Best Practice in Human Capital Management: General Motors (GM)

Overview of GM
General Motors is a diversified automotive business with interests in communications services, locomotives, finance, and insurance. GM's size is staggering. It has revenues of approximately $180 billion from more than 200 countries. Its manufacturing operations in over 50 countries produce 15% of the world's cars and trucks. GM has a gigantic global workforce of approximately 315,000 hourly and salaried employees. The business pays more than 465,000 pensions and touches 1.2 million lives with benefits in the United States alone.1

Business Challenges Facing GM's Human Resources Staff
Traditional HR departments within large, multi-national corporations tend to be inundated with the logistics of managing processes across many departments spanning multiple countries. In addition, GM, like other multi-nationals, has multiple HR groups - one at the corporate level and additional ones for each business unit within the corporation. These HR groups typically do not have a central repository of information and lack a coordinated communications infrastructure.

As a result, the HR processes of large, multi-national corporations generally are redundant and inefficient. In addition, the sheer number of third-party vendors used by an HR department to handle discrete functions makes management of the process challenging. By necessity, these departments predominantly have focused on administrative functions and typically don't have the time or the resources to devote to strategic planning. At the same time, many are facing a dramatic reduction in resources, and cost-cutting efforts primarily have focused on reducing staff, rather than re-engineering service delivery.

Why Is GM Remarkable?
The pervasive use of the Internet makes the integrated service delivery model for HR finally feasible. In 2000, GM prioritized the need to bring self-service capabilities to its huge employee base through a convenient, easy-to-use portal. Its objectives for the employee portal included:

• Raising the productivity of GM employees while increasing service and quality.
• Improving transaction accuracy, thus saving the company money.
• Reducing costs at the multiple call centers through self-service.
• Giving all employees (salaried, hourly, retirees) more control by providing a portal for employee and retiree relationship management.

The company's goal was to reach the maximum number of employees and connect them to the business, regardless of location. By using the Internet to move HR delivery to a largely self-service model for both current workers and retirees, GM was seeking to achieve cost reductions of approximately 25%-30%.

How Has Digitization Benefited GM?
GM's first-generation portal worked well, but had several problems in terms of scalability and flexibility. In the second generation, GM used Workscape and Sun Microsystems to develop the next version of the employee portal, known as ''mySocrates." Scalability, reliability, and availability were critical as the portal supports more than 32,000 concurrent users and receives more than 3 million hits per hour.2 With mySocrates, employees have access to millions of pages of information and can tap hundreds of previously stand-alone, internal Web sites.

The GM portal streamlines employee communications, indexes relevant content from hundreds of sources, consolidates hundreds of existing internal Web sites into a single point of access, and brings collaboration and productivity tools to one place on the desktop.3 It also expands the employee experience by allowing them to customize the portal for fast and easy access to the resources they need, from business applications to personal information.

A more in-depth version of this case study is available in Services Blueprint: Roadmap for Execution.

1 Source: The Web site and 2001 annual report of General Motors.
2 PR Newswire, "Workscape, Sun, and General Motors Win DCI's 'Portal Excellence' Award; Design and Deployment of One of the World's Largest Employee Portals Recognized for Solving Strategic Business Problems and ROI Results," May 21, 2002.
3 Source: General Motors' presentation, "General Motors' Employee Portal - Liftoff Plus 1 Year: The Sky's the Limit!," given to The International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM), 2002.