How GE Digital is leveraging lean to cultivate a customer obsessed culture for industrial automation software

Our customers work on the front lines of the world’s toughest challenges so it is paramount that we transparently listen and respond to their needs. GE Digital applies lean thinking and practices to help us understand our customers’ experience and continuously improve our business processes, products, services, and support. Earlier this year, we launched a customer relationship survey to find out how we can improve our customers’ overall experience with our industrial automation software business. Read on to learn how we applied lean to drive rapid action based on survey feedback.

Three key opportunities to improve our customers’ journey:

1. Decrease time to value with our solutions, from purchasing through implementation
2. Continue to improve product quality and user experience
3. Remove friction from the buying experience

Customer outcomes are a guiding principle

Our solutions are designed to drive results that enable customers to achieve strategic objectives like more efficient time to market, improved productivity, and quality. Digitization is central to realizing these objectives in today’s economy. We talk about breaking barriers to digital transformation, but do we always walk these steps with our customers? To better align our solutions with customer roadmaps and accelerate value delivery, we have mapped and streamlined standard work for collaborating with customers throughout their digital transformation journeys. We are also training our customer success agents to establish measurable customer success criteria that can be implemented and tracked throughout the lifecycle of all projects. We call this our “Customer Time to Value Initiative,” which follows an iterative Plan, Do, Check, and Act framework to proactively set goals inclusive of stakeholders, openly and frequently communicate throughout implementation, and prioritize user experience and adoption.

Product quality with attention to market innovation is critical

Great product quality is an important element of customer centricity. We strive to deliver value more efficiently and more often to our customers through mission-critical products like iFIX, CIMPLICITY, Proficy Plant Applications, and Proficy Historian. We are continuously improving deployment experience, empowering users with automation tools and usability improvements, resolving issues with a sense of urgency, and applying lean and agile practices to strategically restructure our workflows. We have deployed a “Shift Left” practice in DevOps to conduct testing, quality, and performance evaluations early and throughout the software development process.

Continuous customer feedback, iteration, and deployment is also at the core of innovation. Proficy Historian for Cloud, the first native cloud data historian, is a breakthrough solution inspired by customers’ requests for an intagratable, efficient to deploy, and scalable product.  Proficy Operations Hub, a low-code/no-code industrial application builder, addresses customer needs for streamlined business intelligence, web-based dashboards for remote operations, and enhanced visualization tools. We are cultivating a customer obsessed culture by embedding quality and customer value across our organization for a truly differentiated customer experience.

The buying experience helps set the stage for customer success

In collaboration with some of our largest customers, a cross-functional team used lean tools and methods to map the buyer journey through our customers’ eyes and identify the pivotal moments that make or break the experience. We discovered that we need to better clarify customer outcomes to help build stakeholder consensus in purchasing and deployment, simplify communication of our product structure, and streamline negotiation cycles with key stakeholders. We identified immediate actions to start to address these pain points, by increasing visibility into negotiation cycle times and customer satisfaction with their buying experience, “try-storming” new outcome communication techniques, and launching a new organizational playbook and internal learning series on customer experience. Moving forward, we can continue to measure and remove friction from the buying journey with strategic outcomes and success criteria in mind. If your facility would like to conduct a similar problem-solving exercise, learn how to implement lean principles here.

Customer experience helps drive breakthrough business outcomes

Our mission is to bring simplicity, speed, and scale to our customers’ digital transformation with industrial software that delivers breakthrough business outcomes. We aim to listen openly to the voices of our customers through relationship and transactional surveys, user groups, and daily customer success management. Your voice is critical: your input can inspire innovation, launch problem-solving, and help us to continuously improve across our business.

Customer needs are always evolving, so let's keep the conversation going! Requests to respond to our twice-annual relationship survey are based on a random sampling of our customer population. If you have not received an email with a survey link in the last year and would like to – please let us know. Customer success managers and partner representatives can capture feedback and appreciate hearing from our customers. If you are unsure who your customer representative is, feel free to contact our team here. Thank you for sharing your bright ideas and stay tuned for our next survey!