CASE STUDY / STANWELL
Stanwell energises stakeholders’ support for SRM
Not all experts are receptive to new ideas from suppliers. Energy firm Stanwell broke down barriers by listening for when business stakeholders were prepared to ask for help.
T elling someone they might need some help is always a tricky proposition. When it is a procurement team telling engineers that suppliers might know better than them, it can be doubly difficult. That’s why stakeholder engagement is critical to the success of SRM, says Andre Harvey, general manager, procurement and supply, Stanwell. With a portfolio of assets contributing more than 4,000 megawatts to the Eastern seaboard of Australia, Stanwell is one of Australia’s largest and more established electricity generators posting earnings of AU$857 million in 2018. The organisation is subject to the recent energy industry disruption that has seen an influx of technology advances, as well as asset and plant optimisation strategies. Against this backdrop the Stanwell leadership team felt it could gain more insight and value from suppliers to the benefit of its customer base. But Harvey wasn’t sure whether the engineering teams who dealt with suppliers day-to-day would be willing to take on board ideas from suppliers. “To start with, you have to acknowledge the nature of the relationship with the supplier. For us, it was typically something like buy, implement, and if you’re not happy, complain. It is difficult to get into a conversation about insight and value because of a level of scepticism on the part of the workforce primarily responsible for managing suppliers. Any innovation would potentially be seen as a challenge to the expertise of our engineers,” Harvey says.
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STATE OF FLUX
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