P&G Pushes the Envelope with Web 2.0

Industry leader Procter & Gamble (P&G) is pushing the envelope on enterprise collaboration, building a platform for its employees, suppliers and partners to collaborate, work together, and innovate across geographical and departmental boundaries. In its journey, P&G is leveraging Web 2.0 tools and social technologies to connect teams and individuals in a way never before possible, ultimately creating a new social fabric of collaboration in the enterprise. During a CGT Web seminar on Nov. 30, 2010, P&G focused specifically on how it is leveraging Web 2.0 tools for enterprise collaboration to source goods and services. Here are some highlights from the Web event:

 

--Siva Padmanabhan, who leads the Consumer Products practice at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), started by briefly explaining corporate collaboration and knowledge management and then discussed some of its challenges. "It's not about knowing all the answers to all the questions, but it's more about knowing where to go to find the answers. That is the evolution that we need to manage as we look at new norms and new ways of disseminating and sharing information," he explained. Padmanabhan also featured some real life examples through various success stories of TCS clients that leveraged its idea management platform.

 

--P&G's Associate Director of Global IT Sourcing Shashi Mandapaty revealed the company's vision for collaborative sourcing which incorporates connected people, connected processes and a connected culture (aka "Smart Mobs") to create an agile purchasing organization. The transformation for P&G included transitioning from individual leadership to empowered teams; from peer to peer and knowledge retained with individuals to an agile network and knowledge retained within a system; policy adoption via continuous reinforcement to end to end codified workflows; and e-mail-centric and system driven to social-centric and buyers driven. Mandapaty also offered some key learnings and tips from the implementation: "I think it's important to start with a pilot; this is not an ERP implementation. And, it has to start with a business case. The second piece is the identification of power users. It is important to identify them (not to design the system around them) because they can tell us the business benefits quickly. On the cultural side of it, of course, there is the incentive system. And the last point is that this has to be rolled out in waves."

 

To listen to this event in its entirety, click here.