Ge Digital Revolution: Redefining E in Ge

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Lastly, e-business team should be involved and be in touch with operation units and other functional groups within their own business units. At the same time people in the operational units should have access to the of e-business teams’ functions and developments relevant to their business units. This will allow for better information flow, knowledge flow, encourage learning , new insights from different functions, idea generations and keeping in touch with changes within the business units.

Segment 3: Implementation

For each focus area in e-business (e-buy, e-sell and e-make), GE plastics should assign a team of 20 to direct them into a more specific, reachable, and attainable, goals and achieve tangible outcomes and results. What it means is that the initial GE Plastics’ 60 person team will be now divided into 3 teams- one team will be focusing on sales and building relationship customers, the other will be looking at online purchasing opportunities and the last will be figuring out the digitalization of processes. In terms of developing new methods of work procedure, each team will come up with matrices to prioritize the targets and goals and measure its relative impact and importance on e-business success/failure. The matrixes will enable to identify which functions of the e-business development in focus areas attributes most to revenue generation/cost saving. The matrixes will help accommodating the conclusions as to whether the e-business practice can be applicable and transferable across business units.

The second implementation stage in GE Plastic is to create systematic tracking, reporting and review procedures in order to keep track of the trajectory of development progresses within each focus area of e-business initiative. The procedures will be developed using project management tools. The procedures consist of using the estimation tools generated from work breakdown structure to produce most realistic estimate, recording actuals and estimates of effort, time and result spent on each project tasks and goals, reporting of those data and information continually to top management in its own form of calendar operating system within every 2-3 weeks’ time frame, and conducting post project reviews to provide an opportunity for the team to reflect on how the last project went and to capture lessons learned that will help enhance the future performance.

To establish cross-functional collaboration and to allow access of knowledge flow between GE Plastics’ e-business unit and operation and functional units, e-business team members will be allocated a specific amount of hours per week back to their recent functioning unit they worked before signing on to e-business initiative. Furthermore, all 3 teams will draft the leaders of operations units every month with regards to changes and latest developments in e-business.

Segment 5: How recommended strategy address critical issue

As implementation state suggests, the division of GE Plastics’ 60 person e-business team into 3 teams allocated for each focus area (e-buy, e-sell and e-make) and each team having matrices with proper performance/target/prioritization measurement variables, will allow each team to focus on the specific objectives required, prioritization of tasks that has the most impact on focus areas’ success, development of short term goals, management of the expectation of long term goals, the relevant applicability and transferability of its e-business practices across businesses units without losing strategic sight in the process of rapidly changing environment in GE.

Placing efficient reporting, tracking, and feedback procedure in the system will help top management better understand the process of e-business functions, comprehend long term and short term achievable goals , make accurate forecast, give actionable directions to each team. Moreover, team member themselves will have a tangible record of data to track their own progress over a period of time and make changes to goals/target/priorities when necessary.

Allowing the team to involve with operational unit in GE Plastics will not only increase team members’ confidence and motivation in terms of their contributions and roles within the business unit, it will also permit information and knowledge flow within two functioning work units.