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Case Studies > GE® Gains Better Visibility into Channel Sales

GE® Gains Better Visibility into Channel Sales

Technology Category
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
  • Utilities
  • Renewable Energy
Applicable Functions
  • Sales & Marketing
  • Business Operation
Use Cases
  • Track & Trace of Assets
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Supply Chain Visibility
Services
  • System Integration
  • Data Science Services
The Challenge
When investing in partners to drive program performance, internet business-to-business (iB2B) channel suppliers like GE Automation rely heavily on point-of-sale (POS) data from partners to power everything from customer intelligence to sales compensation. The ability to collect and use this information is crucial to GE’s ability to operate with transparency and enable effective sales processes. With its data in disarray, GE struggled to calculate accurate sales commissions, spent weeks matching POS data to opportunities and lacked any information on sell-through for all but the largest partners. GE realized that to achieve their goals of increased visibility and better sell-through, they would have to perform an entire overhaul of their data processes. This overhaul would require cleaning up the customer data stored in GE’s Salesforce database to eradicate issues like duplicate data and inconsistent naming conventions, amongst many others.
About The Customer
GE Automation & Controls is a division of GE, the world’s Digital Industrial Company, transforming industries ranging from aviation to renewable energy with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE Automation & Controls offers turnkey solutions for full power plant automation, control and safety, as well as standalone industrial automation products for a variety of other industries. With 2,500 employees in 30 countries dedicated to customer success, this division of GE automates the processes that generate half of the world’s power. A third of major metropolitan areas rely on GE control systems to help provide electricity to citizens. GE Automation & Controls leverages hundreds of channel partners across the globe to get local inventory to customers and provide technical expertise on GE products.
The Solution
GE began by considering the benefits and costs of a manual data overhaul, but came to the conclusion that this approach would ultimately prove to be too time-consuming and would prevent GE from establishing an automated data management process. The other option was to find a specialized vendor with a solution built to automate the overhaul. This solution would also have to tackle the ongoing data management process. After evaluating multiple vendors and with a consensus from a number of internal teams across a variety of departments, GE selected e2open to drive its new channel data management (CDM) process. GE began its data integration and collection overhaul with e2open during the summer of 2016. As a key part of the integration, the data that e2open’s platform collected began flowing into GE’s Salesforce instance and was immediately integrated into its data warehouse. E2open’s technology officially went live with all GE channel partners on January 1, 2017.
Operational Impact
  • E2open has provided GE with more transparency and better access to inventory data, which has reduced the cost of inventory in the channel, as well as the likelihood of stock-outs.
  • The e2open CDM platform allowed GE to start collecting inventory data from distributors, which made it possible to recommend products for distributors to order based on their improved view of similar distributors’ inventory levels.
  • Newly gleaned insights also enabled GE to avoid stock-outs by finding nearby distributors to ship products when normal distributors lacked inventory.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Reduced inventory spending and stock-out issues.
  • Eliminated unnecessary administrative tasks for sales teams.
  • Dramatically improved the speed, accuracy, and detail of channel partner reports.

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