BUSINESS

GE SourceNow launched to help growth of SMEs

September 12, 2017
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SMEs are high on the agenda across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), with countries such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) & Egypt developing strong national initiatives to support their growth.

In KSA, increasing the culture of entrepreneurship, raising the contribution of SMEs to the GDP and contributing to employment creation are areas of concern.

In Egypt, SMEs are a mainstay of the economy, which according to the Oxford Business Group, account for 80% of gross domestic product (GDP) and employ much of the country’s workforce. In a determined move to support their growth, Egypt’s central bank has taken aggressive steps to expand commercial lending to SMEs across the country.

Inspired by the need to promote the regional industrial ecosystem and SME sector, GE announced the launch of SourceNow, an innovative digital solution that provides a one-stop-shop for industrial services. The solution creates a unique digital marketplace where buyers can float electronic requests for quotes for complex industrial services in sectors such as power generation, oil & gas and others, to high quality suppliers. Any organization can register to use the solution as either a seller or buyer of industrial services.

Drawing on 125 years of GE’s innovation and industrial domain expertise and more than 110 years of its industrial procurement and sourcing knowledge across MEA, SourceNow was created as a startup concept and builds on the organization’s earlier efforts to promote local SMEs and indigenous entrepreneurship in the region.

These efforts include GE’s contributions to the development of the local SME sector and economic diversification in the Kingdom, in line with Saudi Vision 2030. As a leading partner in Saudi Arabia’s transformation, GE has organized Supplier Forums in the Kingdom to strengthen high-value supply chains locally and highlight opportunities for inward investments and partnerships. More than 500 of GE’s suppliers from the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and Africa attended the events in 2016 and 2017. Recently, Dussur (formerly operating under the name of Saudi Arabian Industrial Investments Company) and GE also signed a joint venture worth over $267 million to strengthen “Made in Saudi” capabilities by expanding manufacturing processes to create the capacity to supply most of KSA’s annual demand for gas turbines and boost the local supply chain to benefit SMEs.

In Egypt, the recently held 2016-17 GE Egypt Digital Innovation Challenge brought together young entrepreneurs, university students and software developers to create digital solutions to address Egypt’s challenges in the energy, healthcare and transportation sectors. Launched in collaboration with the Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC), an affiliate of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the aim of the challenge was to help drive Egypt’s digital transformation and foster local entrepreneurship.

“SourceNow responds to a real market need by offering an innovative, intuitive, easy-to-use solution that solves the challenge of sourcing highly-skilled and highly-specialized industrial services,” explained Michelle Wu, CIO and VP of Digital Technology for GE’s Power Services business in MEA.

The solution, developed by a small startup-concept team from GE’s Power Services MEA unit is powered by Predix*, GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet – purpose-built to meet the scale, complexity, speed and security requirements of industry.

Consumer goods industries in Saudi Arabia already use digital solutions to provide various products, ranging from e-books to food service delivery. SourceNow stands apart as it provides easy access to complex and sophisticated services at a much larger, industrial scale.

SourceNow is particularly useful for SMEs – as both suppliers of services and as potential customers searching for high quality services at competitive rates.

SourceNow also provides industrial SMEs with access to a larger network of services suppliers and customers in four different markets – KSA, Egypt, Kuwait and the UAE. More importantly, the significant number of verified vendors and potential customer review ratings can drive competitive pricing.

“Looking at the broader picture, SourceNow builds on our commitment to help industrial services suppliers and SMEs grow faster. By connecting them and giving them easy access to each other, the digital solution can support their business objectives and speed up their decision-making processes,” Wu adds.

As Saudi Arabia looks to strengthen local SMEs further in high value-add sectors such as industrial services and become part of global supply chains, SourceNow can help. — SG


September 12, 2017
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