Speed to market
Leveraging the collaborative properties of the Web, across the board GE is making decisions faster and more efficiently.
Other online innovations have helped deliver substantial efficiencies in manufacturing, sales, and service. In GE Aircraft Engines, for example, the company has used the Internet to build revenue delivered from servicing its customers' engines. On the GE Aircraft Engines Web site, customers can see high-resolution photos of parts they've sent in for repair. The site describes the defect and recommends whether (and how) to fix it, saving both companies the time and cost of reviewing the part in person.
"We cut the cycle time" for such decisions "from between two to four weeks to two minutes," says Russ Mayer (pictured), GE Aircraft Engines CIO. "The customer picks up cash flow because they minimise downtime of the engines."
GE Appliances, meanwhile, uses its intranet to set up collaborative design teams on different continents, with the goal of cutting the time it takes to bring, say, a new dishwasher to market. Since each of the design and manufacturing teams can collaborate with high-resolution graphics and account for scheduling conflicts among colleagues in different countries and time zones, "we can get up to a 50 percent reduction" in the time it takes to roll out a new product, says Joe Deangelo (pictured), GE Appliance's COO. A dishwasher that would have taken 18 to 24 months to design and build, for instance, now takes as little as nine months.
One easily overlooked aspect of GE's e-business effort is that the company is getting collectively smarter about the Net, thanks to an intensive knowledge-sharing project led by Reiner. Deangelo, for one, is quick to point out that he leans on colleagues at other divisions for advice on implementing various Internet programs. One example is the division's Internet procurement system, which was built by interns in the Transportations Systems division in the summer of 1999. "That fall, we beefed it up so we could use it, and last year we bought over $1 billion worth of materials with it," he says.
For global companies with so many diverse business units, collaborating among divisions can be particularly thorny. How, for example, does an executive at one division get access to the wisdom of another executive's mistakes or successes? In some companies, the e-business team is the repository of such wisdom, and is therefore inundated with calls and e-mail from other executives. In other cases, the wisdom never leaves the executive or unit where it was spawned.
To combat this, Reiner created two antidotes. First, he holds monthly best-practices conference calls where managers log onto an intranet and explain their progress in shutting down systems that e-commerce has made expendable. On that site, managers post updates and details concerning their own best practices for everyone to see. The company uses a suite of tools from Lotus, including Sametime instant messaging and the QuickPlace collaboration service, to make these virtual meetings possible.
Reiner adds another team of e-commerce mavens who talk to managers about their best practices and spread the word throughout the company. "For that team, a defect is a best practice that other people don't know about," Reiner says.
Such e-commerce evangelism has helped change the culture within GE faster than even Reiner expected. "Frankly, until two or three years ago, GE was not IT savvy," he says. "The culture change here has been nothing short of remarkable."
