Gates Corporation of Denver, Colorado, manufactures industrial and automotive products such as hoses, hydraulics, and power transmission products. Gates sells its products to large global automotive and industrial companies, which are under intense pressure to shorten product cycles, improve quality, and reduce time-to-market. They pass that pressure along to Gates, whose more than 13,500 employees in 22 countries are constantly looking for better ways to work together more effectively, communicate more clearly, eliminate redundant effort, and stay focused on common objectives. Every hour, day, and week lost tracking down people and information or re-creating work slows the company’s “culture of speed.”
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Greg Vigil Director of the PowerGrip Product Line Gates Corporation |
As Gates expanded into new markets, it found itself competing with smaller regional companies that were able to be more responsive to customer needs. Gates needed to speed up its reaction times but was hampered by its aged technology underpinnings, which had not kept pace with the company’s growth. The company’s e-mail system failed frequently under the increasing message load, and the company’s growing fleet of traveling employees struggled to connect to the company network when out of the office. Mobile employees were unable to synchronize their mobile devices with their e-mail and access contact information, share calendars, and schedule meetings, which isolated them from the office, colleagues, and customers.
Also, the company needed better, faster ways for its global workforce to collaborate. Explains Greg Vigil, Director of the PowerGrip Product Line for Gates Corporation and former Director of Global Enterprise Collaboration for the company, “Almost all our business processes, projects, and strategies have an international component. A manager in Detroit works with engineers in Germany to develop a product for an emerging marketing in China. It was difficult to keep projects on schedule across time zones, ensure accurate document versioning, or even find a person’s schedule to arrange a conference call.”
Many divisions kept their customer records in three-ring binders, with no way to share data electronically or quickly access answers to customer questions. When people left the company, there was no knowledge transfer, hampering new hires and costing the company valuable knowledge loss.
A different but equally significant challenge was making sure that the thousands of Gates employees and hundreds of Gates teams were staying aligned with the company’s key objectives in their rush to move their own small piece of the company forward. “We wanted not only to help employees find the information and people they needed to complete their projects, but also to make sure that every employee’s efforts were supporting corporate objectives,” Vigil says.
Perhaps most limiting of all, the older network didn’t work with emerging technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol and newer mobile devices. This lack of interoperability isolated Gates from innovation, preventing the company from deploying solutions that would help employees communicate and collaborate, solve problems faster, get products out the door sooner, and answer customer questions quickly and correctly.
Vigil and his colleagues envisioned a strategic communication and collaboration initiative to connect Gates people across the world, so they could work together more effectively and provide more responsive customer service. Vigil says, “We decided to rethink our approach to IT investments and look not at individual products but at finding an end-to-end solution capable of supporting our global vision of integrated communications across the enterprise.”
In early 2006, Gates decided to standardize its companywide technology on Microsoft® software. The company already relied on Microsoft software in some areas of its business and decided that Microsoft’s offerings were more reliable, secure, cost-effective, and widely supported than other products on the market, which would help Gates achieve its vision sooner.
Gates started by installing a multifaceted messaging system consisting of rich e-mail messaging, instant messaging, presence awareness, and online meeting capabilities. Using this communications suite, employees can instantly see whether a colleague on the other side of the world is available for a virtual meeting; access e-mail messages, voice mail, calendar items, and faxes from a single inbox; and have their computer read their messages and appointments to them over the phone.
The company also installed Web-based collaboration software with which employees can set up Web-based team sites, without IT assistance. Within months, employees had created more than 500 such sites, where they posted project documents, shared customer news, and participated in virtual discussion boards. These sites serve as virtual meeting rooms where teams come together, share documents, and work with “a single version of the truth,” regardless of time, place, or time zone.
Todd Sellden, Technical Director of Industrial Business Development for Gates Corporation, developed such a Web-based collaboration site to maintain engineering documents for his team. Before, engineers developed their own personal reference libraries over time, which often made information inconsistent and hard to find. “It would drive me crazy to ask three engineers a question and get three different answers,” Sellden says. “I brought all this information together on one Web-based site, accessible to everyone. Now, we not only have one version of the truth, but new engineers have access to all the information that the most experienced staff member has. New hires are able to learn their jobs faster and become useful sooner.”
Vigil’s team then set up a companywide portal, called Unity, to aggregate information and enable employees to search for data across the 500-plus project sites. Ultimately, employees will be able to comb through more than 7 terabytes of data, in seconds. Such companywide searches would have taken hours or days before-or been impossible. “Through the Unity portal, our employees have access to vast reservoirs of business intelligence that they can use to find information to inform specific decisions,” Vigil says.
