My Rotation: Shared Sourcing Services

For my first rotation, I was assigned to work for Shared Sourcing Services, a team which supports the Buy-to-Pay (B2P) application - a business critical standard Oracle ERP responsible for billions of dollars in orders. People from across GE’s businesses use this application primarily for non-direct material purchases ranging from a single pencil to a 5.6 million dollar bimolecular imager.

The B2P application is highly customized by the SSS team, and is constantly being adjusted. If there’s an issue or change to be made, the user must use the SSS IT Request tool, a support central workflow which handles over 1500 tickets per month. 

For my six month rotation, my primary deliverable was to design and build the second generation of the SSS IT Request tool. In order to do this, I would need to take the project through a traditional software lifecycle process, starting with requirements gathering and moving all the way through designing, building, testing, launching and providing support. I was the project manager, and the direction, speed and success of the project depended entirely on me.

When looking at the SSS It Request tool, two parties must be considered in the ticketing process: The requestors, who are the ones opening the tickets, and the experts, the ones dealing with them. To start, I knew I had to understand both group’s experiences before deciding which direction to take the project. I decided that the best way to do this would be to get up from my chair and start talking to people.

For requestors, I split my time between surveying prior users and directly observing people opening tickets in my office and through Webex. For experts, I met with the various technical leaders and consultants on my team to understand their perspective and interaction with the tool. These initial observations and conversations served as my “voice of customer” analysis, which I used to bucket the main problems into three categories: usability, performance, and functionality.

The system was tough to use for requestors. Right away, they were hit with some pretty tough questions which often led to inaccurate ticket classification (later used in reporting). To deal with this, we decided to remove some of the questions and redesign others to give requestors a more pleasant ticket opening experience.The old process map

Performance was also an issue. Some users (especially overseas) would have to wait for 4-6 seconds while a dropdown’s values loaded. When you realize that there are almost 50 new tickets every day, it’s easy to see that this is a huge issue. The goal was to increase the performance by simplifying and reducing back end calculations by 30% without affecting functionality.

Lastly, functionality needed to be addressed. Roughly 60% of the approvals needed in the tool were being done by email, which was terrible for a ticket’s audit trail. To address this, the goal was to simplify and clarify the process while automating all communication into the tool itself, rendering the need to email outside of the tool useless.

I was able to transfer the pain points of my team into actionable items from which I built goals, plans and timelines. Next, I was responsible for leading the development team through building solutions to address my customer's problems. While this was not my first time leading a team, it was my first time collaborating so extensively with IT professionals based in India, who are 10.5 hours ahead of us in EST.

My days began to take on a pretty constant rhythm: Development meetings with my offshore team in the mornings followed by analysis and planning in the afternoon. I planned each new feature to have specific action items with owners and due dates, split up and agreed on between us. It was then my responsibility to keep the big picture in mind and the project moving forward.

With the release date three weeks away and circled on my calendar, I was notified that the team leader of the offshore development team would be moving on to a different company. This was pretty scary, as we had grown into an effective team for the tasks at hand. In order to mitigate this risk, I began including the new team leader on all communications ahead of time, and when the transfer took place, the new offshore leader was able to take over without any hiccups.

For months we worked together preparing for the tool’s release into production. To ensure a smooth launch, I wrote and released technical documentation and held numerous training sessions, each tailored specifically for the audience. After months of development and testing, it was finally time to put the tool into production. I was confident that my team and I had taken every precaution.

The new, more efficient processOn the night of Friday, January 13^th, my team and I moved the new tool into production, following the checklist we had designed and agreed on weeks before. Thankfully, there were no issues that evening, and once the downtime ended, my tool remained. I had just successfully released my first application into GE’s production environment.

The benefits of the new tool could be seen by end users immediately – a simplified front end, clarity in the ticket resolution process, increased form performance, automated communication and accurately placed approval requirements. All in all, the productivity savings given by this tool will come out to roughly 21,000 hours per year (spread over the 18,000 tickets resolved annually.) So far, the feedback I’ve received from users has been great – requestors are spending less time opening tickets and experts are able to move tickets through the process faster. All in all, this is the outcome we were looking for.

Through this project, I was able to gain a deep understanding of one of GE’s largest ERPs through hands on technical experience, process design and project management. I expanded my capabilities as an IT professional through leveraging the expertise of the many brilliant individuals around me, taking every opportunity to learn from their experience, advice and perspective. I saw first-hand the importance of being customer focused, because without keeping the user’s problems in mind, your solutions may not actually be solving anything. All in all, I can’t believe I’ve had such excellent experiences just six months out of college, and I look forward to continuing my IMLP career at GE.