TI's chief information officer rejects firms that do not use
knowledge management effectively
One of the UK engineering industry's leading IT specialists has
warned against the hasty application of an "e-veneer" for
companies' business operations, insisting that such an approach is
doomed to fail.
Ric Francis, who was headhunted from the US earlier this year to
become TI's chief information officer with responsibility for
e-commerce, said TI is building an e-business strategy that will
incorporate effective knowledge management to support the sale of
the company's engineering products.
Francis, who reports directly to TI chief executive Bill Laule,
said that making the optimum use of information is vital in a
modern engineering company. "That is not going to happen
overnight," he said. "We are not building an e-veneer here."
Before joining TI in May, Francis was an IT director at soft
drinks group Pepsi in New York and had previously been a business
systems manager for confectionery giant Mars.
Other key areas of TI's gradual embrace of e-business includes
an electronic procurement strategy using Ariba software to cut its
spending on indirect materials. This costs the company £150m a
year. It expects to achieve minimum savings in supply chain
efficiency of at least 5% over the next 18 months, as it implements
its programme.
Last month, the company announced that it had begun executing
live transactions on the Ariba platform at five TI group divisions,
including aerospace systems specialist Dowty, engineering sealed
systems manufacturer John Crane and TI's polymer products
operation.
TI's long-term approach to transforming its operations to
embrace e-business will come as an encouragement to other
engineering and manufacturing companies now being told that they
must embrace the Internet quickly or risk seeing their place in the
market stolen by competitors.
"We are not in the business-to-consumer space. We are about
knowledge and services to our customers. Less than 20% of our
business is in the UK - the rest is in Europe and the majority of
it is in the US," said Francis.