Adventures in Polymerland

Peter Foss, president of General Electric's Polymerland division, keeps a favorite snapshot in his office. Taken at a plastics trade show in 1997, the picture shows him alongside Chairman Jack Welch. Both of them are hunched over a computer screen, examining a bare-bones version of Foss's now-booming Web site. Foss laughs at how clueless he and his boss were back then. "We saw the Net as a big curiosity," he says. "None of us really knew what was going to happen. This thing has exceeded our own expectations."

There is nothing on the face of GE Polymerland (except, perhaps, its whimsical name) that screams "leading-edge." Its headquarters, in Huntersville, North Carolina, houses rows of standard-issue cubicles. Its 300 employees (managers, operations people, customer-service reps) are straight out of GE central casting: no pierced eyebrows or black turtlenecks here. This is, after all, an outfit that sells plastic pellets -- the stuff of which CD cases, toothbrushes, bumpers, and bedpans are made.

But earlier than most companies, and much earlier than most business units inside GE, Polymerland understood a simple yet powerful proposition: that it could use the Web to improve its customers' purchasing experiences. On the Web, customers could get timely, personalized information about products that they needed, or about the status of an order, or about customization services. Indeed, by offering their feedback, customers could shape the entire experience of working with Polymerland. And, by allowing its customers to manage more and more of their interactions with the company, Polymerland would enable its employees to concentrate on building the business -- by courting new customers.

The results speak for themselves. Since mid-1997, when the Polymerland Web site was launched, Web revenues have grown from $60,000 per week to more than $7 million per week -- and now account for nearly half of the unit's total sales. Foss predicts that in 2001 the site will bring in more than $1.5 billion in sales.

All of which helps explain why Polymerland has become a definitive model within GE -- a full-scale, fully operational instruction manual for bringing an old-line business into the online arena. Along with other members of his team, Foss has become a kind of wandering Web minstrel at GE, enchanting audiences from other operating units with his lessons on how to make e-commerce work. At an organization that has arguably set the standard for big-company management, Polymerland represents a standard for Web-based transformation.

Foss, now 57, shrugs off such hyperbolic descriptions. "I'm not going to tell you that we were great soothsayers," he insists. "We didn't do all of this because it was the next big thing. We did it because it seemed like a great way to serve our customers."

E-commerce as If Customers Mattered

Why has Polymerland been able to come so far so fast? One big reason is that Foss and his colleagues focused their Web efforts on what the Net could do for their customers, not on what it could do for Polymerland itself. "I'd like to take credit for all of our ideas, but, frankly, a lot of them have come from our customers," Foss says.

Customers knew what they wanted: speed, security, accuracy. They wanted order entry on the Web to be as fast as it was by phone, if not faster. They wanted control over which people in their own companies had access to certain parts of the system. They wanted a way to track shipments and a way to access information 24 hours a day. They wanted to make sure that what they ordered would match what they got -- and that what they ordered would arrive on time. "The number-one quality factor in this industry is getting your product to the customer's door on time," says Hank Harrell, 40, leader of Polymerland's e-commerce efforts. "It's not like you can send 40,000 pounds of plastic by UPS."

In the fall of 1998, a team of IT staffers began upgrading the Polymerland Web site -- pruning and adding features in response to customer feedback. By early 1999, the site had all of the power and functionality that one would expect from a topflight e-commerce destination. Using the site, customers could search for plastics by name, number, or characteristic; download product information or fax it to themselves; place and track orders; and view their purchasing histories. The site also made certification sheets (documents that outline the basic characteristics of a particular plastic) available for downloading. Polymerland used to fax out hundreds of sheets every week. Now customers can get them directly via the Web.

"One customer called to thank me after he had been able to retrieve a missing certification sheet for an overnight job," says Barbara Thewlis, 38, a regional-account specialist. "He told me, 'It was long past your office hours, but I was able to find the sheet on your site. You guys kept me from closing down and losing all that time and money.' "