General Electric Power

The Client

GE Power, located in Schenectady, NY, concurrently manages about 200 projects. These projects are based around the globe in such locations as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and The Netherlands. Each project handles hundreds of thousands of paper documents and routes them--for the most part-- manually. McFadyen Solutions partnered with GE to provide EDMS solutions to manage and automate the document and workflow needs of these projects.

The Business Challenge

At GE, various types of documents are tracked including letters, memorandums, minutes of meetings, drawings, and design specifications. The volume of incoming documents to be tracked is enormous, documents have traditionally been copied and routed among team members. GE's paper documents are ultimately indexed and filed into filing cabinets. One goal of the implementation was to eliminate much of the large, physical space necessary to store the vast quantities of documents. More importantly, however, was the goal of having immediate retrieval capability of documents in electronic form directly to an end-user's desktop, while maintaining document security.

The team developed an Action Item Management System for tracking action items. It replaces the manual process of creating, assigning, and completing action items. Further, the absence of mail system delays allows for quicker response time among GE members and, ultimately, to GE customers. Guided by the Six Sigma efforts, this system also captures data used to measure GE's response time to customers.

Finally, in addition to managing documents and action items, GE can now track project management information, such as project members, companies, topics, and various product and function codes.

The Return on Investment

The solution designed by McFadyen Solutions handles all documents exchanged between GE and its partners, vendors and customers through the duration of a project incoming and internal documents of all types and sizes are scanned and stored electronically. This solution meets the goal of replacing the internal document routing and distribution process. With the new solution, this process has been completely automated, thus eradicating tedious delays inherent in enterprise internal and external mail systems.

The Technology & Project Deliverables

The initial analysis and design was completed within two months and these prototype developments and business presentations sparked great interest in additional EDMS projects. The implementation team was expanded and goals were modified to accommodate 10 new projects at GE.

Summary of Deliverables

• Requirements Analysis of approximately 12-15 projects.
• Design of approximately:
  • 15 tables
  • 50 customized windows
  • 20 workflows
  • 12 queries
  • 15 MS Access Reports via an ODBC connection
• Training of more than 150 end-users and administrative users
• Documentation of :
  • Installation Steps
  • System Configuration
  • Training Manual
  • User Manual- Design Specifications
• Support to a team of more than 150 users