Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) from GE Digital in Action

See how Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) from GE Digital is enabling factories, including the GE Aviation facility in Cheltenham, UK, to work smarter, more effectively and improve productivity.
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Video Transcript:
My name's Terry Hodgetts, I'm a lead manufacturing engineer at GE Aviation, Cheltenham. Right now we stood in the ELMS Production Cell (ELMS = Electrical Load Management System), which makes power management systems for 777 aircraft.
From the heated cockpit seats to entertainment systems, the navigation lights, everything is controlled by the power on these systems.
The assembly of these units contains transformers, relays, circuit breakers, a lot of wiring, a lot of crimping. Each of those operations has a number of steps in order to complete it. The application software manages all of those steps and the operations to make sure that we end up with a complete product.
Before we had this software, we had six different manufacturing cells all the size of a small company. Each one did things their own way.
Stuart Thomson, Global IT Program Manager, GE Aviation.
We had four major issues that we were combating. It can be very difficult to track where a particular unit or units are. We had variation across all our facilities. We had a very paper heavy shop floor. Drawings, build instructions that was very difficult to manage.
We've been live since October 2015, so 10 months, right now we've been live in the system. I think we've had some really big wins from a quality standpoint. Being able to accurately layout the manufacturing process within the application and in particular having better control over who's doing what on the shop floor.
We're able to have all the instruction delivered directly to the operator as they're working on the job, on the screen. So you're only working on one part of the job so I don't need to give you a 40-page build manual, I need to give you a couple of paragraphs and a diagram. We were able to control the floor a lot better so, for example we won't permit someone to fit an assembly into a casing until the assembly is built.
Tom Bradley, Executive Site Leader, GE Aviation.
We have very good visibility all the way down to the routing level that tells us exactly how many hours we spend on each part number, on each routing at each operation, we're at 1.95% percent more productive this year. Our on-time delivery is improved somewhere in the order of 10 points versus the last year's baseline. Which ultimately should lead to better working capital or better turns and on-time delivery to our customers. This is a business project, this is not an IT project.