Jorge Frausto

Senior Executive and CIO , General Electric Power

Supernova Award Category: 

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Organization: 

GE Power is a world energy leader providing equipment, solutions and services across the energy value chain from generation to consumption. Operating in more than 180 countries, our technology produces a third of the world’s electricity, equips 90% of power transmission utilities worldwide, and our software manages more than 40% of the world’s energy.

The Problem: 

GE Power executed various acquisitions and mergers in the past 4 years that led to increased business structure, customers, internal processes, and IT systems across 180 countries. Alstom acquisition was one of the largest that brought over 20,000 employees, 2000 customers, and more than 100 IT systems to GE Power. This increased the complexity across functions, system integrations, ERP ecosystem, and databases leading to fragmented processes & data for business transactions. As a result, Customer Satisfaction, Supplier Collaboration, Manufacturing Cycle, and Cash Position of the company were impacted.

The Solution: 

Given the situation, Jorge recognized that there was a need to transform GE Power's IT landscape fueled with innovation and disruptive technologies. To achieve this Jorge collaborated with the senior executives to establish a multi-year roadmap that set the foundation to deliver immediate value, position for growth and superior customer experience. The tenants of the strategy included:

- Simplifying ERP landscape from 74 to 6
- Reducing IT applications from 2500 to less than 500
- Standardizing 20+ global processes
- Deploy automation BOTS to save 300,000 hours of manual transactions across functions

To begin with, he matured an organization of over 200 experts across 5 countries with functional, technical and change management expertise. While Jorge and his team brought wealth of knowledge from past experiences, he instilled the culture of "agile, fail fast, learn fast". Additionally, he created an ecosystem of partners to bring outside-in prospective.

The Results: 

Executing on the Digital Enterprise Solutions roadmap, Jorge and his team were able to deliver substantial productivity of over $100M in 2018-19. Additionally, programs resulted in a simple and an agile IT organization that was able to deliver customer experience and business benefits such as reduction in Past Overdue Cash Collection, Inventory Optimization, Standard Supply Chain, Manufacturing, and Finance process, and Intelligent Process Automation across functions including Cybersecurity.

Metrics: 

Jorge and his team executed strategic digital technology programs to track and achieve key metrics in a record time such as -
1) Business productivity of over $100M
2) 18% to 15% reduction in SG&A cost
3) $1B Inventory optimization
4) 200,000 man-hours saving via Robotic Process Automation
5) 500 to 150 Legal Entity reduction
6) 74 to 6 ERP reduction
7) 2500 to <500 IT systems reduction

The Technology: 

System of Record (Strategic Long Term) - SAP and Oracle ERP, Enovia PLM, Salesforce CRM
System of Innovation - Robotic Process Automation leveraging UiPath
System of Differentiation - Predictive Analytics (Enterprise Datalake), Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning, Chatbots, OCR), Process Mining (Celonis)

Disruptive Factor: 

Deploying an ERP ecosystem aimed at standardizing the business processes coupled with Artificial Intelligence technologies such as RPA, Process Mining and Virtual Assistants, resulted in greater efficiencies in business operations and cash position of the company. For instance, Manufacturing planning process was significantly improved via automation that saved 25,000 man-hours. Additionally, financial processes like lease accounting, general ledger entry creation, finance reporting were automated saving more than 50,000 man-hours. This resulted in trust & confidence with the business leaders who became the advocates of automation as a top-down strategy for the company.

Shining Moment: 

With ERP ecosystem optimization and Robotic Process Automation in 2018-2019, GE Power team was successfully able to drive effective Organization Change Management across 80 countries by deploying Standard Systems & Processes such as Chart of Accounts (COA), Revenue Recognition 606, Sourcing, Manufacturing Process, Services, and Logistics.

About Your Organization

GE Power builds the power generation technologies we depend on today and creates the energy technologies of the future. Its innovative solutions help make power more affordable, reliable, accessible, and sustainable. Three trends shaping our electricity future - Decarbonization, Digitalization, Decentralization. A grand transformation is underway driven by next generation technologies.