20
19
Barclays CEO Energy-Power Conference
Paal Kibsgaard
In 2010, building on our experience from the R&E transformation, we also created a unified
shared services organization spanning the support activities that were managed by the
individual product lines, including supply chain, facilities, distribution, and transportation.
Again, the goal was to create an organization that would enable us to fully leverage
the scale of these support activities and elevate the performance of this part of the
organization, learning from the best companies in other industries.
Today we have fully centralized our supply chain function through a strong category
management set-up, an active supplier management interface, standardized contract
management, and a professional buyer network. The benefits of this organization are
already starting to pay off, as we saw in North America pressure pumping in 2012, for
instance. However significant further upside remains possible as we continue to optimize
our supply chain set-up and our processes.
In addition, we have initiated a complete re-structuring of our global distribution, warehousing,
and maintenance network. The aim is to gradually move away from our current decentralized
set-up, where each business unit is fully self-contained, to an organization where more of the
assets and inventory is owned, stored, and maintained at a regional level. This should help us
better leverage our size, expertise, and sharing of resources.
This organization will be further supported by our global transportation network, which is
currently undergoing a similar upgrade to enable quicker and more cost-effective movement
of assets, materials and spares.
To further drive the quality and efficiency of all our internal business processes, in the
coming years we will undertake a gradual but complete upgrade of our company’s entire IT
backbone. This will help us better support our field operations, and will further strengthen
our growth platform.
At Schlumberger, we rarely talk about the internal parts of the company in public forums,
but given the potential value that the transformation can have on our performance is
significant, and we are looking forward to reaping the benefits of this transformation in the
years ahead.
