Technology Strategies Anticipated to Accomplish Business Goals

GE Lighting Division's expectations for SharePoint were not realized, and as a result, the division moved to adopt a globally-based Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system that includes integration to both reseller order capture and distributed order management systems so that all channel partners could place orders and track them through manufacturing to fulfillment. GE Lightings' channel management had found that through discussions with resellers that of all applications designed for the five objectives, having a coordinated order capture and order management system was critical. Second, the objective of managing pricing both in terms of quotes and handling pricing exceptions was accomplished through the development of a Special Pricing Request application. As Columbus (2003) has stated, the automating of special pricing requests is one of the highest ROI activities for a channel organization to pursue. Third, the automation of lead generation and escalation in conjunction with the development of quoting and custom product ordering was developed both at the process and software application level. The lead generation application specifically focused on creating a lead escalation roadmap that allowed for any reseller to see the status on a 24/7 basis of all leads, and also see which ones were going to be escalated if no activity was completed in 72 hours from time of receipt. This led to a 30% increase in lead closure rates in the first month, on a global scale. The ability to tie leads to quotes is also a critical workflow for resellers, and to accomplish this goal, GE Lighting implemented a quote-to-order workflow that spanned both lead closure and quoting completion applications, which gave resellers a significant boost in productivity overall. As AMR Research (2003) has stated, the ability of quote-to-order systems to traverse the simplistic to the most complex product configuration requirements and encapsulate them into a quote for commercial customers is critical for long-term competitive...

Further, quoting for customized products also allows for greater potential for higher margin product sales as well. The last objective, which is the automating of the Return Material Authorization (RMA) process, also was accomplished through the use of the PRM system installed, once integrated to the services systems.
Summary

GE Lighting began with five strategic objectives and initially relied on a relatively simplistic content management system in Microsoft SharePoint to accomplish its objectives, which were only partially attained. After interviewing resellers, completing process re-definition and analysis, and implementing a comprehensive PRM system did GE Lighting attain its channel management series of objectives. The key lessons learned are to first look at the processes that are critical to the channel objectives being attained, and secondly, to define only those applications that compliment and not hinder the attainment of objectives. Third, getting resellers and their customers involved in the system design and providing them an opportunity to contribute to its definition, functionality, and scope was critical. As a result of doing this, both resellers and their customers adopted the system more quickly than they would have otherwise. In the end, GE Lighting was successful with this implementation due to their ability to bring much-needed functionality to their resellers while attaining their objectives at the same time.