GE Provides Expertise to Local Family Owned Business Through Unique Program.

GE Capital Solutions Lends More than Money, Black Belts Facilitate Lean Principles at Zeeland Farm Services, Inc.

ZEELAND, Mich. -- Founded in 1950, family-owned Zeeland Farm Services, Inc. (ZFS) is now a diversified agribusiness and transportation company headquartered in Zeeland, Michigan. Its Ingredient division buys and sells agricultural co-products.

For example, when cotton or oranges are processed, co-products such as cottonseed and citrus pulp are leftover. None of these agricultural co-products are wasted. They are nutritious, valuable ingredients for livestock feed. ZFS purchases, transports, and stores the co-products to ensure their availability and delivery when desired by livestock customers.

It's a growing, high-volume operation for ZFS--one that has grown exponentially since 1998. In 2008, ZFS was looking to make a substantial investment to digitize this and other processes. Before doing so, they called GE Capital Solutions to take advantage of a unique program called GE Access whereby GE subject matter experts work with customers free of charge to help them learn how to solve their most pressing business challenges.

Two GE process improvement experts known as Six Sigma Black belts were deployed to ZFS to first meet with the customer to better understand their challenges and opportunities. Before digitizing what was a very manual process that involved lots of paperwork, multiple locations and handoffs, they helped ZFS understand the importance of first removing waste from these existing activities. More importantly, they showed the value GE could deliver by helping them improve their business going forward.

From that initial meeting, a two-day workshop was organized at ZFS' corporate offices involving one dozen ZFS employees focused on Lean principles and value stream mapping.

The team made great progress, eliminating many non-value added steps in their processes. Results include reducing the time between booking an order and invoicing the customer by more than 50 percent. Additionally, approximately 40 hours of time spent each week on manually recording information and rework is also being eliminated.

The business rationale behind GE's program, which freely lends GE's best practices and people to customers, is simple. "We're in the business of helping our customers grow. If we can help a client learn how to improve a process, adapt a best practice that GE uses to manage and grow its business, than we're providing unique value to the relationship. Ultimately, if they're able to grow faster as a result, we're opening more opportunities for GE Capital to finance that growth," explains Karen Dougherty, Access GE Leader at GE Capital Solutions.

To learn more about the program and-or schedule an interview with Karen or business leaders at ZFS involved in this engagement, please contact Stephen White at [e-mail].

About GE Capital Solutions

GE Capital Solutions (www.ge.com/capitalsolutions) provides leasing, lending and capital investment products and services to help business customers grow. It has over $100 billion in assets, serves more than a million clients around the world and is headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut. General Electric (NYSE: GE) is Imagination at Work - a diversified technology, media and financial services company focused on solving some of the world's toughest problems.