying system designed to be self-maintaining. A series
of tools – free-of-charge as are the services of the dedicated project