Électricité d’Haïti: HEC Montréal trains executives and managers

March 21, 2013

Starting in March and until September, HEC Montréal will be running two concurrent training programs in Haiti, one for Électricité d’Haïti (EDH) executives and the other for the company’s managers, as part of the program to rebuild the country’s power distribution network. HEC Montréal won the international call for tenders by invitation for this project in June 2012. The project is being funded by the Inter-American Development Bank.  

Sixteen EDH executives are participating in the first phase of the program, aimed at preparing a five-year strategic plan for the utility. This crucial, intensive training includes a seminar in strategic planning, a company diagnosis and a case study, to be followed up with training and coaching workshops during which the EDH executives will draft the five-year strategic plan.

At the same time, some one hundred managers will be taking 20 seminars (46 days’ training), over a 6-month period. The topics range from strategic management in the energy sector to customer service, commercial process improvement, receivables management, business process re-engineering, management skills, management accounting, project management and a dozen other equally useful subjects.

The academic director for this program is Professor Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a recognized expert in energy-sector public policy, particularly for electricity. A total of 14 HEC Montréal professors and full-time lecturers and 2 technical experts will be sharing their expertise with EDH executives and managers.

The EDH proposal was prepared by the HEC Montréal Overseas training for managers and executives (FCDI) team, part of the Commercialization, Technology Transfer and Executive Training Department.

“We are especially proud to have won this call for tenders. It was no small feat for our team to put together so many players and deliver this major project in just six months,” says FCDI Director Hassan Taghvaï. “This mandate is a chance for HEC Montréal to help update and strengthen EDH, a company we have been working closely with for over 15 years.”  

HEC Montréal has been offering various customized executive and managerial training programs in energy management both locally and internationally since 1986. These programs have been run in China, Mexico, Algeria, Tunisia, Malaysia, Singapore and Colombia, among other countries. In the early 1990s, seven EHC managers came to Montréal for a specialized graduate program in energy management. Then, in the late 1990s, HEC Montréal offered a customized training program for EDH executives and managers in Port-au-Prince.

There are currently some forty HEC Montréal graduates living or working in Haiti.