I was in Canada this week (yes, on a 9 hour flight due to weather and maintenance issues!) meeting with the great IBM team there and some superb clients. I had an opportunity to go and see Celestica around a $6M company.
They design, manufacture and ship complex electronic components for international clients, manages customer relationships, operates end-to-end supply chains and logistics, and develops processes and software to support its clients. The company employs more than 30,000 people in worldwide locations, such as China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mexico, the USA and Romania.
Walking in: As I went into their building, I immediately saw the passion around Social Business from Celestica. Basically, Celestica wanted to have social communities to drive sharing of ideas across all their locations. Think of best practices, innovations, and even just networking to drive up productivity.
Below is the encouragement to join the overall community and to start subtopics that add value.
While they do have a community manager, the discussion groups are very organically grown. The most popular one? On helping the Japan team with encouragement and moving workload around due to the disaster in that part of the world. But there are more… on best practices on their processes, and their competitive advantages. So much so that CISCO just named their Partner of the year on both the IT and business side!
The results of this new community are reduced cost and increased innovation. In fact, the team lead by CIO Mary Gendron and Sr Director of IT TQ (Tianbing Qian!). The cool thing was the they formed a collaboration council to drive ideas, made up of line of business leaders, and had over 2000 collaboration champions in the company.
Further results have been that this has been named the #1 Game Changer Award winner, and it has reshaped and inspired the corporate culture. From the CEO on down, they have changed their culture of their company from Silo to a single driving organization set on changing the world.
Hi Sandy, I just read through your Blog today. Hopefully your next trip to Canada won’t take as long. We see lots of opportunity here and welcome you back. I really like your Blog about your Celestica visit and we are going to feature this and some of your other information in our internal Newsletter, I’ll make sure I send it to you when it comes out in early May. A summer visit in Canada will enhance your experience!