[KEY FACT]

Schlumberger Group is a leader international group which provides oilfield services. It services and smart cards and terminals (manufacturing sites) where they have decades of experience and understanding. Schlumberger is a company of over 85 000 people , with 140 nationalities who work in almost 100 countries and about $ 20 billion of revenue.

I decided to join RMS Full Time MBA in order to improve my knowledge and to have an international experience in China to make better my way of doing business before moving to Schlumberger subsidiary in Beijing. What motivates me in my professional life is to work in a multicultural environment, to manage a variety of tasks and possibilities, to anticipate and analyze information and opinions, and to decide, actions, with the people concerned, to monitor and get things done, to keep on learning.

[POINT OF VIEW - OBJECTIVES AND STRATEGY]

One of my “coaching for change mission” in Schlumberger Group was to create in Montrouge headquarter a strategy based upon the 3 main non bill of material purchasing families. These were : IT contractors (Altran, Alten, etc), temporary agencies (Adecco, Manpower, etc) and consulting firm (Michael Page, etc..) specialized in all the external human delegation.

First step, I recovered all the suppliers’ names, figures ($14 million and about 100 suppliers), money spent by supplier the last three years and the skills requested by purchasing family. The main sources were from the accounting area, project managers and human resources managers, where a real interest was born regarding the forecasted savings and the new quality process.

Second step, I set up a form with the financial controller and the human resources top management. A validation process was focused on us to ensure that the money was really available and that the project was really authorized.

Third step, I created a quality process that summed up what I had set up, the process to follow (ISO), HSE basic conditions ( ID cards, etc), contracts, risk management and the evaluation of each mission.

[OPERATIONS AND RESULTS]

Next, I selected through a tender (price, skills and geographical coverage) the main suppliers and I met them in order to unify and cut the prices by reducing the number of suppliers from 100 to 10 while keeping the same volume of purchases. Of course, they were comfortable with that and they accepted all my conditions.

Regarding the success in term of savings realized, I applied my process (to the whole France) with a new tender based upon $ 1 billion and about 800 suppliers, to reduce price and supplier number to 25.

The same thing happened to me as Western Europe coordinator, I used a Master Vendor Agreement by supplier which was a financial European agreement (based upon another $ 1 billion and about 200 suppliers) and one contract per country with another new tender to reduce price. The only difference was I used one purchaser per country as the link to centralize the requests.

Thus, the Purchasing managers had their financial and organizational savings, the financial controllers had their database reduced, improved, updated, the human resources had the control to regulate, if necessary. The users as a whole were really satisfied and the suppliers were too.

“This is my definition of win-win implementation based upon a real internal and external partnership with a real way of doing business”.