We asked Shell’s Michael Dragos, Logistics Excellence Manager, North America, what he finds most valuable about APQC membership.
About Royal Dutch Shell Plc
Royal Dutch Shell Plc (“Shell”) is a leading oil and gas producer in the deep-water Gulf of Mexico; a recognized pioneer in oil and gas exploration and production technology; and one of America’s leading oil and natural gas producers, gasoline and natural gas marketers, and petrochemical manufacturers.
What tools, expertise, services, or information do you use the most?
My function is benchmarking our performance externally and internally across the other regions to identify opportunities for improvement and then setting the strategy to close those gaps and implement improvement.
APQC is a resource we use to gain better insight into how we’re managing our organization and how well we’re performing against the competition.
My global counterparts are also using APQC, as are others within the other functional areas in supply chain management.
We use APQC’s information on process management to help us redesign our business process mapping and value chain analysis tools.
APQC allows us to create a common language with other functions within Shell. This keeps us attuned to what we should be doing, what we should look like, if we match up against other functions, and where we sit in the market.
APQC’s process management tools help us gain insight into the specific functions of processes that should exist. APQC's Process Classification Framework (PCF)® helped us build our own value chain analysis tools so that we can begin making better decisions on the projects we run.
APQC’s benchmarking tools help us identify the pain points, the gaps associated with them, and gain buy-in for projects to help close the gaps.
How does APQC membership help you work smarter, faster, and with more confidence?
APQC helps us stay relevant. APQC is a one-stop shop for putting the pieces together – benchmarks, process improvement, and creating a common language.
APQC does the extra work for you—they created the process framework, found the data, and validated it.
That helps us to understand whether or not we have relevant processes and systems as it relates to our business model and to understand how well we’re implementing those business processes by utilizing the benchmarking lists and related analysis that comes along with our membership.
Ultimately, you’ve got to have something to benchmark yourself against, and you want to do that against a good and valid data set. Supply chain hasn’t changed in decades, and you really want to learn from the team that designed the system right the first time and then made the changes needed to move with the economies as they changed along the way.
When we get questions about the validity of our process, the process mapping tools, and the benchmarking itself, I can reassure people that APQC’s data is validated and trusted.
That’s what APQC brings for us. And, APQC works with us along our journey to make sure we get the best value out of the membership. We really appreciate all of the effort, all the way around.