Mr Mosaed Al-Ohali, Executive Vice President, Manufacturing, Sabic spoke to Oil Review about Sabics sustainability drive and ambition to become innovation leaders.
Plenary speaker
Al-Ohali was one of the plenary speakers at MEPEC in Bahrain recently and he felt that the opening speeches and panel discussion of the show had been very well organised. He added: "As Sabic, we talked about what we should do, Saudi Aramco talked about how we should do it and Dr Al-Sulaiman from KFUPM put it all into perspective through building a knowledge base."
On MEPEC, Al-Ohali said, "I think we had a very good start and this is the right forum for technical exchange."
Al-Ohali expanded on the main themes of his speech, saying: "My speech was a reflection of our realisation at Sabic. What are the focus areas for us? Sustainability is coming to be a very important subject for us going forward. It is becoming a very important theme. Our approach will not be legal compliance but instead we aim to embrace sustainability as a way to create value for us."
The value side
He added that some of the people think sustainability means investments in energy optimisation and investment in Co2 reduction – from a certain perspective, this is true. That is the cost side of it. "What we are looking at is the value side of it. Because as we spend capital, we gain business benefits far in excess of our sustainability costs. So as we drive more sustainability, we aim to gain market leadership, we are not compromising our economic viability. We still want projects that are economically viable on their own but also achieving our sustainability goals."
Innovation leadership
Al-Ohali went on to discuss the importance of innovation which, "we firmly believe that we can not meet our corporate objectives by just being a smart follower as has served us very well in the past. But going forward, we need to be technology innovator and we need to be a recognized innovation leader. We do not want to innovate in everything, but we want to have innovation leadership in our core business."
This does not mean that in the future Sabic will not enter into joint ventures, far from it. "We still have a lot of room for a lot of partners and there are many things we can do together," observed Al-Ohali.
Competency
Training is very important to Sabic. As Al-Ohali explained: "Knowledge sharing is very important for us. We have a number of initiatives on training ongoing, both in-house and with third parties. We are trying to move from formal kind of training into training that is competence based. We are engaged in a big project where we are mapping out the competency needed for all our career paths and then what we do in terms of training and development, work experience that we want to give to our professionals to achieve the competencies prescribed for the career path they choose." Al-Ohali believes this provides a very comprehensive, total approach to training and development.
MEPEC - a window
On the importance of MEPEC, Al-Ohali explained that the show plays a major part in his company's training and development programme because their engineers are able to come to the event and have a window to other technologies from around the world. They come to network and exchange ideas.
Open dialogue and transparency
Al-Ohali talked about his positive outlook for the downstream industry. "In terms of building technical capabilities, I think we are definitely in the right place and on the right track. We are moving to be more efficient and, in a way, we are optimising our costs. So from that aspect we are doing the right thing in terms of organisational structures and in terms of selecting the types of technologies we want to use. Now, this is only on the manufacturing capabilities side."
Al-Ohali did add that to succeed, Sabic will need other things, such as a favourable market.
In conclusion, he observed: "The most exciting thing for me is that together we can build our future. Open dialogue and transparency is very important."
