Francesc Güell
Francesc Güell provides support and professional coaching to companies, organisations and executives in entrepreneurial initiatives, business excellence, integrated management processes, knowledge management and innovation. He founded his own firm, fguell iniciatives s.l. in 2002, and is a partner of Delos Partnership.
Since 2001 until 2004 he was collaborating with Oliver Wight, developing management courses and consulting.
Previously he gained wide experience as Managing Director and Board Member of international specialty chemical & pharmaceutical companies. From 1999, he was Managing Director of Goldschmidt España 1999, integrating two companies and forming the new Degussa in 2001.
Since 1996, he was Managing Director of Witco-ODG Europe, Member of the Board of Witco GmbH, Member of Witco ODG (USA) Global Business Team and Managing Director of Witco España. With four production sites in Europe, he was the European executive sponsor of the Class A project. He also chaired the S&OP process for Witco ODG Europe. The initiative delivered substantial improvement in results in all business processes, planning and control (ERP), Continuous Improvement (CI), cross functional teams (HPWT), strategic planning and new product development (PACE). Key Performance indicators were also developed and implemented.
Since 1992 he was Board Member and Managing Director of Witco España. In that period substantial investments were placed to enlarge production capacity of the Spanish site, providing new distributed control systems (DCS) and a new ERP management system. He reformulated the business strategy, integrating strategic units and focusing the company into customer satisfaction, process orientation and continuous improvement.
From 1978 to 1992, he was Board Member and Managing Director of Rewo Química S.A. and Managing Director of the Chemical Division of Schering España S.A. With the strong company's growth, a new site was developed in Granollers (Barcelona), built a new specialty chemicals and surfactants plant, inaugurated in July 1987.
From 1969 to 1978 he was developing the surfactants business in Hispano Química Houghton, and from 1975 he was responsible for International & Export Business in the same company. He developed a new international business, based in chemical specialities for metal working, textile, tannery and other industries.
He was also President of the Organisation Committee of CESIO World congress in Barcelona 1996 and Vice-President of the Spanish Surfactants Association.
His academic background is in Industrial Chemical Engineering, postgraduate in Business Administration in ESADE (Barcelona) and Master in Knowledge Management in ICT UPC (Barcelona) in 2002. He has participated in several educational programmes, courses and seminars in ESADE, IESE, EADA (Barcelona) as well as in the Management Centre Europe, Brussels.
He is author of articles about chemical industry in Spain and Europe, Knowledge Management, Integrated and Change Management, business excellence and Innovation.