Gexcon is a world-leading company in the field of safety and risk management and advanced dispersion, explosion, and fire modelling. Headquartered in Norway, Gexcon has offices all around the world including the United Kingdom. Gexcon has detailed knowledge of explosion phenomena built up through years of extensive research projects and carrying out safety assessments.
Gexcon develops, maintains, and uses the industry-standard 3D CFD software for modelling gas dispersion and explosions, FLACS®, along with the industry-standard tool for modelling dust explosions, FLACS-DustEx. The FLACS Suite also includes the Gexcon 2D tools Effects & Riskcurves and the Shell 2D tools FRED / Shepherd and PIPA. The Gexcon business, especially in the United Kingdom, has grown rapidly over the past five years.
The Challenge
Five years ago, Gexcon had an inconsistent set of reporting processes and a requirement to create a business strategy using an industry-standard approach. Their aim was to align each of the local country businesses to an overall company business strategy and provide tools to simplify and coordinate centralised reporting.
The Solution
After reviewing several strategic approaches, senior management decided that the Balanced Scorecard methodology would provide them with a framework to build a successful strategy. Gexcon engaged Intrafocus to facilitate a three-day Balanced Scorecard workshop with their executive team and country managers. Sturle Pedersen, CEO at the time said:
“The three-day course was very helpful for supporting our senior management team to better understand the strategic process and how to coordinate corporate and departmental strategies, initiatives and priorities.”
Gexcon is rolling out the process and tools across the world. The United Kingdom organisation has acted as an evangelist and embraced both the process and the technology to great effect. Using the Spider Impact® by Spider Strategies® application has simplified their reporting process freeing time for their consultants to do what they should be doing, engaging with clients.
The Benefits
The initial workshop five years ago was well received and created momentum within the company to continue using a Balanced Scorecard strategic approach underpinned by the Spider Impact strategy and KPI management software. Five years on, Gexcon is still using Spider Impact to both monitor strategic output and local country Key Performance Indicators. In the United Kingdom, growth has been spectacular. Dave Price, UK President of Gexcon said:
“Gexcon UK has been using Spider Impact religiously for 5 years. With around 20% growth per annum, you can conclude that the Balanced Scorecard and the Spider Impact tool has certainly helped me achieve this consistently positive result.”
Over time, Gexcon has been able to simplify its reporting by adding more and more information to the tool and by using the new functionality, especially enhanced dashboards, that became available in the later Spider Impact releases.
