My first assignment when brought over to join Whirlpool Corporation at its headquarter in Benton Harbor, Michigan, was to develop a business case for the use of self-service and the Internet. I literally stumbled into this assignment. Wolfgang Richter, the US-CIO that hired me, asked me where I wanted to work, the Supply Chain or the Customer Management team. That was a no-brainer to me.

My first supervisor, Rich Vavra-Musse (great guy!), was the IT lead for the Customer Management team of the global SAP implementation. After a few weeks, he assigned me to work with Kevin Cordes to develop a strategy for customer management.

I learned tons from Kevin, and we together we able to develop a business case that centered around replacing phone and fax communications with the trade partners with a self-service environment based on the internet. The cost savings were staggering, they amounted to a substantial (more than 25%) of the US business case for the introduction of SAP.

This was my first brush with formal business modelling, and I think I had some good experiences since then.