The Journey towards agility (page 3 of 3)

RFID is a good example of where the rubber meets the road on an Adaptive Enterprise journey: As real-time RFID data links with manufacturing processes, HP will have the up-to-date information it needs to respond quickly to change and take advantage of opportunities as they arise.

As an early adopter of RFID and a board member of EPCglobal, the international RFID standards board, HP is helping to develop a framework of global RFID standards and is bringing the benefits of RFID to customers with infrastructure technology, consulting and integration services.

And just in time: Wal-Mart challenged its top 100 suppliers (including HP) to tag all product cases and pallets headed to the Dallas/Forth Worth area by January, 2005. To meet that mandate, Wal-Mart supplier Conros hired HP Services to oversee its RFID implementation.

For Gilles and the GO+IT team, HP's innovative approach to linking IT and business makes good sense moving forward: If he's going to be responsible for both sides of the house, the new GO+IT organization will give him more control over the results. For Gilles and other CIOs adopting the same approach, those results will not only deliver the business agility they need, but the opportunity to prove IT's true value to the enterprise.

"If you take a step back, you can see we have multiple, inter-related efforts underway at the same time, all designed to simplify and transform HP as a company," says Gilles. "On the one hand, we're standardizing and improving our business processes on a global basis and streamlining our IT infrastructure. At the same time, we're continuing to innovate and pull substantial cost out of our supply chain and our customer operations.

"Put it all together," he continues, "and that's what enables us to build a one-billion-dollar-a-year cost savings machine inside of HP. And we will be capable of generating savings on that massive scale on a recurring basis every year for the next three years. Equally important, we are bringing the power of HP's portfolio to customers and offering a unified, improved customer experience."