The Canadian head office of global technology company, GE, needed a solution to facilitate a new way of working and reposition the value of its vintage 1980’s campus to meet global utilization targets.

The B+H Advance Strategy team engaged leadership in reimagining the Meadowvale Campus as a valuable asset to support their business goals. Aligned with the global GE utilization goals, our team mobilized to collect data from leadership and employees to inform the real estate strategy, campus masterplan and interior redesign in parallel with a time sensitive design schedule.

The resulting enterprise vision report captured GE’s key business goals and objectives for multiple operating units. We developed scenarios for real estate solutions to meet the vision, supported by a pricing and weighted success matrix to inform decision making.

 

Our scenarios integrated two key GE business objectives: become a “simpler company” and “make progress”. Through visioning exercises, we learned that “simpler” means quicker execution and closer collaboration with customers. “Progress” translates to getting better, being better, and doing better. To present GE Canada with a robust range of strategic occupancy options, including continued occupancy at the Meadowvale site, we created and evaluated a series of scenarios against these criteria.

Considering the current climate of uncertainty, global competition for market share and talent, disruptive business models and technologies, the best long-term investment for GE is a real estate and space strategy that provides a responsive platform capable of accommodating unanticipated expansion or contraction. Our proposed strategy addresses location, the GE brand, generational transition in the workforce and the need to facilitate agility. In this context, our analysis determined the best solution was to sell the 1980’s campus and lease space in a strategic location closer to where the next generation of employees lives and plays.