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General Electric Healthcare, 2006 For the exclusive use of C. Rasche, 2015. 9-706-478 REV: APRIL 3, 2007 TARUN KHANNA ELIZABETH A. RAABE General Electric Healthcare, 2006 In January 2006, Joe Hogan, head of General Electric (GE) Healthcare Technologies, packed his belongings at his Wisconsin office. Hogan was moving to England to officially step into Sir William Castell’s shoes as CEO of GE Healthcare, the world’s leading manufacturer of diagnostic imaging equipment, after the latter’s retirement in mid-2006. Castell, the former head of British bioscience and medical diagnostics firm Amersham plc, became CEO of GE Healthcare in April 2004 when its celebrated corporate parent GE, under the direction of CEO Jeff Immelt, acquired Amersham for $10 billion. The acquisition was part of Immelt’s GE-wide move to reemphasize research and development (R&D) to complement former CEO Jack Welch’s emphasis on efficiency (Exhibits 1 and 2). Hogan had run GE Healthcare’s predecessor organization, GE Medical Systems (GEMS), which he had taken over from Immelt in November 2000 when Immelt was named to replace the legendary Welch in the top position at GE. A 20-year GE veteran, Hogan witnessed three distinct stages of the subsidiary’s development as it evolved from the Global Product Company (GPC), to the modified GPC, and then to GE Healthcare. The firm had built a formidable global presence by adopting the GPC concept, launched under Immelt in 1997. GPC’s philosophy was to concentrate manufacturing wherever in the world it could be carried out to GE’s exacting standards most cost-effectively. Later Hogan modified GPC by adopting an “In Country for Country” policy that focused squarely on particular markets, such as China. By 2005, the company had a 34% market share of the worldwide diagnostic imaging equipment business.1 During this time, populations in advanced nations were aging, and those in Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America increasingly demanded better healthcare (Exhibit 3). Technological changes— represented by advances in genomics and healthcare information technology (IT)—were making personalized diagnostics and personalized medicine possible. In response, GE acquired Amersham and several healthcare IT firms. GEMS thus entered the next stage of its evolution, reinventing itself as GE Healthcare. GE executives designed the acquisitions to catalyze the firm’s move from an engineering and physics-based diagnostic company to a life sciences-based healthcare solutions company that could better meet worldwide healthcare needs. As Hogan placed the last item in a box, he wondered: What challenges did GEMS’ previous quantum leaps portend for this new step- function change? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Professor Tarun Khanna and Research Associate Elizabeth A. Raabe prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of Harvard Business School. This document is authorized for use only by Christoph. Rasche in 2015. For the exclusive use of C. Rasche, 2015. 706-478 General Electric Healthcare, 2006 The Global Product Company (GPC) Immelt inherited a $4 billion company in 1997. GEMS1 had come a long way from its origins as an X-ray business in Chicago in the 1940s, its invention of computed tomography (CT) in the 1970s, and its tentative forays into Japan and Europe in the 1990s. He stepped up acquisitions to grow the business dramatically. For example, a company acquired in 2000 formed the basis for GEMS-IT, a new subsidiary focused on healthcare IT. GEMS often acquired companies with little international presence and used its resources to offer the companies’ products and services worldwide. Immelt also tried to make GEMS more than an equipment company in his customers’ eyes by developing local marketing and sales organizations that, among other activities, hosted symposia to keep customers abreast of change. But by far his greatest legacy was the Global Products Company (GPC) initiative. GPC was geared toward cutting costs by shifting manufacturing activities, and eventually design and engineering activities, out of high-cost countries and moving them into low-cost countries. This built on prior CEO John Trani’s efforts to globalize GEMS in the 1980s. Trani had emphasized cross-national teams of managers rather than only employing American nationals working outside the U.S. By the time Immelt handed over GEMS to Hogan in 2000, it dominated the worldwide diagnostic imaging market together with its three principal competitors, divisions of Siemens, Philips, and Toshiba. These firms were just four of 10 prominent full-line diagnostics players in the early 1980s.2 By 2005, the four