The impact:
Meeting project objectives
PwC identified year-on-year savings of around $50 million early in the transformation programme, and Baker Hughes expects to see around $700 million in savings for 2020. Over the longer term, they intend to achieve $1 billion annualised savings.
Those saved funds will enable the company to invest in carbon-reducing or carbon-capturing services and technologies, and will leave it better positioned for the Energy Transition. With its new products and services, Baker Hughes will also be able to help customers and suppliers decarbonise their operations.
Challenges
The first challenge was moving away from the traditional approach to cost-cutting in the oil and gas sector, which is generally reactive and largely dependent on oil price and volumes. Baker Hughes realised that they would only see real change by taking a longer-term view of driving sustainable cost reduction through cost-based transformation.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, upended operations for many organisations around the globe, starting early in 2020. However, leaders recognised the potential business impacts early and acted quickly to support employees in a switch to remote working, in many cases ahead of governments’ mandated lockdowns.
Baker Hughes also undertook its transformation journey while navigating other ongoing challenges, from changing economics in the oil and gas industry to its separation from GE and both acquisitions and divestitures. Staying on track required unwavering commitment from the CEO on down, as well as a single-minded focus on its ‘north star’ of energy transition technology.
Lessons learned
The close and established working relationship between Baker Hughes and PwC avoided inertia, often terminal for transformation programmes. It made it possible to quickly agree on – and launch – a programme that could prove the value of their non-traditional approach and begin producing results quickly.
For transformations of this magnitude to work, there needs to be a strong, significant relationship between the parties, built on trust and proven delivery. And these principles apply to any organisational transformation. Authentic working relationships will allow people to have the right conversations upfront, agree on goals, challenges and direction, and most importantly transform at pace. Being able to trust the collective instinct and experience of the team also made it possible to embark on the transformation without being pinned to specifics from the start, making the project significantly more agile and adaptable throughout.
Impact
As the world shifts to an increasingly decarbonised future, Baker Hughes’ transformation to an energy technology company will enable it to become a sustainability leader in an increasingly decarbonised future through the Energy Transition. And the efficiencies and cost savings it is achieving will help others across the industry as well: by developing innovative new offerings for customers and supply chain partners, it can also help those companies save costs and reduce or capture their carbon emissions.
As part of the transformation process, Baker Hughes has seen additional benefits such as supplier rationalisation across key categories, enhanced processes and controls on third-party spend, process improvement in back-office functions, as well as the use of automation to drive efficiency, among others.