Helping Us Help Ourselves
Site Selection: Walk us through the site selection process for this Atlanta project.
JM: There are a few things we look at when we make the real estate decision. First and foremost, the customer, which leads into our Strategic Long-Range Planning [SLR] process – strategies to enhance and improve the customer experience for existing customers, as well as to acquire new customers. Our real estate organization, as a support organization, provides some of the pillars to the top-level strategies that the global sales and marketing team pulls together.
Some key criteria are: What capabilities are required in terms of human capital and physical capital? And how do we ensure alignment between the two, and, most importantly, the customer. When looking at the opportunities, a big driver for us is "Where can you source talent?" We will look and see if it's engineering talent, training, customer engineering, product management, marketing talent or procurement talent. That varies by region within the U.S. even. There are universities that have strong electrical engineering programs, and some have strong procurement programs. We look at where we can hire the best and most talented resources. Where do they want to be? Georgia was attractive to us. We looked at demographics, universities, programs the universities have at the R&D level.
Ways we can improve the customer experience – that's probably the single greatest driver for us.
We have to be located close to a major airport, cutting down on transportation time, and ensuring we have the capability and flexibility to deliver on customer requirements. We need the ability for an employee to get on an airplane and travel to a customer site. Also, we look at what type of incentives the local and state governments are willing to provide, to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to attracting top talent to their communities.
http://www.siteselection.com/issues/2009/jan/NCR-QI/
