The benchmarking identified a number of possible improvements, and one of West's responsibilities is to help prioritize targets. It took us eight weeks to come up with an internally developed application. We piloted it in about a month and within four months of the pilot, we had 75,000 travelers in over 60 divisions using it. But it's pushing the envelope on culture change. We've got a call center that takes reservations.
People are comfortable picking up the phone and calling.
But the CFOs in the divisions are trying to move more reservations online - and we've got online utilization up from 2 percent a year ago to around 50 percent today. Eliminating the old process was an important part of gaining acceptance for the new, West notes. Because of acquisitions, we've let non-standard processes creep in to accounts payable processing. If you're not willing to maintain a standard, you will never get the productivity that the Internet makes possible. It got GE's team thinking about the benefits of making more financial information available online for many users to see.