Seizing Opportunities in Challenging Times: Strategic Countermeasures for Enhancing Profitability and Positioning for Growth

Based on our experience working with many companies in the chemical process industries, given the current headwinds, the best companies have prepared well in advance to navigate through the downturn to come out even stronger. They have maintained a laser focus on Operational Excellence and built a strong foundation and culture to run a highly predictable and reliable business.

Get prepared: So, what have the leading companies done, and what should you be doing?  The best companies think strategically and have restructured operations to run more efficiently and effectively, eliminating the need to implement short-term tactical initiatives to cut costs, and additional time to ramp up when the market improves. They know how to run a lean business and have a robust Operational Excellence program to drive additional productivity gains. This “do more with less” approach also has the added benefit of reducing your operations, logistics and carbon footprint.

Where to start: In most cases building a world-class performance driven organization and culture, deploying best practice standard work and a streamlined organizational design, will be self-funding, however this will take some time and hard work. The effort and investment will pay dividends and improve financial performance, providing operational agility, and eliminate the need to ramp up and down as business cycles change.  Start by performing an analysis of your operations, conduct a gap assessment of your current performance by work process area to best practices, get the support you need and utilize benchmarks where possible. Build a compelling business case and implementation roadmap. See our recent article from Chemical Week Magazine that highlights what actions the best run companies are implementing to take their business to the next level.

Who We Are

At ARGO-EFESO we have a proven track record of helping chemical and process industry companies accelerate performance improvement to take their operations to the next level. We are operational performance improvement consultants who know what “good” looks like, leading with seasoned  industry experts who work shoulder to shoulder with our clients at their sites to get results.

Chuck Deise, Sr. Vice President, leads the Chemical and Process Industry practice. Chuck is a seasoned veteran that has more than 40 years of experience in the chemical process, energy, and natural resources industries, where he has been advising and working with global clients to implement programs that transform operations and improve productivity.

 

 

 

Accelerating Value

Our mindset is to help our clients improve EBITDA, right from the beginning we identify the financial opportunities and build a business case. We then drive the improvement initiatives through implementation to achieve and sustain the gains. Our Accelerated Transformation approach includes a series of quick wins along the way to improve financial performance during the program, resulting in rapid gains that our clients never thought were possible.

Best Run Chemical Operations Playbook

ARGO-EFESO utilizes its industry leading Best Run Chemical Operations Playbook (SM), which includes best practices, benchmarks, frameworks and maturity models to quickly identify, prioritize and implement programs to improve operational agility. Our Best Run Assessment Methodology (SM) helps our clients rapidly benchmark, understand gaps, and quantify opportunities. We also work closely with Chemical Week Magazine on a regular basis to provide relevant industry insight on business and operational challenges, and solutions to improve performance ranging from articles to webinars that attract stakeholders from the top Chemical and Process Industry companies.  Overall, our team at ARGO-EFESO is passionate about driving sustainable change.

ARGO-EFESO is proud that we have supported many of the global specialty, diversified and commodity manufacturers in the world spanning the value chain from petrochemicals through intermediates to fertilizers, pesticides, paints, detergents, coatings, catalysts, polymers, pulp & paper and many more. We work across the spectrum from large companies like Trinseo, Grace and Haldor Topsoe and many others.

Strategy, Frameworks & Accelerators

ARGO-EFESO’s experts excel at revealing powerful and actionable insights to improve profitability, predictability and performance in the heavily regulated asset intensive industries. Our Chemical and Process Industry clients consistently give us feedback that ARGO-EFESO brings a new way of thinking with fresh ideas and a unique perspective. Our approach includes new systems, tools and processes to provide the required discipline, structure and accountability to help our clients better plan and optimize their assets and run their operations more efficiently and safely.

 

Capabilities and Services

ARGO-EFESO’s Chemical and Process Industry consultants lead with proven Best Practices that have been developed by our industry consulting team and our chemical advisory council of industry veterans. These accelerators enable rapid benchmarking and gap analysis to define the improvement opportunity and build a roadmap that includes quick hits. Our implementation teams work closely with our clients to implement the right strategies, processes, behavioral changes and systems to achieve sustainable operational improvement.

Our service offerings include:

  • Operational Excellence – Strategies and frameworks including operational best practices to understand what “good” looks like and improvement programs to take your organization to the next level
  • Manufacturing Excellence – Programs to maximize overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and build exceptional operational discipline and capability.
  • Reliability and Maintenance Excellence – Programs to improve maintenance efficiency and reliability effectiveness to significantly increase productivity and maximize asset availability.
  • Turnaround Excellence – Programs to increase turnaround intervals and methodologies to better plan and execute work. New Command Center approach to tightly manage resources and materials.
  • Capital Planning & Execution – Programs to benchmark capital planning and deployment. Best Practices to assure schedule and financial adherence.
  • Supply Chain Management – Strategies to optimize the network and footprint; including planning, procurement, material movements, warehousing and transportation management (rail, trucking and ocean).
  • Quality Management – Management system and systematic approach to continuously improve plant processes and product quality.
  • ESG Excellence – Strategies and Programs to think differently, run safe and significantly improve your carbon footprint and business performance
  • Safety and Health Excellence – Stewardship programs to improve behaviors, Process Safety Management, employee health and wellbeing with a well-defined governance approach.
  • High Performance Organization – Best practices to align leadership, embrace a lean structure that reflects the strategic organizational focus, and create a culture where employees are motivated to go beyond the call of duty to achieve the corporate objectives.
  • Digitization Strategy & Roadmap – Strategic approach to understand, map and deploy latest proven technologies in operations and supply chain. Strong focus on financial business case to ensure ROI.
  • Advisory, M&A Support and Restructuring – Strategic support for deal evaluation, portfolio optimization, acquisition or business exit. Due diligence support for private equity and merger integration best practices to accelerate synergy initiatives.
  • Product Innovation & Value Management – Leading-edge services capability to improve product development and innovation cycle time, and increase ROI on new products.