Executive Interview Series | Rebecca Liebert, President & CEO - The Lubrizol Corporation

Ally, thanks for having me. Well, let me just tell you and your watchers a little bit about Lubrizol. As you mentioned, we're a specialty chemical company. We were formed in 1928 to solve the problems for those initial automobiles. They were creaky and the engine seized up, and you needed lubrication for all of that. Over the years, we've transformed to enable cleaner fuels, better mileage of your vehicles, longer-wearing vehicles. The average car today is almost 13 years, and that's possible because of products that Lubrizol would make. In addition, in the early 2000s, we bought a former division of BFGoodrich that doubled the size of the company and expanded us into everything from health, beauty, home, and a lot of engineered products. So we're a pretty diverse company serving lots of people around the world. You probably use more Lubrizol products in products that you use every day than you know about.

Yeah, I think all those areas are definitely big focuses. But as we look at Lubrizol and using digital tools, we really see an area around innovation as the ability to leverage digital. You think about how we need products that can do things differently than ever before, and using digital tools to determine what's that next molecule you can create, how do you do it more quickly and more efficiently. Our customers' timelines have sped up so fast. We all want the next product almost before we've learned how to use the first product, and to do that, we need to speed our innovation capability. I think there's a lot of digital platforms that can help us do that, again, by getting new molecules, uncovering new molecules, knowing how to integrate them into our innovations and leverage them more fully. So a lot about innovation for us. Secondly, our customers are very interested in improved supply chains, and that really can't happen unless we get better at manufacturing and using digital capabilities in our manufacturing assets, so that we are using all the automation that are on our current equipment but then linking it even further downstream into our supply chains, our inventories, our shipping, our logistics, our inventory availability. All of that has to be linked up so we can be more or less an Amazon-like experience for the chemical industry. We have a lot of heavy lifting to do there as an industry, and I know Lubrizol as well, but we're putting our effort behind it.

Yeah, it is, because it is complex. Unlike when we go to buy something on the shelf or something that could be just shipped to our house — oftentimes it's shelf-ready, it's available. But lots of our products are made specifically for customers, and so that production time needs to be very well understood. Because if it runs over, if it takes you longer to make it than you're planning, then your supply chain gets backed up, that inventory is not going to be available, and then that available-to-promise isn't going to be readily there. So we have a lot of work to do to really link all that together, as you talked about, and it comes back to the manufacturing assets and knowing you're going to make it when you say you're going to make it and have it available.

Well, I think the biggest trend right now is sustainability. Whether you want feedstocks that are made from sustainable, biobased methods, or you want things that can biodegrade or have other types of sustainable attributes, we're going to have to track all that. And that's going to mean that we need digital information that comes from way upstream, whether it's a fermentation-based product and how that's coming into our network, or whether it's a biobased product or a fossil fuel base that might be made with lower carbon. We have to collect all that information and track it in some type of digital network, and we all need to do it in a similar way, or it's going to be almost impossible for us to add up all of that sustainable value that we're creating. So I see that as a big challenge for the industry and look forward to us all getting on some type of similar platform and similar capability set, or I think it's going to be hard for us to deliver to the customer base.

Yeah, something definitely as an industry and broader that we're going to have to do, right? Because many of those feedstocks today are not coming from our traditional industry. It was easy when they were all coming from the same subset of suppliers and the same set of plants and basically oil or natural gas. But now they're coming from anything, as I mentioned before — fermentation, and other areas. So we've got to figure out how to get all of those suppliers also working through the analysis in a consistent way.

Well, I worked at Honeywell for 12 years, and Dave Cote was the CEO, and he wrote a great book called Winning Now, Winning Later. And that was really how we operated at Honeywell those years. We would win now by doing things like continuous improvement, lean, Six Sigma, general good operations. But we would always put some of that money towards winning later, which was making sure you're investing for the future — whether you're investing in your research, your plants, your digital footprint, your capability set, your people. You have to keep investing for the future. If you just invest for today, it makes tomorrow really, really tough. And especially in the chemical industry where you have to think about assets and capability sets that you're going to need five, ten years out. So I just really urge people: think about winning now, winning later, and get your orgs thinking about it. Just putting a few pennies that you save today for the future — it will really start to add up.

Agree completely.

Ally, I just want to thank you for having me and tell everyone to stay safe. That's the right to operate in the chemical industry.

Thanks.