Veolia Environnement

By Catherine Coulomb

In a globalised and connected world with increasing environmental regulations, to keep competitive in your industry, you need to perform on every single task your organisation embraces. But, can you be, on your own, an expert in every step of all the necessary activities contributing to your manufacturing process? As environmental constraints are increasing and evolving rapidly, do you have the relevant expertise available within your own organization to handle, in a performing way, these activities?

Outsourcing these specialised activities which are at the boundaries of your core-business seems to be a good solution and can really help you achieve this target of global performance. While you concentrate on what you are good at: your core-business, your partner brings a determinant contribution to your performance.

Veolia Environnement, an international company dedicated to environmental services in four areas: water, energy, waste management, transportation, has a several decades experience in outsourcing such services for industrial clients. This strong experience enables us to draw lessons from this market and its recent evolution.
 
Probably emphasized by the effect of economic downturn, outsourcing of non core-activities is increasing in all sectors of industrial activities. Outsourcing practice is more related to the culture and maturity of the organization of the company than to the sector of activity. Though the practice of outsourcing has existed for a long time, strong recent evolutions are definitely shaping the landscape in a new way.

From our perspective, we consider 4 main factors essential to describe the evolution:

-    environmental stakes
-    increasing cost saving requirements
-    globalisation of the market
-    enlargement of the scope of activities outsourced

1/ Environmental stakes:

Though environmental regulation has always been a major parameter of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s becoming more challenging. Anticipating future requirements is one of the key of performance.

As the dynamic of evolution is accelerating, relying on a specialized partner is a good way to mitigate the associated risks.

For example, waste-water treatment is an area where the pharmaceutical industry requires specific solutions which can only be elaborated with highly skilled companies, with strong references, able to have an overall approach of the water cycle within each plant.

Outsourcing environmental services helps to keep regulatory compliances, delivering expertise view and operation on the associated process. Nevertheless, no mistake should be made at this step: regulatory compliance remains the manufacturer responsibility, outsourcing company improves processes to make compliance easier to achieve. Thus, having a good integration of outsourcing company system of works into manufacturer’s one is essential.

2/ Increasing cost saving requirements:

Cost reduction has always been a driver to outsource activities. But, with the conjunction of globalization and economic downturn, industrial companies expect more cost savings than in the past.

This means that usual recipes are not enough. Outsourcing companies need to be more innovative in their approach and develop more synergies to reveal new savings. In fact, all levers must be activated to get the results. A deep knowledge of the involved process is necessary to identify the most relevant savings in the long term, preventing your company from excessive risks. Partnering with a company which has a relevant experience in your sector of activity is a key success factor.

3/ Globalisation of the market:

In the environmental services field, outsourcing used to be mainly a relevant local solution to face specific issues, at a local scale. As globalisation is a main trend in all the activities, you need to increase reactivity of your organization. Outsourcing appears to be a part of the solution. In fact, dealing on a global outsourcing contract brings key elements, among which we can list:
-    generation of economies of scale
-    global view of the services delivery and performance in all the installations
-    quick roll out of best practices
-    homogeneous quality of service

Organizing such a project needs a good level of maturity of your internal organization, with a good knowledge of what benefit you can get from outsourcing services and what you can’t expect. Outsourcing is not a magic wand; it’s more a step forward internal optimization, having already well established internal processes. Data management plays a structuring role in the organization.

4/ Enlargement of the scope of activities outsourced:

As a result of all the factors exposed above, the scope of outsourced activities is often bundling soft services (catering, security, janitorial,…) and hard services (energy, compressed air, water for injection, wastewater treatment,…). It aims to increase synergies in the organization and thus, improve savings and efficiency.

With this variety of services, it’s important to keep in mind that risks are not equally allocated between these activities. As hard services are generally directly contributing to manufacturing process, more attention should be put on the proposed organization to deliver them. Improving performance is, of course, essential but you also need to keep an eye on how the results are obtained, the way processes are managed and the skills on which the organization relies.

Aware of all these evolutions, Veolia as a world reference in the environmental services has developed a multiservices offer to respond the expectation of the market.

The core of the offer is a result based contract. Covering a wide range of technical services (hard and soft services), we address the major environmental issues (water, energy, wastes and logistics) associated to your industrial process whether on new built or existing plants.
Combining different technical skills as to directly manage related operations (almost no sub-contracting), our multiservices offer is shaped to deliver the best performance results on a recurrent and long term base. Encompassing site-wide activities, a global outsourcing solution can generate much more benefits than a collection of single service outsourcing solutions.

Veolia multiservices offer minimises operational risks, maximises cost savings (more than 20% savings can be achieved on a multi-years contract), guarantees a seamless quality of services, handles social issues related to personnel transfer and boosts innovation, with the convenience of a unique interlocutor managing a large scope of services.
 
Veolia’s goal in the pharmaceutical industry is to develop partnerships with customers offering worldwide the best adapted practices and organization based on its unrivalled operational experience in the environmental services.

Catherine Coulomb
Industry and Tertiary Markets Marketing Director
Veolia Environnement
Catherine.coulomb@veolia.com
Website : www.industries.veolia.com

Biography: Catherine Coulomb

Actually Marketing Director in the Industrial and Tertiary Markets Department of Veolia Environnement, Catherine COULOMB has an experience of more than 20 years in the utilities sector (within a provider, than as a consultant and now within a service company).

Joining Veolia in 2007, she develops multiservices offers dedicated to industrial clients at a worldwide scale. The pharmaceutical sector is one of the major industrial sectors for Veolia.