Visitors to last month’s THE Expo in Hamilton may have heard GE Capital’s NZ general manager of distribution finance, Pete van Shaik talking about the new GE Access web portal in the seminar building.
Access GE, to use its correct name, is a free web portal for GE Capital customers to use, beyond financing alone.
It shares best practices, peer insights and business expertise, not just from GE’s own broad multi-industry experiential base, but also that of their customers – and GE has a lot of customers, across a wide range of industries.
While GE Capital’s funding might well be regarded as the fuel required for business growth, the Access GE portal is designed to provide thought leadership and, as Van Shaik describes it: “An invaluable opportunity to tap into a peer network of businesses that have successfully overcome hurdles on the road to success.”
A week after THE Expo, GE Capital’s ‘building better business’ event at Auckland’s Sky City, marked the official launch of GE Capital’s New Zealand Mid-Market Report 2013 (HERE), and to demonstrate the importance that GE has placed around the Access GE resource, GE Capital’s chief commercial officer, Mike Pilot flew in from New York to host a lively presentation and panel discussion on the portal.
In the panel discussion, Pilot talked with NZ transport business leaders who have used the portal, and integrated key learnings into their business strategy and planning.
Pilot told delegates that: “Post the global financial crisis (GFC), and in the light of GE Capital being in the credit business, we looked carefully at what we do and asked: What do our customers really want?
“The answer? They want to “de-lever” (reduce debt); and there we are selling credit. It was a wake-up call indeed,” says Pilot.
Clearly GE needed to do more than supply funding in the austerity that surrounded the GFC era, and Pilot spoke about what he sees as a core GE difference. ”We don’t offer fee-for-a-service like banks – we finance lifestyle and business growth and invest in you by providing growth capital.”
Access GE acts as a business mentor and provides a toolkit packed with insights and operational tools to run businesses efficiently, and maximise the capital funding.
Access GE operates on the basis of taking GE’s global customers’ experiences, merging those with GE’s own commercial expertise to provide ‘know-how capital’ that GE customers can leverage to build better businesses.
As Pilot explained to over 200 delegates – many from transport, equipment and agriculture – “GE has built, powered and cured the world for many years, and with that comes a large knowledge bank. Our people actually are rocket scientists, chemists and supply chain leaders, who have walked the walk and done things like set-up business in China.”
While Access GE has been in existence for around a decade, this is its first appearance in this corner of the globe, populated with real-world, local and overseas case studies. More than 6500 businesses have used the portal to date.
Can the portal be used in a New Zealand commercial context, and can it be applied to heavy transport and equipment?
The answer would be ‘yes’, according to Big Chill Distribution Ltd’s Mike Shapland: “We were looking to make changes as a result of an acquisition, so we sat down with the GE team who told us about GE Access, and we ran through a plan to restructure parts of our business. That was a success and we now use it across the entire business to help in modelling and planning.”
Shapland continues: “It helped to provide us with an outside view of ourselves.”
Tranzliquid Logistics Ltd, a Bay of Plenty fuel distributor, is also a convert to the portal, and regularly uses the resource – particularly around performance monitoring.
Tranzliquid is a high-volume, low-margin business, making constant performance monitoring vital. Co-founder and director Greg Pert says: “If you can measure it, you can compare it and therefore you can compete. If you can compete, you can win, and Access GE has helped us in ensuring that our business is operating profitably, maintaining good cash flow while minimising unnecessary costs.”
Jackie Carroll, co-founder of Tranzliquid, has used Access GE to implement recruitment and compliance best practice. “We operate with increasing layers of compliance and need to be certain around all aspects of transportation and delivery; that means we must recruit the very best people to deliver our product safely.”
Working with GE to best utilise the portal, Carroll has developed and implemented a comprehensive recruitment, training and retention policy resulting in the recruitment of younger drivers, who now undergo a rigorous driver training programme.
In closing the ‘building better business’ event, GE Capital’s Pilot told delegates: “Better capital builds better businesses, whether financial, human or knowledge-based. The Access GE portal grabs everything that GE knows and makes it available to the mid-market, free”.
Pilot continued: “All of GE’s international experience and methodologies around leadership development, operational effectiveness, financial planning and customer engagement is available online. Our expertise is your expertise and we built it for you.”
For more details on Access GE, contact Pete van Shaik 09 374 2334, or email: peter.vanshaik@ge.com.
