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By STANLEY W. KANDEBO/EVENDALE, OHIO Finance Section General Electric Aircraft Engines has created a customer-based Internet site aimed at boosting productivity, strengthening customer relationships and promoting e-business activities between the engine-maker and its clients. GEAE's Customer Web Center is aimed at boosting productivity and enhancing communications with its customer-base. A test version of the site for use by a select number of customers has been up and running since January. Full launch for all customers is anticipated in the second quarter of this year. To date, customer reaction has been positive. "The reception has been incredible. They've been floored with the plan, and ever since we went live they've been telling us they want more, more, more," John Rosenfeld, global e-commerce leader at GE Aircraft Engines, said. GEAE currently has about 300 customers for its products, and many have been exposed to the Web site. Since the concept took shape at the engine-maker last May, one-and-a-half-day demonstrations have been given to about 25 targeted airlines and leasing agencies. Another 100 or so clients also have come in contact with the site through presentations given at GEAE's annual customer technology briefing. The most recent one, Tech2000, was held in Phoenix in February. Exploded drawings of engine assemblies are just one feature on GEAE's Web site. GE90, CF6-80C2 and CF34 data are now available. About 20 customers already are taking advantage of the site's benefits, including Delta, Alitalia, Continental, All Nippon, Lufthansa, LanChile, Qantas and JAL. These clients are helping to guide the evolution of the site, David Overbeeke, general manager of e-business at GEAE, said. GE is not only using the site with outside customers, it's also using it at its overhaul and repair facilities to order parts, check service bulletins and maintain engine status records. GE subcontractors and suppliers are being encouraged to join in the company's e-business strategy through a separate supply-chain Web center. In fact, some 500 of the company's suppliers, about 80% of the total, are linked by personalized sites on the Web. These allow GE to access schedules, shipping dates and other data, John Whitenack said. He is GEAE's e-supply chain leader. "Data transfer, records management and inventory control are all areas GE Aircraft Engines can improve on through Internet use," Rosenfeld said, and many of those activities have been addressed in the first version of the site that is now up and running. As time goes on, the capabilities of the site, and the services it offers, will expand. GEAE has ambitious augmentation plans in place and has already upgraded some of the functionality of the site's initial offerings. Improvements such as online engine records and configuration management tools, self-help support including animated engine disassembly techniques, online training and three-dimensional, rotating views of parts and components should be added about every 60 days this year. An online, technically oriented "chat room" where customers can share information also is planned for this year. Substantial resources have been devoted to the e-business activity, including about 75 full-time employees who have been assigned to the company's e-business group. GEAE also has 16 six-sigma black belts working throughout the company to spread the e-business philosophy. Called "e-belts," these individuals hold a mandate to seek out potential e-business opportunities within the GEAE organization and implement solutions. Outside contractors also have been brought on board to help. SpaceWorks in Rockville, Md., provided transactional software that allows GEAE site-users to order components, research inventory availability and verify orders and shipping status. Enigma in Burlington, Mass., also assisted. Their software contribution deals with content, automating GEAE's data delivery and allowing site-users to navigate between service bulletins, illustrated parts catalogs and engine manuals. GEAE is far from being the only organization within General Electric to be involved in e-business activities. GE Medical, GE Power Systems, GE Appliances and others are emphasizing Internet solutions to attack business inefficiencies and boost productivity. But, according to Rosenfeld, Aircraft Engines holds the lead in focusing so intensely on customer productivity enhancement. GEAE's extranet activities are divided into several sections, and the name of each is taken from its main task. They include: inform, transact, warranty, collaborate, communicate, support and Customer Web Center. Two additional areas, train and wizards, will come online later this year. Train will provide online training and tutorials to reinforce previous training. In some instances it may even replace current sessions of classroom-based introductory engine training. Wizards will allow customers to play "what if" with potential engine upgrades by calculating benefits upgrades could give a specific client in terms of shop visit rates, cost of ownership and money saved. The inform portion of the existing site holds illustrated parts catalogs, engine service manuals and online service bulletins, the equivalent of about 1 million pieces of information per engine, Rosenfeld said. Products already online are the GE90, CF6-80C2 and CF34 powerplants. Similar data on the rest of the company's stable of commercial engines should be available within the next quarter. To get a feeling for the potential cost and labor saving involved with eliminating paper mailings, officials point out that CFM International, a GE/Snecma join t engine company, annually prints and ships about 30 million pieces of paper related to engine bulletins and manuals. The ability to e-mail these documents, eliminating the cost and inefficiency associated with paper mailings, would have a tremendous effect on the corporate bottom line. And while the FAA has not yet accepted the Web as an official medium for transmitting secure digital data, they probably will soon, Rosenfeld said. In fact, GEAE is working with