How is the Engie group steering its "Fuel For Growth" strategic plan?

Fuel for Growth is an ambitious performance plan worth 600 million euros over three years!

And we had the privilege of interviewing Engie's Performance Director in charge of this strategic plan. We invite you to immerse yourself in the inner workings of the performance plan of a world leader in energy!

How does ENGIE deploy thousands of performance actions across the world and in all its Business Units?

How can you manage a performance approach to optimize your business and industrial strategy?

What support does the Perf Monitor platform offer to disseminate, collect and secure the Fuel For Growth strategic plan? 

Performance, a pillar of Engie since its creation

Fuel for Growth is a three-year performance plan launched in May 2021. This plan unites all the hierarchical levels and geographical zones of the Engie group, around a common ambition. Indeed, Engie is present in over 70 countries, with 170,000 employees who need to be aligned around the same objectives.

"Fuel for Growth" aims to achieve net savings of 600 million euros. The aim is to improve performance rather than cut costs.

This plan is the third to be tracked via the action plan management software Perf Monitor. Fuel for Growth follows on from the Lean 2015-2018 and Lean 2019-2021 plans.

This new performance plan has three main focuses:

1. Improve plant performance (both production and distribution)
2. Boosting companies in difficulty (incentives for energy renovation and saving, decarbonization)
3. Improve service efficiency (concentration of professions, pooling of resources)

This quest for performance is not only financial. A large part of the improvements will take place on the organizational dimension. Engie wishes to assert its role as a leader in the energy transition through its industrial and digital approach.

"We are activating several performance levers within the group and we are truly accompanying growth."

Interview with Marc Verstraete, Performance Director, Engie

How do you draw up such a performance plan?

The three-pronged exercise is highly ambitious, but Engie has kept a large measure of realism in building this plan. Fuel for Growth" was drawn up bottom-up, with a Best-In-Class approach using benchmarking tools. To underline this ambition, the plan was announced at the same time as Catherine McGregor's appointment as Group CEO.

How does this plan apply to Engie's various businesses?

Although the plan is global, it is broken down into several areas. Each Business Unit and Territory therefore receives a specific, tailored roadmap. More than 100 operating units are working on the Fuel for Growth plan, and are autonomous in the way they achieve their objectives.

All elements of progress (actions and action plans) are communicated to head office via the Perf Monitor platform. This global tool enables this energy leader to monitor the plan's progress easily and in real time. In fact, every action created on the platform in North America, for example, can be checked instantly by the head office in France.

All performance gains are collected via actions and are compiled and validated at central group level. These actions follow a methodology specific to the Engie Group. "All new actions and ideas are welcome within the various entities". The Performance Department ensures that best practices are shared and that all teams work together.

Plan highlights: closings

Every quarter, the Engie Group carries out a closing review of performance gains. This consists of an operational milestone with a follow-up on the progress of the plan and the achievement of objectives. Data is collected from over a hundred entities, using the standardized, multilingual Actionway tool powered by Perf Monitor. The application follows a well-defined methodology. The Perf Monitor platform enables centralized data collection, with highlighted indicators and well-defined areas of analysis. Reporting at each closing enables "multi-dimensional" exploitation by performance lever, business unit type, territory, etc.

Every quarter is a closing operation:

• The new actions have been completed by the various Business Units
• The old shares have been readjusted, with new amounts
• A photograph of the data is taken.

Data collection is continuous throughout the quarter (although there is a spike in entries just a few days before the deadline...). Around fifty people manipulate the data for analysis purposes, but the team members who put these ideas into practice are far more numerous. Around 3,000 actions a year are created on Perf Monitor, a platform on which it is possible to track, analyze or validate this data by different people. An action is qualified (what is its nature? how does it relate to an action plan?) and has a certain impact in terms of budget, timetable, and so on.

Three main areas of data analysis can be found at Perf Monitor :

• Data by geography
• Data by business unit
• Data by performance lever

A compensating effect can sometimes occur between an advance and a delay, but each retains a well-defined objective.

It is important to underline that the closing of this result shows the differences between the actions, but the objectives of the roadmap of the plan always remain fixed.

We have chosen to report on a quarterly basis, but our quarterly financial results are based on cumulative data. This is therefore a good time to see whether progress and the course of action are in line with the cumulative result. As far as the latest data collected by Engie is concerned, the lights are on green, with around half of the target met, halfway through the plan's timetable.

Through the three plans it has managed, the Actionway platform has adapted to the Group's reorganizations. These organizational adjustments have sometimes taken place right in the middle of a performance plan, implying a redistribution of objective portfolios. On the other hand, the way in which we monitor has remained constant over the years, allowing for continuity in performance monitoring.

And what about the platform?

Perf Monitor, action plan management software, has made a number of contributions to the Engie Group. They consider their platform to be :

• Centralized for easy reporting and compilation of all group data
• decentralized, since everyone can access it easily from their own entity, with the specific objectives assigned to them and the actions carried out
• to collect data continuously and validate the completeness of the data before it is communicated to the markets in particular.
• Standard with group-wide dissemination and adoption of the defined methodology

Methodology, a key issue

Each action is linked to a plan and must be detailed according to certain attributes and indicators.

The platform is a receptacle for actions, helping to structure them, but not the guardian of the entire methodology.

Auditing also plays an important role in the action validation process. External auditors ensure that the methodology is properly applied. In view of challenges the need for transparency vis-à-vis the market, this is the best way to avoid being both judge and jury.