Air Liquide

Air Liquide – Cylinders Inventory Management Service

Air Liquide is a world leader in gases. It splits its activities across 4 business lines; Large Industries, Electronics, Healthcare and Industrial Customers. The competitive landscape is diverse and tough. With 4 main international competitors and many regional players, Air Liquide has had to develop services to supplement their core offering.

By developing these “Peripheral Services”, Air Liquide has improved customer loyalty as well as created an entry barrier, especially for the smaller regional players. In addition with the increasing commoditising of gases it is important to be seen as a partner for companies and not just as one of many suppliers. Since 1993, Air Liquide has pursued this strategy with successful results. Offering these value added services resulted in €39.5 Million in revenues by 1997. Therefore the need to innovate with respect to the offerings is very high. With global competition increasing, Air Liquide is facing a tough challenge of how to grow the business further.

Air Products is a US company that has launched a new offering called CATS. It had already launched this service in Germany and was seen by customers and competition as the next step in closer business relationships between supplier and client. The CATS offer is a comprehensive cylinder tracking solution. With the changes in regulations regarding traceability of cylinders as well as a better inventory management this type of service is exactly what customers are looking for. By launching such an offering Air Products has made a large leap forward in becoming the partner of choice for companies facing these issues. In addition, the implementation of such a service offering also provides cost savings for the client.

An important result from this service is that not only will it tie in your customers to your cylinders and therefore provide a long term revenue stream, but will the now surplus cylinders more companies...