Alumni Profile:
Cecilia Shea '83
“In recent months, I’ve been visiting UMass to develop a pipeline for information technology talent,” observes GE Plastic’s Cecilia Shea ’83. Shea offers students in business and technology internships with GE Plastics; she also introduces prospective graduates to fast-track career opportunities through GE’s Information Management Leadership Program. “I spend time with computer science students but I’m just as enthusiastic about Isenberg School students,” notes Shea. “General Electric places a premium on business students who can cross disciplinary boundaries by combining information technology with management and other business skills,” she emphasizes.
By all accounts, Shea, who is Chief Information Officer for commercial enterprises at GE Plastics’ world headquarters in Pittsfield, was such a student herself. A graduate of the Isenberg School’s former Department of General Business and Finance, she is responsible for the information systems associated with all of GE Plastics’ commercial initiatives. That includes strategic responsibility for the firm’s global business and tactical responsibility for its initiatives in the Americas. It’s an extensive landscape that embraces account management, field marketing, customer front-end information and inquiries, order management and tracking, and supply chain management. “My team covers everything except financials and manufacturing,” she explains. “Our commercial strategy is focused on the customer.”
The commercial team may own the customer, but in GE Plastics’ growing emphasis on e-commerce, it’s the customer who’s in the driver’s seat. “Five years ago, some of our customers and potential customers weren’t up to speed in the e-commerce medium to take full advantage of our services,” notes Shea. “Today, virtually every customer can use our website for self-service activities, including identifying products for new applications, learning about the latest visual effects in technology, and tracking orders for our seven different product lines—Lexan ®, Noryl ®, Cycolac ®, Cycoloy ®, Valox ®, Ultem ®, Geloy ®.” GE Plastics’ extensive portfolio of high-performance resins, film, and sheet products serve a variety of industries, including aerospace, automotive, healthcare, consumer electronics, transportation, packaging, construction, telecommunications, and computing. The business employs 11,000 people and operates sixty manufacturing and technology facilities in twenty countries.
Tell us what you want your products to do and where your customers will be using them, and we can match—or create—the materials to answer those needs. We can help reduce weight, enhance performance, and free your designs for optimum usability, notes the GE Plastics website. Following an interactive partnership that yields the “right” material,
the web-site becomes the medium for a seamless commercial chain beginning with the customer’s order to its delivery and the customer’s eventual feedback. The e-commerce framework encompasses a diverse set of activities—everything from activating global supply chains and allowing customers to fine-tune the colors of materials, to calculating costs and predicting and tracking delivery dates. “Our e-commerce interface gives the customer maximum control over the order,” observes Shea. “We strive for touchless ordering. Every time we intervene manually by “touching” an order, we increase the risk of errors in the process. We also use e-commerce to find new customers. It extends our reach and leverages our resources. After all, you can only physically visit so many customers.”
In January, General Electric publicly announced its intention to put its plastics division up for sale. The firm has remained profitable, with 5% earnings last year , but rising costs of the division’s critical petroleum-based raw materials—notably benzene—will continue to squeeze margins. (Shea also notes the increased capacity of foreign competitors to obtain another critical class of materials, polycarbonates.) Shea’s initiatives in business information systems, then, are significant assets to the firm in this hypercompetitive environment. (So are the firm’s diverse research partnerships both inside and beyond General Electric that yield higher-margin engineering plastics and polymer composites.)
Shea credits the Isenberg School for her first sustained exposure to the role of information technology in business. “I took a number of management courses in IT; Professor Chen was a major influence. In my senior year, Professor Conlon introduced me to a number of contacts in industry,” Shea recalls. After graduation, Shea joined Shawmut Bank, where she was a staff auditor for financial and systems environments. Several years later, she joined GE Plastics in Pittsfield, where she has remained for eighteen years. Beginning in systems development and support, she mastered a number of commercial IT positions, ultimately advancing into the firm’s leadership team. “It’s been a fantastic learning experience to grow as a professional alongside so many path-breaking developments in information technology,” she observes.
“My career with General Electric has been unusual, because I haven’t moved around the company like many other senior GE employees. Shea and her husband, William, a 1984 graduate of the Sport Management Program, live just east of Pittsfield in Dalton with their three teenage sons. Her husband, a Lieutenant Colonial in the U.S. Army Reserves, is a quality manager with the a Pittsfield firm, Sinicon Plastics, Inc..
Shea may live in the Berkshires, but she remains a savvy player in a global business.
“I take that aspect of my job for granted,” remarks Shea, who travels periodically throughout North and Latin America and occasionally to Europe and Asia as well. (Her firm divides Asia into seven regional markets, she notes.) “Lately, we’ve been simplifying our global supply chain. We have to think globally to be competitive,” she insists. “My advice to Isenberg School students, then, is twofold: develop a global business perspective and contribute as a business partner beyond the boundaries of your technical discipline.”