other industry leaders to assure the reliability of, and security surrounding, digitally transmitted technical data, Overbeeke said. Once that happens, documents such as service bulletins will be instantly available to all of the site's users. In fact, automatic service bulletin notification via e-mail has already been added to the site. Also on the horizon is an editing capability that will enable a user to customize and repackage these documents to suit his own needs. Another capability already available is a search feature that allows site-users to easily find and identify specific engine components. "When you click on an assembly drawing, the site will keep taking you deeper into the visualization, down to the bolt level," Rosenfeld said. At each step, part numbers are available for everything onscreen. Using this system, "a customer can determine a part number even if his knowledge is limited to what a part looks like." And that part number can then be used to generate an order through the transact portion of the site. "Transact not only allows customers to order parts, it also supplies price and availability information. It will even search for relevant part numbers if only the first three digits of a part are known," Rosenfeld said. The system is equipped with order management features that save and retrieve prior parts lists so reorders associated with specific overhauls don't require generating a completely new list. According to Rosenfeld, the site can help determine the status of any order, provide shipping dates and send an e-mail to notify a customer that an order has been shipped. In upcoming months the site also will provide summaries of a company's total parts expenditures with GE. Another feature will enable it to automatically send notices to supervisors at a client company if one of their buyers requires an authorization signature for a GE order. Other capabilities coming to this portion of the site will allow clients to order engine accessory parts directly through GE. The warranty portion of the site has been developed to manage claims in an expeditious manner and to decrease the physical labor needed to track them. Customers can reference previous claims as well as submit claims. The site's "collaborate" area holds the promise of expediting repairs by helping to determine exactly how a damaged component or part should be dispositioned. For example, by posting historical, high-resolution photos of damaged components for visual inspection, GE engineers and customers can discuss, over the Web, whether a part can indeed be repaired. If so, they can then decide which of the company's recommended repair techniques is most applicable. "This should help eliminate the schedule and cost ambiguity often associated with parts repair," Overbeeke said. To date, only photos of damaged high-pressure turbine blades have been posted. Low-pressure turbine blade images should follow this summer. Engine nozzles and cases will come next. Besides assisting component disposition, an upcoming expansion to this area will provide trend analyses, so clients will be able to see how their parts are holding up against fleet norms. The communication portion of GE's site is centered on keeping the customer informed about the status of any engine he has in any of General Electric's overhaul and repair shops. By providing proper codes and passwords, a customer can now access engine receipt reports, cost estimates and lists of what might have been missing when an engine arrived at the shop. "We eventually want to add all shop tra nsactions and reports to the site, and we expect to have this capability in the next few months," Rosenfeld said. Support is also an important function of the site, and Web-based applications have been developed to aid workers staffing the company's round-the-clock Customer Support Center. It was launched last year with capabilities beyond those already available to patrons calling GE's 800 help number. In the next few months, Center personnel will be able to call up historical reports, frequently-asked questions and other data concerning GE aircraft engines. But more is coming. For months, staffers have been keeping records of every request for help that comes into the Center, accumulating a wide-ranging database. "When you call in or contact us on the Web, each query opens a case file," David L. Joyce, general manager of product support at CFMI, said. Eventually, Support Center staffers will have the capability to use artificial intelligence-based tools on the Web to search all of those logged cases each time a call comes in for help. "These case-based reasoning tools will allow CFMI and GE to capture the intelligence of all the technical teams responding to queries, and will help us leverage that the next time a question comes in," Joyce said. Today, word-search systems are used to scan the case files. One of the most important components of the GE site is the Customer Web Center, available at https://customer.geae.com. Through user names and passwords, clients can enter into the site to access their own custom-tailored page. In addition to opening up all the site's transactional and tracking capabilities, each unique page in the customer center also will display a series of metrics. These graphically represent specific quality statistics and performance parameters such as engine shop visit rates or maintenance costs--things that customers want to track and eventually improve. The graphics focus on about a half-dozen specifics that are determined jointly by the airline and GE or CFMI. Collectively they are referred to as a "dashboard." These have been in use at GE and CFMI for several years in a nonelectronic format, and are an outgrowth of GE's six sigma philosophy. They also have a proven track record. "The dashboard is a scorecard to assess our performance, but it's also a communications vehicle used by GE and CFMI to set goals and improvement targets with customers," Joyce said. CFMI also uses it as a tool to ensure the company is applying correct resources, in the right quantities, to the right places.
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