Collaboration reduces costs?

There has been a lot of hand-wringing around collaboration recently. For instance Paul Goodfellow Manager of UK Upstream at Shell said companies working in the North Sea need to learn from other industries on how to work together [Link]. Quite which industries he is talking about I’m not sure, also I am not sure what type of collaboration he’s looking for.

Worryingly for me there seems to be a focus on input costs. For instance one quote in the article stands out: “work with the supply chain on how to collaborate and get common purpose whilst driving waste from the system and driving unit costs down”.

When I analyse situations like this with clients I encourage them to take a view on both industry and supply chain, and be clear about the distinction. In Shell’s case their industry consists of other oil and gas operators. MMO companies, Scaffolding providers, helicopter operators and a myriad of other companies are part of the supply chain. They belong their own set of industries. Of course many companies supply services in more than one industry – so I need to consider them both in relation to their “competitors” and their own internal structure.

Here are three ways that cost can be removed:

1. Industry collaboration between operators – to increase standardisation or share resources
2. Adoption of new technology and methods
3. Drive new processes to reduce unnecessary steps

These actions can increase efficiency which I define as the ratio of units of output to units of input. Assuming that output remains constant then efficiency comes from reducing system costs by removing labour or materials. This will increase the profit available for distribution among companies within the supply chain.

Reducing costs within the supply chain does not necessarily mean that Shell will see their input prices reduce – the location in the value-chain where profits are captured is subject to other factors. One model to explain how profit is captured was described by Michael Porter [Link]. Supply chain collaboration is, of course, important to organisations such as Achilles backed by my friends at Hg Capital [Link]. They set out some of their views on the issue here [Link].

In a commodity industry – like crude Oil and Gas production – there is little that producers such as Shell can do to change the selling price of their product (of course OPEC might have a different opinion [Link]). To protect profits producers need to reduce cost. At the moment operators seem to be forming committees to squeeze the supply chain. They are also laying off employees to cut overhead. I don’t see any action from Operators to collaborate with each other to reduce their own structural costs. Claims that they are seem to be a joint-ganging-up to encourage the supply chain to collaborate and reduce prices. That’s different.

Oil and Gas UK have stated that the North Sea needs to reduce costs by 40% within 5 Years or face very tough times indeed. Stephen Marcos Jones, Oil & Gas UK’s business development director, said: “Companies are having to make tough decisions on their capacity during the downturn and are individually taking measures to improve efficiency. However, co-operative working across the industry … can also help deliver the cost and efficiency improvements required to secure a long-term future for the UKCS.” [Link]

This quote from the Shell article highlights the inefficiency in buying within a single operator:

“One very enterprising supplier came forward and said we’ve got a great piece of quick erecting scaffolding, but we don’t understand why you haven’t been picking it up. The reason was because they were trying to work at various front-line levels of the organisation and it wasn’t important to one individual, because they didn’t know the totality of what we were spending on that service. When they came in through the strategic contracting team and demonstrated to the facility managers and made the decision there and then and we’re in the process of deploying it across every facility and rig we have in the UK sector.”

I feel this is an example of an operator missing new technologies due to their internal bureaucracy and inefficiency. My clients can tell me about literally hundreds of examples of this type of behaviour. The reality of course is more complex. When I ran the technology investment process at a major operator I found that the cost (and risk) of scaled change was such that it can easily outweigh the demonstrable benefits delivered from a new technology. Therefore this type of change can be slow and the results can be counter intuitive.

So in summary to drive out costs we must answer the following:

1. What time scale and magnitude do we need to work to (some are long-term structural and will take many years to deliver, other are tactical and can reduce Op-Costs quickly)
2. What can we do to reduce the cost within the supply chain, and how will we ensure that those costs flow to the prices we are charged?
3. What can we do to reduce costs within our industry by collaboration and standardisation
4. What can we do to reduce our individual costs by simplifying what we do, eliminate unneeded activity and increase work-rates?

Of course, as you would expect, the professional services firms have opinions on this. Their approach and advice is nuanced and reflects many of the same themes. Some of what they are thinking can be found here: PWC [Link], Deloitte [Link] and [Link], EY [Link], Bain [Link] and KPMG [Link].

Incidentally the word-cloud image at the top of this post contains many of the words I’d expect to elicit from a group of oil executives. It comes from VOTE – an organisation based in New Orleans – the Voice of the Ex-Offender. It is a grassroots, membership based organization founded and run by Formerly Incarcerated Persons (FIPs) in partnership with allies dedicated to ending the disenfranchisement and discrimination against of FIPs. [Link]. Goes to show that many of the issues that surround collaboration are human ones and not things specific to our industry.