Interactive practice exchange facilitation between Russian leading coal companies

SUEK, or Siberian Coal Energy Company, is one of the world's largest coal companies operating production and generation facilities in Russia and an international sales network.

RUK, or Raspadskaya Coal Company, is a Russian coal producer. Acting as a member of Evraz Group, it constitutes a coal mining and processing complex located in the Kemerovo Oblast of the Russian Federation.

ManGO! Games was tasked to help the two companies exchange valuable experiences, establish close ties, and gather insights to boost business efficiency.

Mission: Organize and run an interactive facilitation session for the two coal companies to exchange best practices in procurement management.

Background:

For a long time now, SUEK company has operated a corporate training program, mainly aimed at managerial personnel development. The special attention, meanwhile, is paid to the talent pool formation in two areas, namely procurement and regional management.

With SUEK actively involved in purchasing raw materials, equipment, machinery, etc., the entire company's efficiency depends on smart procurement management. This requires the holding's procurement managers to possess high-level supervisory knowledge and skills.

The company decided to adopt a rather unusual format to increase the procurement department's efficiency. Coming from the SUEK Procurement Director, the idea was to exchange experiences with another company that handles similar business processes, problems, and challenges. Sharing best practices in procurement management between two comparable companies was expected to produce a strong synergistic effect. Subsequently, the role of such a company was proposed to RUK.

Solution:

We chose a conference format as the solution to bring the two coal companies together.

After collecting information from the participants through electronic surveys, the ManGO! Games team initiated the scenario development. Together with the third-party event agency, we developed a program for the large-scale multiple-day event. It comprised facilitation sessions, business games, along with visits to mines, processing enterprises, wastewater treatment plants, and other facilities.

Among other things, the conference featured a series of facilitation sessions that totaled a day and a half. The event was followed by a business game focusing on negotiation as a topic of great importance to all participants. For that, we took the Winter Is Coming business game as the basis to culminate in a negotiation competition.

The rest of the time was devoted to production site visits. Conducted in a benchmark format, they were followed by a final facilitation session for the participants to draw up action plans.

The conference marked the beginning of a long-standing horizontal relationship between the two companies. During the facilitation sessions, they managed to identify common ground between the procurement managers for them to jointly address shared challenges.