General Electric (GE) remanufacturing plant in Grove City, Pennsylvania, rebuilds 1200 locomotive engines every year with the help of 350 dedicated employees. Until a few years ago, the whole process of diagnoses used to be pretty tiresome, as each locomotive engine used to be torn down, piece by piece, to be assessed carefully using instruction manuals, and then the whole servicing details were recorded back in papers. Now, the factory workers at the plant scan barcodes on locomotive engines and pull up all the details of the history of the machines to diagnose for repairs. All this big data is being stored in the cloud, with the help of algorithms.

By adopting automation, digitization, and robotics GE is fundamentally transforming; the company has been investing billions of dollars to develop the "Industrial Internet of Things" to re-imagine itself. This change has improved GE's ability to return cash to shareholders. Digital transformation in remanufacturing unit has helped in reducing the time, space, and inventory.

How is GE transforming itself?
GE is employing Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) to transform the ways in which manufacturing enterprises convert raw materials to final products. The “GE Digital Software” enables IIOT and helps the organisation to manage and exchange data, which also trigger events in a digitalized environment.

Overall 26,000 freight locomotives operate in the United States of America. Every single freight locomotive engine, on an average, operates effectively for ten years. After this period of a smooth run, they are sent to GE’s Grove City Remanufacturing Facility for the repairs and service. The Grove City Remanufacturing Facility is spread across the area of 240,000 Square Feet and has the workforce of over 350 individuals.

The dilapidated locomotive engines are rebuilt and revamped in this unit and sent back on the tracks. Since 2013 GE started to digitize this process under which they started to serialise all the metal parts and heavy tools by putting a scannable barcode on them. This prompt digitized system has helped in cutting down the time by manifolds, the processes which used to take five to six days can now be done in real time, and it helped all the 96 different stations of the unit to report out in real-time.

The other benefit of it is that, now, across the facility, anyone can see the current status of operations from anywhere in a second. The supervisors and production heads are now able to examine the runtime of all the processes of all the stations, and at the same time, they can check the information related to the employee shifts and other details.

GE Digital Software has helped the facility in reducing the unplanned downtime by 20% and the site has also become paperless. These structural changes might not show many outcomes in the short run but the long-run advantages of IIOT are incredible, and will ultimately help to improve the standard of manufacturing.

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