Building Resilience into the Supply Chain at Ovintiv

The disruption of the past few years has taught Vineeta Maguire a thing or two about agility and thinking on your feet.

“People are starting to get a much deeper appreciation and understanding of how everything is linked and the importance of the supply chain in our daily lives,” she says.

“For us, as a business, the challenges have accentuated these connections and underscored the importance of understanding the links. It’s also made us realize how critical flexibility and optionality are during times like this.”

Vineeta Maguire is VP Supply Chain Management at Ovintiv Inc., a North American oil and gas producer.

In this interview, Maguire discusses how Ovintiv is rising to the challenge of building flexibility and agility into its supply chain, the role of data analytics, and what the employee of the future will look like.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  How have the disruptions of the past several years affected your business?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv:  The security of supply has been a challenge at times. We’ve had so many disruptions that have stressed the system.

Inflation is adding to the difficulties, and we've had to overcome some pretty devastating weather events during the same time period.

We had severe freezing temperatures in Texas which led to electrical supply problems. The atmospheric rivers along Canada's West Coast last year washed out all the rail lines and highway infrastructure.

Supply chains are never stagnant—we’re constantly learning. How we work together in the face of these challenges is becoming increasingly critical.

Diana Davis, IX Network: When you talk about security of supply, are you referring to the security of energy supply or anything in the supply chain?

Vineeta Maguire: I’m referring to anything in the supply chain—whether it’s equipment, systems, cars, semiconductors, or baby formula.

People are starting to have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of how everything is linked and the importance of the supply chain in our daily lives.

For our business, the challenges have accentuated these connections and underscored the importance of understanding these links. It’s also made us realize how critical flexibility and optionality are during times like this.

Diana Davis, IX Network: Could you take us through an example of something that you've had to do in your company to adapt to the challenge of security of supply?

Vineeta Maguire:  We're having to plan further out—sometimes six to twelve months out. We've also had to understand each link of the supply chain and go deeper in order to understand where there could be a break in the link. We need to understand who is providing our service provider, for instance.

It's also led us to really hone in on what it takes to deliver supply chain excellence. We focus on flexibility. If something happens, what else can we do? We focus on strategic relationships. Everyone is going through a tough time, but we can help each other by not just getting the vendor of choice, but being a client of choice.

We understand that through both the good times and the tough times, we need to work together with our partners and suppliers to solve problems. I think you’re going to hear increasingly more about agility and innovation as these abilities are both becoming crucial. Preparation and planning are critical to being agile.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  What specifically are you doing at Ovintiv to get that agility?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv: We’ve expanded our business analytics, which has improved our understanding of our supply chain risks.

We don’t have to wait until something goes wrong, we start to see it in the data before it occurs. We look at a lot of signposts; the more we look, the more we understand what signposts we need to be looking out for.

We work a lot with the asset teams around what could change in their program. What's happening that could affect the supply chain?

Then we boil that down into numbers and run analytics. Analytics improve transparency and help us with sustainable innovation. We are constantly looking at ways to get better, even in small increments.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  Are analytics new to the company or is it something you've been doing for a while?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv: What’s new is that so many of our employees are involved. We have the systems, we have the tools, and we have experts in certain areas; however, everybody is becoming more aware of what analytics can show them.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  Changing tack and looking towards our Operational Excellence Week Canada event where you’ll be speaking: What does operational excellence look like at your company?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv: Operational excellence is a multifaceted word. It means something different to every company. I believe it's the agility to respond to constantly changing market conditions, having the technical know-how to do what you do extremely well, and have the key performance indicators to measure and shift when something isn't working well.

To truly be successful with operational excellence – to make it more than just a statement – I honestly believe it needs to be part of a company's DNA.

Diana Davis, IX Network: How do you structure it to embed that capability?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv: It comes down to the actual culture of an organization. When you talk about operational excellence, it comes from the leadership.

By leadership, I mean not only formal leadership, but also informal leadership. It’s the ability to see something that isn't working and have the voice to make it better. To get there, you need to talk about operational excellence a lot, focus on it and measure it.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  There's another buzzword that is milling about a lot these days: transformation. Do you think there's something new going on, or is it just a new way of referring to something that companies have always done?

Vineeta Maguire:  Transformation has been around forever. Another word for it is change.

Some organizations struggle with it while others excel.

At Ovintiv, our core values are being one team, being agile, being innovative and being driven. These are supported by our foundational values of integrity, safety, sustainability, trust, and respect.

If you have these values as a foundation, then change and transformation are not so hard because people can build off the foundation in a powerful way.

If you believe in something, you can innovate, you can try new things, and you can cope when things don’t turn out the way you expect. I think that's something our company does extremely well.

Diana Davis, IX Network: As life starts to return to the new normal, what do you think will be the big learnings and the lasting impact from the past few years on your operations?

Vineeta Maguire, Ovintiv: In my mind, the fragility of our infrastructure and systems is the new normal. That makes it so important to stay connected and understand three or four layers upstream and downstream of anything you do.

I think that we’ve realized that it is also critical to have a resilient attitude. We need to focus on what we can control rather than getting tired out by what isn’t going to work. For example, we had an equipment manufacturer who was unable to store certain components and notified us that they couldn't meet our delivery.

We understood our supply chain and how this event would impact our operations. By focusing on what we could do, we came up with a creative solution. We were able to source the components and have the unfinished equipment shipped to our site. We then had our field teams assemble the equipment in the field. This allowed us to complete the project on schedule.

I think that's going be the new normal. We need problem solvers who can find different ways to address the challenges that come up.

Diana Davis, IX Network:  What capabilities and skills do you need to get this?

Vineeta Maguire:  The employee of today - and the future - is going to need to be extraordinary. They already are. We're also giving people the voice to speak up regardless of level or role—their voice matters.

Diana Davis, IX Network: What gets you excited about your work?

Vineeta Maguire: Seeing that my effort and my team’s efforts are making a difference. It’s as simple as that. Finding solutions. Empowering people. Those are the biggest things that make me stay where I am. In every challenge that we have, I believe that our industry – and our company – is part of the solution.

Diana Davis, IX Network: What's your focus in the year ahead?

Vineeta Maguire: Execution excellence with sustainable performance is the theme of everything that we need to do. If we can focus on that – above all the talk about security of supply, inflationary risks, or geopolitical issues – we will achieve execution excellence with the extraordinary people who sustain our performance.

Interested in learning more?

Vineeta Maguire will be speaking at our upcoming Operational Excellence Week Canada taking place October 17-20, 2022 in Toronto. Hear more about how your peers are accelerating digital transformation, operationalizing sustainability, improving supply chain agility, and boosting productivity.

Join over 200 of industry professionals and over 30 world class transformation thought leaders this October. Find out more here.