Gates also uses the Unity portal as a way to make sure that every employee’s work is supporting corporate objectives. Executive management and division leaders create annual objectives that correlate to pillars of the Gates Business Leadership Process, a permanent model for continuous improvement. These objectives are easily accessible through the portal. Managers can log on to their key performance indicator (KPI) lists in the portal and see red, yellow, or green lights that indicate the status of each objective. Team members can view their work (mapped to their division leader’s annual objectives) in 90-day action plans and can readily see how close they are to meeting the action plans. “Employees have a better sense that what they’re doing every day is supporting Gates business objectives,” says Clark Pope, eBusiness Web Specialist, Global Enterprise Collaboration, at Gates Corporation.
The most recent technology addition at Gates has been mobile devices (PDAs and smart phones), issued to executive, sales, and engineering staffs. Traveling workers use these Microsoft-based devices to connect easily to the corporate communications systems to be more productive. For example, engineers in the Gates Industrial Power Transmission Group use mobile devices to gather specifications during customer visits, rather than taking notes by hand. The sales staff uses mobile devices to take orders and transmit them directly into the company’s order management system, eliminating days’ worth of delay.
Gates employees use their new suite of communications tools to transcend the boundaries of time and space and come together virtually to make decisions and solve problems faster. They save time searching for information and people and better serve customers. As a bonus, Gates eliminated more than U.S.$1 million in redundant support, licensing, and IT maintenance costs by standardizing on a single technology.
“Every employee probably spends at least 30 minutes a day searching for information. Using the search capabilities of our new technology, employees will reduce that to a few minutes a day,” Vigil says. “The value of 6,000 workers saving just 15 minutes a day from better information search is worth $7 million in time and talent that can be redirected to helping Gates better meet its objectives.”
Better e-mail filtering to eliminate spam has also given employees more time in their day. “A conservative estimate would be that better e-mail filtering restores 15 minutes of productive activity per day per employee, which adds up to one hour and 15 minutes per week per employee. That’s close to 5 percent more time freed for serving customers,” Vigil says.
Al Mostacciuolo is a Master Black Belt Six Sigma Manager for Gates Corporation, responsible for continuous cost improvements at Gates factories. He used the team site software to create a Web site where factory managers can enter monthly improvement data. “Factory personnel used to send this data in spreadsheets, and I had to cut and paste it into a master spreadsheet for analysis,” Mostacciuolo says. “The new software saves me about 10 hours a month, which I’m spending on higher-value work such as mentoring teams and doing plant training. Plus, the data is more accurate, because we’ve eliminated the reentry step.”
Adds Wayne Fletcher, Plant Manager of Gates Corporation’s Moncks Corner, South Carolina, plant, “We’re doing a much better job of communicating the goals of the company president to plant managers and their direct reports. Before these systems were available online, we had a lot of three-ring binders, handwritten notes, and miscommunication. Today, you can review the goals of your department, plant, or the company at any time. Before, we’d have to get everyone together in a conference room to see what everyone was doing. Customers benefit from our ability to work more tightly as a team; it leads to superior processes and products.”
“I can enhance my productivity by using my PDA to utilize off-peak times for e-mail management, thus freeing me to concentrate on core activities during the day,” says Howard Hurwitz, Corporate Counsel for Gates Corporation. “Before and after work, I routinely clear e-mail messages that do not require action. This way I can focus on critical tasks while in the office. Additionally, from a legal perspective, I benefit from being able to respond to my clients right away, regardless of time of day or my location, instead of having to wait until I get back to my office. This is vitally important, as it increases my responsiveness to our clients.”
Mobile workers are not only more productive but achieve better work-life balance. “When we give users a mobile device, it fundamentally changes the way they work,” Vigil says. “Mobile-device users are working at least 38 to 46 more minutes per day, and they love the ability to take care of business from home, on a train, in the elevator, and so on. Being able to take care of routine tasks during what was once idle time means that they can focus on more value-enhancing activities when they are in the office. Plus, it leads to better work-life balance.”
Director of Gates’ PowerGrip Product Line, Greg Vigil heads the company’s timing belt business for industrial and automotive markets in North America. Previously, he was Director of Global Enterprise Collaboration for Gates, leading the communications infrastructure overhaul described here. Vigil received a B.S. degree from Ambassador University and an M.S. degree from the University of Colorado.
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