Engineers from GE Appliances (GEA), a Haier company, and other companies gathered on Tuesday for the first day of the Digital Manufacturing and Engineering Summit at the Monogram Hall on the campus of the GE Appliance Park in Louisville.
For some, it was a way to see how the latest in metrology (the scientific study of measurement) and 3D scanning technology has been implemented into the assembly lines of the industrial park that employs more than 8,500 people — including approximately 1,600 manufacturing engineers.
For those at GEA, it was a way to pay it forward to approximately 20 undisclosed companies who were present to benchmark the company and the investments it has made, after originally being exposed to 3D scanning and related technologies while benchmarking automotive giant Ford in 2015, as part of a mutual involvement with the Lean Enterprise Institute.
“It was an amazing amount of tools that, quite frankly, posed a huge opportunity for us. So at that point, that was when we set out to reinvent our product process,” Dave Leone told the crowd. “How do we leverage these tools? How do we get smarter and faster and more efficient?”
Leone is senior director of engineering and dimensional control at GEA, and one of the key members of the leadership team who oversaw the implementation of the technology at the appliance park.
Derrick Little, executive director of technology for GEA, was also a part of that team who would make several trips to Detroit to meet with members of Ford’s leadership team. He noted that GEA’s virtual reality (VR) lab is based on the specifications of Ford’s plant.
Little told me that GEA’s momentum in the digital meteorology space started to take off around seven years ago when it first started working with 3D technology to scan both individual parts of the appliances — Appliance Park assembles dishwashers, refrigerators, washers and dryers — and entire appliances.
“It’s really been an enabler for us to transform from the company that we were in 2015 to the company that we are now in 2023,” Little added. “The big difference is really from a craftsmanship standpoint. When you look at the products that we make today, compared to the products that we made back then, there's a marked difference — and the reason behind that is because of the tools that we've been able to put together.”
'We had no idea of the full power'
As GEA CEO and president Kevin Nolan told the audience through a pre-filmed video message to begin the summit, GEA has invested more than $2 million in “new tools and tech,” noting those investments have “played a big role in helping us launch products faster and more efficiently than ever before.”
“How do you make the [return on investment] work? Well honestly, that’s the secret in the sauce,” Bill Good, vice president of supply chain at GEA, told the crowd in the introductory comments.
“It’s nothing short of incredible. As we started ramping up 3D, we had no idea of the full power of what we were getting into.”
The event was the second of its kind, with the first being held in 2018 — right around the same time that the collaboration between GEA and Quebec City-based InnovMetric began to take full effect after initial meetings took part two years earlier.
“It was really all about learning. Now if you go out here, a lot of the content you’ll see is content we’ve developed … through a number of different spaces within manufacturing, within quality and within design engineering,” Little told me about the inaugural event in 2018 when compared to the exposition booths that were assembled outside of the hall’s main theater.
Marc Soucy, co-founder and president of InnovMetric, was on hand as the morning’s keynote speaker. Although InnovMetric has been around since 1994, the company started making inroads into its current digital infrastructure — leading to its PolyWorks Inspector metrology software solution — in 2011 after investing close to $30 million in software development alone, to ensure its universal platform across all stages of manufacturing.
The PolyWorks software is what can show quickly if a product is built up to the manufacturing specifications originally programmed by the engineers based on the colors that it gives off in the 3D modeling heat map. If the map is predominantly blue, the specifications are up to snuff. If it’s violet, there are issues that need to be addressed, Little said.
Soucy said although his company has close to 20,000 clients — lots of whom have massive operations like GEA — in total, the host company stands apart when it comes to grasping the sandbox mentality, so to speak, in the interest of helping both parties improve their products and offerings.
“They are a leader for us,” Soucy told me afterwards at the expo. “GE believed in it very early on — and helped us develop a solution and pushed the development way farther than any other customer we’ve had.”
I asked Soucy what others in the local business community who are not present at the seminar this week can take away from the event.
“The importance of [undergoing] digital transformation, but doing it in an intelligent way,” said Soucy, adding that it was critical to first assess a company’s issues and then prioritize what it wants to fix.
“Don’t disrupt your operations. Too many companies have failed because they go too fast,” he said. “It cannot be top down. … You need to rally all the team members.”
And when it comes to deploying a technology, start slow.
“Let people react to it. Let people learn from it … and make adjustments. … It’s like eating an elephant: One bite at a time."
