Integrating the global enterprise using Six Sigma: Business process reengineering at General Electric Wind Energy

This paper describes the risks involved in business process reengineering (BPR) when a large enterprise company acquires small fast-growing companies to power its own growth engine. Integration of business processes across disparate organizations with different cultures requires careful planning and involves process automation, globalization, system selection, downsizing, and information security. It is important to streamline and automate processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce operating cycle times. Ideally, during reengineering, processes should be built from scratch based on evolving business needs, changing market conditions, as well as innovations in technology. Business realities, however, often force organizations into redesigning peripheral business processes while keeping the core process intact. This helps avoid disruption of organizational operations and allows for more flexible time constraints during implementation. Several compromises must be made during this redesign. This paper presents a framework for BPR using a structured analytic approach to make business decisions. The paper discusses the case of BPR at General Electric Energy's Wind Division to integrate business operations across its globally dispersed acquisitions. The effort involved defining metrics for redesign, identifying alternate tools and processes, and evaluating the alternatives through those metrics employing Six Sigma methodology. The goal of this work is to demonstrate our approach that abstract best practices for process integration across global engineering corporations developed over time at General Electric.