This Thursday, GE will hold its annual Investor Conference at GE Aerospace’s Customer Technical Education Center and nearby manufacturing facilities in Cincinnati and will feature keynote presentations from GE Chairman and CEO and GE Aerospace CEO Larry Culp, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik, and leaders from both businesses.
There are about 7,000 GE gas turbines distributed throughout the world. Each one needs regular maintenance — a few weeks every several years in which a power plant is taken offline for service, repairs, and potential upgrades. This involves a great deal of planning to prepare for the outage. It’s meticulous in nature, due to the complexity of the technology and the environment. All this work requires an encyclopedic amount of documentation to support the activities, including technical specs, equipment lists, safety protocols, diagrams, data sheets, and quality control forms.
In the 1970s, a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology traveled to Japan to figure out why that country’s automakers were delivering cars faster than their competitors in Detroit. Their search led them to Toyota and its Toyota Production System — a set of management principles focused on boosting safety, quality and efficiency, reducing waste and creating more value with fewer resources.
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The 1980s are back in fashion, according to Harper’s Bazaar, but in some corners of industry, they never left. “Nobody’s wearing big hair and shoulder pads, but it’s all very pencil and paper,” says Jeremiah Smedra, an operations director at FieldCore, GE’s field services company. Smedra is talking about maintenance workers trudging into power plants with thick binders filled with drawings and instructions to make sure outages are performed according to plan.