Gold winner: American Electric Power (USA)
Categorised under: intranet innovation awards
AEP's 'Now Ideas' helped the company identify $8 million in savings in five months.
Post 8 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.
American Electric Power’s (AEP) intranet, ‘AEP Now’ has already won awards for its overall design, and some clever features. This year AEP won an Intranet Innovation Award for ‘Now Ideas’, an online suggestion box with some critical twists.
Unlike a typical suggestion box, Now Ideas specifically looks at real problems the company faces, with a focus on uncovering real solutions, which can be suggested by anyone in the company. An executive sponsors each major problem, and employees can also rate each suggested idea.
The first problem: one business unit needed to save $1.7 million in the coming year. When this problem was put to employees they submitted over 100 ideas to help save money. At least four ideas were immediately identified as offering savings of over $2 million. At the close of this first exercise, which the team treated as a pilot, 10 ideas were chosen with identified savings estimated to be $4 million, easily surpassing the original target ($1.7 million). But it doesn’t stop there.
Several months into Now Ideas and AEP has identified almost $8 million in savings. There have been so many good ideas that the team had to freeze the process, while the company implemented the best suggestions.
For the Intranet Innovation Award judges, this was a clear winner. Not only is Now Ideas incredibly effective, it’s been thoroughly well-designed and implemented on the intranet and it’s as aesthetically appealing as any site design on the web.
(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 