Virtual Teams Light Up GE

Customers, suppliers linked in real time with collaboration apps

General Electric Co. is rapidly rolling out real-time collaboration tools to all 340,000 employees in a program executives say will change the way the conglomerate works internally and interacts with customers and suppliers.

The program is designed to improve information sharing and tear down geographic and cultural barriers for a company whose businesses range from plastics and light bulbs to broadcasting and financial services.

GE is rolling out Web applications from Lotus that ultimately will reach all worldwide employees across 12 divisions and be extended to thousands of suppliers and business customers.

The Lotus tools are now being used by senior managers in several GE divisions, said Gary Reiner, GE's CIO.

"People need to play with these things for a little while to get a feel for them," he said in his Fairfield, Conn., office as instant-message alerts rang in the background. "I think once people get used to them and recognize their power, they'll grow like weeds throughout the organization." The real-time tools "make e-mail seem slow," he added.

GE wouldn't say how many employees are using the applications or when all 340,000 employees will have them. But most of the necessary infrastructure is in place, and the applications will touch all business units by July, totaling 100,000 employees around the globe, executives said.

GE, which uses Microsoft Exchange for messaging, won't implement the rival Lotus Notes e-mail package but is using several applications from the Lotus Domino suite. The key tools are QuickPlace, which lets nontechnical users create shared Web workspaces, and Sametime, which provides instant messaging and real-time conferencing and application sharing.

GE also will use Domino Workflow, Domino.Doc for document management and LearningSpace for Web training. The apps will be used stand-alone, combined and in customized configurations.

The Lotus tools will immediately impact the way GE works with suppliers and customers.

While manufacturers of all stripes are benefiting from Internet collaboration to cut time, costs and inefficiencies from partner interactions, GE is going a step further. It's combining the Lotus tools with other internal systems and pulling customers and suppliers behind the firewall to work as part of GE's internal project teams.

GE Industrial Systems, which makes electrical equipment such as fuses and transformers, is the first to use the software to interact with customers and suppliers. The unit already is using a homegrown internal collaboration system, called Web City, to manage projects.

Web City breaks down projects into tasks and tracks progress. Updates are stored in virtual folders that can be viewed by other team members. Web City also lets GE Industrial Systems capture best practices and repetitive tasks and apply them to new projects.

The system, which now supports some 500 projects involving 700 users in 300 teams, consists of GE's internally built apps on top of an Oracle database.

The key to the system's success, however, is adding Sametime's and QuickPlace's ability to extend collaboration across the firewall, GE executives said. The Web City functions are being integrated into QuickPlace interfaces that bring outsiders into the Web City environment. Sametime will speed collaboration with real-time document and application sharing.

GE Industrial Systems will use the combined system to extend Web City's procedures to supplier shops so they comply with GE's own processes, such as workflow, quality control, documentation and testing procedures.

The sharing of test results in real time alone will speed production times, said Chris Fuselier, general manager of technology at GE Industrial Systems.

Partners "will be working as if they're part of our team," Fuselier said. "We think it will change the whole paradigm of how we work with suppliers."

The supplier links will be built in the next few months. Web City has internally cut 30 percent to 40 percent out of cycle times, and expects similar benefits once suppliers are integrated, Fuselier said.

On the customer side, GE Industrial Systems will revamp the way it involves customers in manufacturing projects. Currently, major customers are flown in for preliminary meetings to plan projects, then again during the development phase to observe and review status, and once again when projects enter pilot phases.

"It's going to get us a lot closer to our customers," Fuselier said. "They're going to be more involved, more frequently. We'll be much better able to meet their needs, and we think it will result in great customer loyalty."

GE also wants to do a better job of sharing best practices internally. Even so, GE isn't embarking on a formal knowledge management project in the image of Lotus' Raven initiative, which involves storing and reusing the information captured by collaboration tools.

Instead, GE is moving all information sharing onto the Web and adding real-time capabilities to existing Web collaboration processes, said Loren Douglass, global head of the collaboration initiative. GE ultimately will establish knowledge bases using tools other than Raven, he said.

The company's need to deploy now was likely a strong reason it didn't choose Raven, analysts said. Raven isn't expected to enter beta until later this spring.

Although Raven's benefits seem compelling, the software is still too immature for most companies, said Burton Group analyst James Kobielus. "It's something a lot of companies will want to evaluate," Kobielus said. "But whether it will work properly out of the box remains to be seen." n

David Joachim and Mitch Wagner contributed to this story.