No matter where you are reading this article and whether it is in print or online, you are highly likely to be sitting near a piece of electrical equipment manufactured b ABB. Cables, switches, the transformers that allow your electric train to speed you to work as well as the robots used to build cars such as Jaguars are manufactured by ABB, the largest manufacturer of electrical parts and machinery. With customers in every country and a manufacturing presence across Europe it is a complex business. To reduce the complexity it recently completed the standardisation of its business processes and IT onto SAP. CIO of ABB UK and Ireland John Ellis-Braithwaite explained his role as simplifier of the ABB world in Britain.
"ABB is a leader in power automation technology, for example we are the people that provided the power systems for the west coast mainline upgrade and whose distribution switchgear keeps the lights on at Arsenal Football Club," John Ellis-Braithwaite explains of the company's market position and its leading role in powering the train that has just whisked me to his Warrington office. In the UK ABB manufactures low volt switch gear and instrumentation and is the service and back up provider to its robotics users in the car manufacturing sector, Tata owned Jaguar Land Rover being their major customer.
ABB also manufacturers transformers, power systems, sub-station equipment and the cables that connect it all together. We meet Ellis-Braithwaite in the technology centre of the Cheshire HQ and are amazed by the array of industrial and electrical equipment on display, it's a sparkies dream. Globally ABB has operations in 100 countries and employs 111,000 people.
"Our global footprint means that we have some factories based in the UK which we call global focused feeder factories, manufacturing products for the global market," he explains of the globalised nature of manufacturing electrical power systems. In the UK ABB employs 2,500 people in 12 locations across the country. The company is divided into five divisions: power systems, power products, automation products, process automation and robotics, the latter even had a starring role in the recent Terminator film. The company then breaks down globally into regions and then countries. Ellis-Braithwaite is CIO for the UK and Ireland. "ABB was commonly used as a text book example of matrix management," he smiles. Each of the five divisions are present in the UK.
View the CIO slide show of how ABB simplified their business using SAP here
"ABB's range of products and services is very diverse, from small low voltage products sold in high volumes through to multi-million pound projects." As a result ABB has a large mobile workforce of engineers visiting client's sites or even based permanently at the client site. Which means being a CIO at ABB is not about ensuring that the PCs have the latest Windows installed, it's about using technology to bring such a diverse company together. In his 11 year career with ABB; that has been the central plinth of Ellis-Braithwaite's platform as CIO.
Lotus Notes was one of the first systems to help them centralise. "In the late 90s it brought a lot of the company together. We are still a Notes house; it has been a large investment over the 12 years. Email is one the most important systems. We also use it for workflow, it is a platform for the business." Ellis-Braithwaite joined ABB in 1998 and arrived to find a company made up of many subsidiaries, each with their own different IT environments. At the time there were 20 different business units.
Aware of this on a global scale in 2006 ABB launched One Simple ABB a standardisation programme of business processes with the focus on finance, HR and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Ellis-Braithwaite and the UK ABB management team realised as they carried out Y2K preparations that there was a need to centralise IT. From 2000 to 2003 this process began with the formation of a single IS division and a central helpdesk. This led to the outsourcing of infrastructure services to IBM in 2003. By 2003 the company had a standard IT infrastructure in place, but a very diverse application landscape.
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