The GE Brief: October 26, 2021
Reporting GE’s third-quarter results, GE Chairman and CEO Larry Culp said the company delivered “another strong quarter as orders, margins and cash improved.” The results benefited from “continued signs of recovery” in the aviation market, Culp said, but he stressed that GE’s focus on continuous improvement and lean management was driving broader operational and financial progress. Read our story here.
GE Aviation’s services business is an unsung hero of the aviation industry. It is helping customers keep their planes flying and allowing them to open new sources of revenue — like supplying them with engines for converted cargo planes. The services unit is also an important source of income for GE Aviation and GE. But how does the business work? GE Reports traveled to the Mojave Desert and Texas to find out. Here’s our story.
In the 1970s, a team of MIT researchers traveled to Japan to figure out why the country’s automakers were delivering cars faster than their Detroit competitors. What they learned at Toyota — that company’s famous Toyota Production System — would make its way back across the Pacific Ocean as lean management, a set of operating principles focused on boosting safety, quality and efficiency, reducing waste and creating more value with fewer resources. Lean is also the engine helping Culp and his team drive GE’s turnaround. As Betsy Bingham, GE Aviation vice president and operations leader, put it: “Lean is our strategy, lean is how we are going to run our business, it’s key to our growth.” Click here for a roundup of lean stories from GE.
— Larry Culp, GE chairman and CEO