An Invensys makeover

It is hard to imagine a company whose roots go back 100 years to look and feel like a startup, but that is exactly what Invensys is looking like these days.
“If you take our manufacturing and automation heritage and add to that our business performance expertise and bring that together as a set of integrated solutions, we believe we have something that is unavailable anywhere else,” said Paulett Eberhart, president and chief executive of Invensys Process Systems (IPS) this morning during her keynote address at the IPS North American Client Conference in Dallas. “We are moving to become an integrated solutions company.”
With Invensys’ subsidiary Foxboro turning 100 years old this year, Eberhart knew from the first day she started 18 months ago the old way of doing things was just not going to fly.
“I found when I got here we had a huge amounts of capabilities and industry knowledge but we kind of had it scattered everywhere around the globe,” she said. “It was hard to know who had what knowledge and expertise and how we can bring that all together. We are now focused on how we can bring all that industry knowledge and technical capability and general business knowledge and how to bring that all together from a client’s perspective. And how to work with clients to uncover opportunities and issues and problems they are having.”
When Eberhart first started at IPS, she found a company that seemed focused internally and not out toward customers.
“We were very product focused, and we will continue to build and develop and invest in those products, but we also have capabilities we can bring in terms of service that can mean a total solution for our client.”
“We need to take a holistic view of solutions,” said Steve Blair, president of IPS North America. “In the past we looked at solutions on an individual basis and not with a holistic view. We need to look at solutions from cradle to grave. We need to talk about building relationships with clients, not about getting the next sale.”
When it really comes down to it, the end user does not care about what it takes for the supplier to end up getting the job done. The user just wants the job done.
Eberhart said in one of her first meetings with a client, they said for Invensys to continue getting their business, they have to “make it easy for us to business with you and you have got to be able to deliver global projects seamlessly around the globe.”
“We want to leverage our knowledge and skills, but also (the users’) knowledge and skills,” she said.
“Solutions are about the full lifecycle,” Blair said. “It’s about starting the process. It’s about how you operate your plant and it’s about how you optimize it.
This is about making sure we are maintaining our relationship with clients,” he said.
The old days of Invensys just selling products to end users are gone.
“Our existing products are important to us, but we want to continue to deliver improvement and use our entire portfolio to target solutions and partnerships," Blair said. "Fundamentally, we want IPS to work differently with our clients. We want to build up a client care model. We want to have a business conversation and we want a consultative interaction. We don’t want to wait for an RFQ. We want to get involved with you ahead of time to understand your problems and offer potential solutions in partnership with you.”