IMD Annual Report 2019

119

Inside the transformation Mohamed El Amine Alaoui Sossai, OCP Senior Project Manager for Strategy and Corporate Development, explains how OCP’s partnership with IMD helped to accelerate and simplify its transformation as the industrial giant sought to define new strategic priorities from a multitude of possibilities and internal ideas. How has IMD supported transformation at OCP? In an objective to support its ambition to expand beyond itscorecommoditybusiness, OCP incubated and supported many internal initiatives. IMD is currently helping OCP to prioritize the most impacting initiatives, and foster their execution, supporting them with IMD content expertise and transformation and learning consulting Why is transformation important for OCP? It is key for us to capture growth outside of our traditional commodity business to cope with the fast moving technological and environmental innovations that the world is facing. Those challenges and disruptions will reshape our industry. They are both threats for stagnant companies and opportunities for the ones who are continuously innovating. Thus, transformation is key for OCP, like any other company. How is OCP looking to capture new growth? During the last decade, OCP went through an important transformation. We increased capacities to become the biggest phosphate producer in the world, reduced cost to be among the most competitive players, and increased our industrial and commercial flexibility to meet market demand.

The company is looking now toward delivering its next S-curve, based on three-core pillars: human capital, innovation and digital. OCP, for instance, is developing a new “farmer centric” approach to understand the farmer and its ecosystem, with the ambition to create innovative and sustainable products and solutions tackling customized farmers’ needs. What I find great about this approach with IMD is that it is simple but really efficient. It starts first with a diagnostic that allowed us to have global visibility across all of our opportunities portfolio. We then worked to prioritize them using pragmatic criteria, while being sure we had the buy-in of top management to accelerate the ones we had selected. Through their expertise, IMD helped by providing some benchmarks and best practices from different industries and geographies. How has IMD helped OCP develop its strategic priorities?