On their way to commoditization, old industries are waking up! Seizing the digital opportunity, Bengs assists Vallourec into the definition, ignition and animation of a “Digital Booster”. The goal: develop & monetize new digital services to generate additional revenue for the group.
3 innovative Oil & Gas Digital Services in 18 weeks!
The industrial context is quite simple: innovate or die! Vallourec is struggling with its finances. The amount of premium pipe orders, Vallourec core positioning, has dramatically decreased due to the economic environment. Differentiation levers are weak on an industrial point of view and the price criteria becomes preponderant over premium technology & security.
One solution: go meet the customers! Which problems are they facing? Which solutions did they test? What are the human and financial impacts of those difficulties?
Bengs builds and deploys with Vallourec a dedicated methodology for the “Digital Booster”.
Innovations are structured around 6-step seasons with a Go/No go at each step, clear deliverables, an autonomous team and 1 KPI: the cash-burn rate
Results are amazing after a first season of 18 weeks: convinced customers, enthusiast entrepreneurs & a pleased top management. As an example, a star project is now ready to scale: “Smartengo Best Fit”, a new digital solution to secure and optimize line pipe welding assembly operations (more information here).
200M€ additional revenue in 5 years: Value creation is a matter of mindset!
The enterprise culture, steered by patent and R&D with a historical “Techno push” mindset have contributed, in a negative economic context, to the misalignment of Vallourec’s offer and its customers and markets’ needs.
The role of the “Digital Booster”? Bring the customer back to the core of Vallourec’s offer!
3 key actions secure the customer focus:
- Co-designand co-build services with customers, solving unresolved problems
- Impulse rhythmby developing services under a sprint format (including business development and product development)
- Maximise service desirability
Thanks to this strong customer-focus and to teams’ autonomy, Vallourec intrapreneurs manage to overcome their own limits, to demonstrate the feasibility of their products and to generate additional revenue for the company. Market validation of value propositions is fast and in less than a year, over a million euros of additional revenue is secured for the group. The global business plan of new services projects a couple of hundred million euros of additional revenues by 2024, addressing customers both in Oil & Gas and other industries, worldwide.
Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast!
Collaboration is not that natural! In the “Digital Booster”, an efficient governance along with collective goodwill demonstrate the power of combined intelligence all through the innovation process:
- Experts, researchers, entrepreneurs, business developers, gathered in one place, accept to validate an ambition through a non-perfect prototype displayed to the largest number.
- Feedback, challenges and expectations enable the teams to improve their offers and maximise their value proposition.
- Weekly routines allow teams to focus on actions over reporting, to accelerate the deployment of the solution and to gather enough proofs for a fast and well thought scale-up.
Through this digital booster, the commitment of all stakeholders (employees, internal sponsors, partners) have become a must-have for any transformation at Vallourec.
