About us

Sebastien Giard is the founder of Last Line Partners.

Holding a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering from ENSAM (France) and Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), Sebastien brings more than 22 years of hands-on experience in the energy and industrial gases sectors, primarily with Air Liquide. Over the course of his career, he assumed increasing levels of responsibility, spanning large-scale plant construction and operations, regional center management, and executive leadership roles, across 10 countries as an expatriate.

This broad exposure to operations, engineering, and leadership led him to a clear conclusion: sustainable industrial performance is fundamentally driven by human factors. Building robust systems is essential; but without equal attention to how people operate, decide, and adapt under real-world conditions, performance and safety inevitably erode. This conviction motivated Sebastien to consolidate his experience and create Last Line Partners, with the purpose of supporting industrial organizations in strengthening human reliability.

Throughout his industrial journey, Sébastien enabled multiple assets to reach a higher level of safety and reliability, laying the foundations of the methods now deployed by Last Line Partners. For example, trip frequency was reduced by a factor of 5 within 3 years at one of the plants under his management. His contributions included, among others:

Deployment of ESOPs (Emergency Standard Operating Procedures) for immediate response to critical events
Comprehensive update of ERP (Emergency Response Plans), integrating ready-to-use checklists
Development of structured checklists for critical operations (pre-start-up, post-start-up, high-risk activities)
Streamlining of shift inspection sheets to enhance clarity and field effectiveness
Creation of a structured “close-the-loop” program embedding lessons learned into training and procedures
Design of a practical competency matrix with measurable progression tracking
Reduction of alarm load by up to 70% across 5 plants within 6 months
Implementation of visual management tools at field to improve situational awareness
Development of data analytics dashboards to detect weak signals through predictive KPIs
Design and roll-out of Operations Excellence Assessments across 40 plants
Design and roll-out of a Workload Evaluation Model to assess organization sustaianbility
Strengthening of regional staff awareness through aviation safety case studies
Establishment of a management system

Alongside his industrial career, Sébastien has maintained a long-standing passion for aviation. This influence naturally shapes the approach of Last Line Partners, which draws on lessons learned and proven human-factors tools from commercial aviation, a sector that has dramatically transformed its safety and reliability performance over the past decades, and adapts them to the realities of high-risk industrial operations.