How connectivity goes hand in hand with business growth

When Ernst & Young LLP (EY) began working with Carrier, Carrier’s systems relied heavily on time-consuming manual processes and often inefficient communications among many parts of the supply chain including distributors, dealers and homeowners.

Using Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry made simple tasks difficult.  For example, knowing if a part was available, who had it in stock, ordering that part, finding out if it had shipped or had left a warehouse was often an impediment for anyone who needed the information.

So, for the past few years, EY has worked alongside Carrier to help it grow at pace by creating a leading-class digital experience for its customers while simultaneously delivering more sustainable products to the market.

Carrier’s leaders recognized the need to innovate and committed to a bold, long-term transformation strategy that would change the way the entire business operated.

Tapping into new technologies, a connected ecosystem and more collaborative ways of working has allowed Carrier to continue realizing and tracking to its goal of general and administrative expense (G&A) reduction by US$700 million by 2023 (Carrier 700 program).

According to Gundeep Singh, Carrier Residential and Light Commercial CIO, “Our digital agenda and function has evolved from a mere IT support function a few years back to a forward-looking function that’s actively leading growth and transformation. We thank EY for being a great collaborator in this journey.”

Technology at speed: building the technology infrastructure for a more agile and resilient business

For Carrier to become a future-focused business primed for fast growth, the first step was creating the foundational elements necessary for a leading-class, digitally powered experience. Carrier began by working with EY to address the limitations of its legacy system. A new SAP HANA® solution was implemented helping to integrate multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from around the world. With all data now sitting in the cloud, on a single platform, Carrier and its customers can access information and make better-informed decisions.

Additionally, with a solid foundation of data in place, Carrier now has a 360-degree view of the needs of its customers and can turn data into actionable insights and identify opportunities to add value and drive growth.

Innovation at scale: connected services that drive value across the entire ecosystem

The introduction of a B2B e-commerce platform, Breeze, ensures Carrier can connect the value chain — empowering distributors and dealers with digital tools. Breeze allows these vital partners to provide customers with a high quality user experience: finding, ordering, tracking and installing parts in real time and enabling unprecedented levels of customer service. Additionally, it drives new revenue and efficiency opportunities. In fact, within the first few months, Breeze has improved Carrier's ability to deliver by improving fulfillment cycle times by 50% resulting in significantly elevated customer experience.

Humans at center: using new tools to empower people.

While re-engineering the operations of an entire business like this involved introducing new technologies, processes, digital tools, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile applications and e-commerce platforms, none of this would have been successful without new, more collaborative ways of working.

This new technology is helping Carrier deploy machine learning and intelligent bots, saving Carrier the equivalent of 70,000 full-time employee hours per annum.  The intelligent automation program at Carrier was recently conferred with a highly coveted CIO100 award.

In addition to showcasing to Carrier’s C-suite how the IT investments would drive business transformation, EY helped make certain the organization was committed to working more collaboratively. By educating people on the benefits of adopting more data-driven practices, EY was able to help put people at the center of every solution and improve their experiences in very tangible ways.

As Michael Yadgar, EY Americas SAP Leader, explains, “Our success is due to a one-team integrated delivery model. We tapped into multiple EY subject-matter experts and acted as a trusted extension of the Carrier team.”