Kevin Summers, I'm the Corporate Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer for Whirlpool.

Whirlpool is a hundred year old plus company  Okay, first of all I think Whirlpool you have to look at Whirlpool, not just a US based business, it's a global business.  Uh over half of our revenues come from outside the US, where a lot of people look at Whirlpool as US specific.  And we also have not just the number one market share, but we also have the best products.  Well I think, first all there are four areas that are impacting our industry. First starting off with consumer expectations.  Our consumers are demanding more, but wanting to pay less price. I think number two that’s impacting us not only from a consumer standpoint but from a supplier standpoint, where our suppliers have increased their prices over the last five years about uh 300 percent, while at the same time, we haven't in-increased our prices to our consumers.  Uh I think the third area is competition.  We're seeing a lot of competition not only here just in the US but also from our Asia uh suppliers and competition as well too. Our trade partners are looking at not only Whirlpool as a supplier but our competitors as well that are coming from Asia Europe and also here in the U.S. It took us 90 years to get to 10 billion dollars in revenue but also we had one major trade partner, companies like Sears in that first 90 years but in the last ten years we’ve grown from ten billion dollars to twenty billion dollars and not only that we’ve probably increased our number of trade partners by not just one for Sears but also hundreds of others from a global basis. Maytag  itself has a world-class brand name also that brought other products like Amana and Geneer, as well.  So that’s a big positive because it gave us more feature functionality and more products that we can offer to our consumers. It did increase our complexity, because Maytag  brought along their own set of processes and systems and people and a certain way of doing things. We found out we had a lot of fragmented systems and then that translated into fragmented systems translated into fragmented business processes. So, at that point we went to our Chairman and CEO and we said look, we think we can save money by reducing our systems but at the end of the day that’s not the type of quantum leap this company needs.  If we start looking at our processes we can get more value for our bucks, while at the same time reducing our technology footprint.  
		
		Management excellence is an initiative where we’re looking at all of our processes across the company on a global basis.  And really we’re looking at the end to end value chain.  From the time that we raw materials from our suppliers, to the time that we deliver goods to our consumers, or our trade partners.  

First of all not the most important one but is to simplify our technology foot-print. How do we increase our speed to market, how do we make sure we’re manufacturing the right products just in time? The fourth area for management excellence in terms of goals is making sure we have visibility to the right operational metrics and those metrics can be seen all the way from our chairman end of the company on his desktop all the way down to the person on the factory floor. 

And I think the fifth goal is around the procurement area. We spend billions of dollars in procurement and how do we make sure we’re leveraging our suppliers, getting the right prices, getting the right product and the quality from our suppliers. There are a lot of technology companies in the industry that we could pick from so this was a difficult decision but I think the four reasons why we chose IBM, first of all because they have experience in helping other companies transform. Number two they’ve re-engineered their own processes as a hundred billion dollar plus company. So that’s very impressive. Another reason is because of their relationship and partnership with SAP and we have numerous instances of SAP and they’ve helped companies rationalize their footprint.  And then the last reason is because of their knowledge in the industry relative to manufacturing companies as well as durable good companies.



Kevin Custis, I'm the IBM Global Business Services Industrial Sector Leader Partner for our consumer electronics and durable good industry.

The solution we worked with Whirlpool on is what we call, ERP transformation, which brings the best of our ERP, capabilities and IBM together with our business strategy and transformation capabilities from our global business services team in the strategy and change organization, our CRM, or consumer relationship management organization and supply [inaudible] teams.  

How it's going to make us smarter in the future, it will leverage our scale as a twenty billion dollar company with goals to move to forty billion dollars over the next several years. I think two it'll make us a lot more efficient that we will not be re-inventing the wheel across the globe. I think also it's going to allow us to go to the market faster, I think it's going to make our consumers even happier because of the fact that we're going to have more feature functionality at competitive pricing. I also think it's going to make us a lot faster with our suppliers. I think it's going to allow us to have more collaboration with our suppliers.

To a more globally integrated enterprise which is what Whirlpool is doing, is helping them in a number of ways. First it's helping them become much more operationally efficient which is going to drive higher margins for shareholders. Next it's really speeding up the overall business, you know, speed of the supply chain, speed of new product development, speed of management as they react to future changes and transform the business. It's also really improving the decision processes around the company so they can make smarter business choices around product launch, around consumers that they want to serve. What's really exciting about this overall engagement and program for the Whirlppo Corporation is that it's not just a significant impact in terms of the operational efficiency across most all of these processes which is material unto itself and it's not just that it's enabling a new way of doing business a new business model for Whirlpool but it's also that they're becoming much more of a dynamic organization and in fact they're changing the way they go about change which is going to prepare Whirlpool for the future very, very well. 

Kevin Summers: This is a really exciting time to be at Whirlpool Corporation. We're going to change the game in terms of as we move from a manufacturing company to a CPG company and management excellence is one of those enablers. We're gonna go to our consumers with a different model and never done before. We're gonna collaborate with our suppliers in a way that we've never done before. We're gonna look at our business intelligence and manage our business in a way that we've never done before.