A gas turbine and a jet engine are remarkably similar machines. In fact, GE Power was tasked by the US government during WWII to build America’s first jet engine. The partnership evolved into what is now GE Aviation. A jet engine and gas turbine operate under similar mechanical principles. They have similar designs and similar components. Ultimately, the process of repairing these machines are very similar.

Because GE Aviation and GE Power’s components are so similar, the component repair process is remarkably similar as well. This allowed the two business units to share the same software for component repair.

Like any modern-day industrial conglomerate, government regulation is a reality that looms large over any process change. Because of that, the service shops are stuck using legacy mainframe software and paper. Lots of paper. Tons of paper.

The biggest challenge we faced was that most of the shops in the component repair network were built up over the last several decades via external acquisitions. When GE acquired these businesses they generally left their legacy processes in place. There was no standard across the shops. This meant that business process varied wildly between not only component repair shops, but individual working cells too. User roles were different, vocabulary was different, paper processes were different, even the software used was different.

Because each shop has wildly different standards and processes, GE Aviation and GE Power decided they needed to try to standardize their processes across the board. The answer to this problem was to create a piece of software that both businesses would share. The SmartShop team was tasked with creating an application that was:

• Configurable to suit the various requirements of the shops in the short term.
• Built so that processes could be easily changed at the shop without a complete overhaul of the software.
• Scalable so that new component repair shops could be onboarded quickly without the need for engineering support.

It was obvious that there was a business process overlap, so the decision was made for both GE Aviation and GE Power to share one application that would ultimately become SmartShop. This allowed us a lot of flexibility in designing a cloud-based SaSS product that was business agnostic, scalable, and flexible to suit various business processes across multiple shops and businesses.

It all starts with a conversation

The first step was to hop on a plane and travel to a component repair facility to meet end-users. We stood back and we watched them work. We observed first-hand, the pain points they faced every day.

Designing the product

One of our key takeaways from our many conversations with end-users was that SmartShop needed to be simple.

SmartShop needed to:

• Stay out of the users’ way. Our users are highly skilled laborers. They know what they needed to do to get their work done.
• Be as simple as possible with no distractions. Users are working with extremely dangerous machines. Their software tool can’t be a distraction.
• Work effectively on any number of devices. There’s no way for us to know what devices will be used across the shops.

We created a set of design principles and product goals for the teams to review before design critiques to ensure we were always aligned with our core principles.

GE Aviation’s McAllen Component Repair Facility

GE Power’s GEMTEC Saudi Arabia Component Repair Facility