Case study · Chemical manufacturing
Air Liquide North America: from maintenance managers to the entire frontline
Air Liquide’s Large Industries North America business turned one custom training program into three engagements in a matter of weeks, adding a 100-seat frontline course rollout and a Plant Managers Conference before the original program had even wrapped up.
Hybrid
online and F2F workshop
~30 managers
and their maintenance teams
100
frontline staff
The client
About Air Liquide Large Industries North America
- Industry
- Chemical manufacturing
- Location
- United States and Canada; delivered from Houston, Texas
- Engagement
- Custom nine-week hybrid training program (live online cohort plus two-day workshop), a half-day Plant Managers Conference, and a 100-seat rollout of the PS400 online course for the frontline
- Timeframe
- First contact June 2025; program delivered February–April 2026; frontline rollout ongoing
- Scope
- Cohort of around 28 maintenance leaders, plus 100 frontline seats
The problem
The challenge
Air Liquide’s Large Industries North America organisation runs plants across the United States and Canada, and those sites largely operate independently, which is exactly how silos form. The company wanted its maintenance managers and coordinators working from one common foundation: a shared understanding of the core processes that improve and sustain maintenance and reliability performance in industrial plants.
The enquiry came to Reliability Academy in mid-2025, after Erik Hupje’s material had been shared internally at the VP level. And from the start, the brief had a condition built in: this could not be training for training’s sake. It had to end in committed action.
The solution
What we did
Reliability Academy designed a custom nine-week blended program for the cohort. Over the first six weeks, participants attended ten live online sessions covering the four elements of the Road to Reliability Framework™: planning and scheduling, preventive maintenance, defect elimination, and leadership and culture. Erik held one-on-one onboarding calls with every participant, and between sessions each participant used structured self-assessment tools to score their own site, turning the training into a diagnosis of where each plant actually stood. Two Q&A weeks followed, in which each site drafted its own reliability improvement plan.
Then the cohort met in person. On 30–31 March 2026, about 28 maintenance coordinators, turnaround managers, zone managers and maintenance managers from across the US and Canada gathered in Houston for a two-day planning and scheduling workshop, deliberately seated in mixed table groups to break down the site silos. The workshop converted nine weeks of learning into four agreed improvement standards (a Work Request Quality Standard, a Prioritisation Framework, a Job Plan Standard and a Close Out Standard) each with a named owner, a timeline and KPIs, plus two initiatives requiring corporate-level decisions.
Air Liquide then asked for one more thing: brief the leaders whose support the improvement work would depend on. Erik extended his stay and on 8 April 2026 delivered the Plant Managers Conference: a half-day session for close to 30 participants, including all plant managers, some maintenance managers, the Vice President and other corporate roles. It covered what the maintenance teams had just completed, what the self-assessments showed, and the specific behaviours these leaders needed to own to make the four improvements stick.
The third expansion had already landed before the cohort even met in Houston. In late March 2026, Air Liquide purchased 100 seats of PS400: Maintenance Planning & Scheduling for the Frontline, extending the same thinking from the managers who run the process to the technicians and operators who live it. Reliability Academy supports the rollout with weekly progress reports to the client’s leadership.
The outcome
The results
Air Liquide doesn’t publish plant-level maintenance KPIs. What’s measurable from our side is the program’s growth and what participants said about it.
- One custom program became three engagements: the nine-week hybrid program, the Plant Managers Conference, and a 100-seat frontline course rollout, the last two added while the original program was still running.
- The Houston workshop ended with four improvement standards agreed, owned and scheduled for implementation by year-end, not a parking lot of ideas.
- Of the first 38 frontline staff to complete PS400, feedback averaged 4.3 out of 5 overall (content 4.3, resources 4.3, experience 4.2, video 4.2).
Client feedback
What a participant said
It was all really great training material. I believe all maintenance and operations leadership should have to take this course.
What’s next
Build the same capability in your team
Want your frontline to understand planning and scheduling the way Air Liquide’s does? Start with PS400: Maintenance Planning & Scheduling for the Frontline →
See what this could look like for your team
A 30-minute call with Erik: your operation, your gaps, and whether this is the right fit. No pitch deck.