| |February 20199(and rightfully so). The focus for ERP now needs to be on driving a rich user experience with customized personas of roles being performed. Digital-savvy em-ployees entering the workforce do not want complex manuals and training guides to use our systems. Rather, they want their digital work experience to be no different than their social life or personal use of technology. As a result, we are investing in social platforms to drive collaboration across common func-tions to solve problems much faster, and we are also embracing mobility. We are experimenting with how to eliminate the human key board interface with tech-nologies such as holo lens to bring in 3D visualiza-tion to our processes and voice activation to complete transaction entries.Changing Role of CIOs:The role of the CIO has dramatically changed. The IT organization is one of the few functions in a modern global business environment that has a holistic view of the entire business and can connect nearly all func-tions. The lines are now being blurred between CDO/CIO/CMOs, and this is a good thing. CEO's recognize that leveraging digital capability can help drive out cost, increase revenue, and directly impact share price. At GE, our supply chain leaders now talk regularly to our CIOs internally as they make decisions on pur-chasing intelligent machines that can be connected to our digital brilliant manufacturing suite of appli-cations for performing predictive analytics. Our prod-ucts are now being manufactured keeping software and data in mind. We are leading the charge of the new digital industrial world. Within GE Power, our equip-ment powers approximately 1/3 of the overall world's electricity needs, so there is tremendous opportunity to continue driving a new digital industrial future. We are working towards a digital world where we can dig-itize our assets to drive more optimization and value for our end customers. Using Technology to Curb ERP Cost ERPs should be focused on achieving or supporting business outcomes. The outcomes should justify the cost. Within GE Power there are multiple ways we are looking at optimizing the overall cost of our ERP pro-gram. We are leveraging bots to digitize all our regres-sion testing needs. We work horizontally to leverage a single team across GE to manage data conversions, testing and to develop our integrations. Within GE we have built digital hubs, which provide these services to all our different business units so we can get the ben-efit from the economies of scale. We are also building a DevOps model to make ourselves accountable for the ERP software that we roll out. We are experimenting with collaborative tools to optimize the cost of change management. There are a few levers that we are ex-ercising to optimize our ERP costs but at the end the business outcomes should justify the investment.4. Reaping Out ERP Value: ERP is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing culture of continuous improve-ment. Mining transactional data from ERP and opera-tions data provides business insights with opportuni-ty to drive revenue growth or cost out opportunities. For example, equipment monitoring in the field pro-vides insights into predicting equipment failure, ser-vice outages. This equipment insight with ERP trans-actional data can help determine the appropriate stocking levels of critical parts and avoid stock outs. The net impact is avoided downtime for a customer who needs parts for a power plant urgently (as an ex-ample). GE is building capability to transform our-selves and our customers into digital industrial com-panies, and having a single view of global operations helps drive out cost in the supply chain. We can identi-fy quality issues in the manufacturing process, com-pare this across geographies and can determine if the issue is related to product design, varying manufac-turing process, or even human error. The possibilities for ERP driving improvement are nearly endless. C IJorge Frausto
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