leaders accounted for over 80% of worldwide sales. GEMS’ three major competitors were strong in different modalities and geographic areas. For example, Germany-based Siemens was well positioned in the future growth markets of eastern Europe. Philips led in nuclear medicine and was particularly strong in vascular and cardiologic X-ray (Exhibit 4). Key activities under GEMS’ GPC model are described below. Manufacturing Since the launch of GPC in 1997, manufacturing was shifted from high-cost to low-cost countries. Each product was to be built in one or two “Centers of Excellence (COEs)” and could then be shipped anywhere in the world (Exhibit 5). Between 60% and 96% of products made in a COE ended up being sold elsewhere. GEMS, with its extensive sales and marketing organizations around the world, was ideally positioned among GE divisions to pioneer GPC. Manufacturing had gradually moved from Paris to Budapest and from Tokyo to Shanghai and Bangalore. The firm was more a supply-chain manager for complex subassemblies than a manufacturer (Exhibit 6). Its assembled “inputs” were not simple parts such as bolts, resistors, or metal frames; they were complex, high-value-added assemblies such as computer boards and precision-machined assemblies. GEMS only made the proprietary heart of each of the company’s products. In 2002, inputs purchased from vendors accounted for roughly $2 billion of GEMS’ $2.3 billion in total variable costs for manufacturing, and most (85%) of these inputs were manufactured in high-cost countries. Manufacturing costs were approximately 80% material and 20% labor. John Chiminski of the services division observed that an efficient parts organization was a key part of the supply chain: We use 90 warehouses across five continents to ship 2 million parts annually. There are half a million different types of parts, of which 80,000 will ship in any given year, with half of these repeating the following year. In general, demand is spiky. We measure our performance by the “span,” or the time it takes to fulfill a certain percentage of the demand for our services. Seventy-five percent of our demand is met in four hours, and 95% is met within 75 hours. 1 We refer to the company as GEMS prior to GE’s 2004 acquisition of Amersham and as GE Healthcare afterwards. 2 This document is authorized for use only by Christoph. Rasche in 2015. For the exclusive use of C. Rasche, 2015. General Electric Healthcare, 2006 706-478 GEMS had set a goal of having 50% of its direct material purchases from low-cost countries and 60% of its manufacturing activities located there, up from roughly 15% and 40% in 2001. Its ultimate goal under GPC was to save 10%–30% on materials and 50% on labor. Brian Worrel, head of finance at GEMS, commented, “While GPC moves into a country entail some fixed costs, the payback has been within two years typically, partly because much of the plant and equipment can be sourced locally.” The biggest challenge in such a transition was the development of suppliers in low-cost countries, which took considerable time and commitment. First-year cost savings of moving to a low- cost country were about 30%, with expectations of further ongoing cost reductions of 10% annually. GPC costs included inventory, logistics, documentation, and import-duty costs relating to moving materials and products around the world. It was costly to rely on a less experienced workforce in the new location. Those left behind often lost their jobs, creating a human toll on the workforce. Moving away from developed countries also meant losing the concessions these countries often provided to encourage export-generating investment. On the other hand, GPC enabled the company to attract talent from new regions, gaining the firm insider status in these countries. GEMS used a “pitcher- catcher” concept to help move production from one location to another. For each move, a pitching team at the site of the existing plant worked with a catching team at the new site. Managers were measured on the effectiveness of the move, which was not considered complete until the performance of the catching team met or exceeded that of the pitching team. R&D and product design GEMS typically spent 7%–9% of sales on R&D. New products within existing platforms might take a year or two to develop and cost $5 million–$10 million. New platforms might take three years to develop, while significant breakthroughs might take 10 years. Often longer-term projects focused on more basic research were done at the GE corporate R&D level. Corporate R&D had helped develop remote monitoring and diagnostic technologies that GEMS used in its equipment-service activities.
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