Digitization is in our DNA at Plastics. We were the first GE business to move online, the first to cross $1 billion in online sales and the first, we always say, to challenge ourselves to go further. That's what our master production scheduling (MPS) project was about.

 We wanted to take the guesswork out of the delivery times we quote customers. If we could use real-time data from the plant floor rather than trend data from spreadsheets, we could cut our "span" – the difference between quoted and preferred delivery times. So we focused on getting the machines in the plant to "talk" to our order entry system and tell it when they could actually produce a product for shipment. This linked our customers directly to the manufacturing floor.

Our initial rollout was for one product and region, Lexan® Americas. MPS helped us cut our span in half and improved our customer satisfaction marks for on-time delivery to industry-leading levels. And not only did we make customers happy, we significantly reduced our own costs.