GE Capital Solutions
Reference: M. François Asselin, VP Quality
I had the privilege to work with Analystik for 9 years as VP Quality, GE Capital. We adopted a leasing application developed by Analystik, SUM (SALES UTILITY MANAGER), which won the world-wide prize in 2001 for the best productivity tool, for General Electric.
François Asselin, VP Quality
The initial situation:
GE Capital of Canada was financing very valuable equipment throughout Canada. In order to do this, 150 account directors in 14 offices across Canada were using several different non-aligned and competing programs to manage client accounts, draw up quotations and generate contracts. The sales cycles were very complex, and closings could sometimes take many days or weeks. Contractual errors were normal. As well, the break-even point per employee was often high because of the high degree of training required. In fact, the whole sales cycle was too complex, over-burdened and seriously handicapping the employees of GE Capital’s ability to compete.
The Challenges and Objectives
It was necessary to simplify the sales cycle in order to increase the productivity of the employees and grant them more autonomy, reduce errors and training time. It was also necessary to offer electronic communications and as well as standardized documents. In fact, it was necessary to reduce each task to essentials, to the tasks that were value-added, so that they could be evaluated against established business performance measurements.
As GE is a world leader in management as well as in very advanced technology, it is therefore very rare that GE would hire a firm the size of Analystik to automate a process critical to their growth. Remember that one of the challenges of this mandate was to optimize and to conserve all the knowledge of GE Capital contained in the sales cycle which is comprised of many business processes; sales and client relations; risk evaluations; the return on equity (ROE); and contract creation which includes all relevant legal clauses, etc.
The Solution
Analystik developed and integrated SUM (SALES UTILITY MANAGER), a customized ERP software solution summarizing all facets of the sales cycle. It includes all business processes and allows the account managers to work both off- and on-line. SUM incorporates advanced functions of Knowledge Management, allowing managers to make sound and enlightened decisions regarding process efficiency as well as the productivity of the account managers. It also displays the functions of CRM which allows account directors to create highly personalized, intelligent and proactive customer relationships.
SUM is used daily by all GE Capital account directors, their assistants and administrative personnel, using both on- and off-line modes. This project up to now has logged in more than 25,000 man-hours. It is without argument the most important project for Analystik and the most convincing example of our expertise.
The Benefits
- 20% annual sales growth since adopting SUM
- A 7-10% increase of account managers’ productivity
- Error reduction of 96%
- Time to produce special project rates reduced from 4 hours to 5 minutes
- Quotation production time reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes
- Processing of credit application time reduced from 5 hours to 35 minutes
- The credit department’s response time is now within 48 hours for 92% of the requests
- Reduced training period for new employees
- Total elimination of unprofitable business practices
- Account managers can dedicate the major portion of their time to creating ‘value-addeds’ for their clients
- Significant increase of autonomy and productivity of account managers in both on-and off-line modes, thanks to the Mobility Solution
- A flexible, user-friendly and fluid system through dynamic field-by-field data
- Synchronization
- A more streamlined paper flow
- Integrates perfectly with Word, Excel and Exchange
