On 9th November 2021, GE announced plans to form three industry-leading global public companies. In early January 2023, GE completed the separation of GE HealthCare1 and plans to complete the separation of GE Vernova – GE’s portfolio of energy businesses – sometime in early 2024, leaving GE Aerospace as a standalone company.
At the start of the separation journey, the Separation Management Office (SMO) was established, and within Corporate Finance it was identified that treasury was one of the most centralised and complex Corporate functions. The separation and stand-up of three independent treasury organisations was critical for success. To support this massive transformation, GE Corporate and Business Treasury – with support from PwC – created four execution teams to separate corporate entanglements and stand-up business treasury operations.
Team gets to work on separation work while managing business-as-usual
A global team of over 150 set-out to create robust and detailed separation workplans, focused on granular activities that rolled up to critical milestones. For the GE HealthCare separation, there were a total of nearly 1,000 workplan steps, plus nearly 200 cross-functional dependencies.
Among other key accomplishments, the team executed 700+ bank account changes, novated 300+ FX trades and thousands of trade finance instruments, set up new bank lines, and made critical enhancements to 30+ systems.
With internal and external dependencies, tight timelines, and the need to manage numerous risks, close coordination across the teams was essential to successfully tackling an effort of such enormity.
Across GE, running the business remains the number one priority, so the most important and challenging task has been simultaneously running the day-to-day operations. The team has embraced lean and uses lean tools to drive the separation work, while continuing to run treasury operations. This is truly the differentiator that the teams bring to the table; the ability to execute a large-scale transformation while continuing to run a leading global operation.
Key achievements
“As we started work to establish three fit-for-purpose treasury organisations, we soon realised the sheer volume and activity that needed to be separated to achieve operational readiness,” explains Nicole Horman, Treasury SMO leader.
“At the same time, all employees involved in the separation work did so while maintaining their ‘day jobs’ and ensuring that there was no disruption to run the business activities. The use of lean daily management and KPIs to track execution was critical in coordinating activity across more than 150 people,” explains Lynda McGoey, Global Head of Trade Finance and Leader of the Trade Finance separation workstream.
