The GE Brief: January 25, 2022

Growth And Momentum
Reporting GE’s fourth-quarter results, GE Chairman and CEO Larry Culp said 2021 was an important year for the company, with GE successfully navigating a dynamic environment and delivering solid margin expansion, free cash flow, and growth in earnings per share. Culp said it was this momentum that allowed GE to announce “one of the most important events in GE’s history” in November: a plan to form three independent companies focused on the growth sectors of aviation, healthcare and energy. GE Reports has the details here.

Taking Care Of Business
The engine driving this progress is lean management. At GE’s FieldCore business, service crews used lean to cut cycle time — the interval between shutting down a power plant for maintenance work and bringing it back online — by more than 30%. An outage that used to take six weeks, for instance, may take only four weeks with a new digital tool called Live Outage. That can translate into faster outages for customers, who can get back to producing and selling power more quickly, and more productivity benefits for GE. GE Reports has the story here.

Lean Management 
Lean is also at work at GE Renewable Energy’s wind turbine factory in Pensacola, Florida, where employees make some of the most popular onshore wind turbines on the planet: GE’s 2-megawatt machines that reached a combined 20 gigawatts of installed capacity in 23 U.S. states and 10 countries. That’s enough to power the equivalent of 12.9 million homes around the world. Still, they know they can improve. Lean has allowed the plant to reduce the number of build hours it takes to produce a turbine by 340 minutes and shortened the time a turbine spends on the production line by 100 minutes — 6% and 12% improvements respectively. The story is here.

New Energy 
When GE released its Sustainability Report last June, it made a commitment to become carbon neutral in its own operations by 2030 and announced an ambition to be net zero by 2050, including Scope 3 emissions from the use of sold products. GE’s technology and its long innovation tradition are already helping customers find new ways to deal with looming challenges like the energy transition to address climate change. Look at our list here.

Video: Spotlight On The Future
In November at the Dubai Expo, GE organized a summit called Spotlight Tomorrow, featuring speakers who discussed how innovation can make the energy, aviation and healthcare industries more sustainable.

— Quote Of The Day —

“We enter 2022 with strength from this continued strategic, operational and financial progress, thanks to the dedication and resilience of the GE team … And we’re seeing real momentum and opportunities for sustainable profitable growth from near-term improvements in our businesses, especially as Aviation recovers and our end markets strengthen.”
— Larry Culp, GE chairman and CEO

Quote: GE Reports. Images: GE Renewable Energy, Getty Images, FieldCore. Video: GE Reports.