GE Aviation Inspection Challenge - Webinar Transcription
Speakers:
Moderator: Kacey Shapiro
From GE:
Wayne Spence, Chief Manufacturing Engineer, Rotating Parts and Airfoils Value Stream
Lisa Ralph, Open Innovation Operation and FastWorks Integration Leader
From NineSigma:
Paul Musille, Program Manager
Kacey Shapiro:
Good afternoon. Welcome to GE's aviation Inspection Technologies
Challenge webinar. Please note due to technical difficulties, the live
webinar recording from 1/13 was lost. We are re-recording the webinar
to insure that the solution providers interested in this challenge have the
resources they need to submit a proposal. As this is being recorded at a
later date, please note that we will be providing the live Q&A from 1/13
in written form with this recording on the forum. Those who ask
questions will find the answers in transcribed form. Additionally if you
watch this recording, please note you can ask any additional questions
you have in the challenge forum on the challenge website. Without any
further notes, let's get started.
Kacey Shapiro:
My name is Kacey Shapiro. I will be your host and moderator for this
webinar. Now I'm going to briefly go through the agenda. First, we're
going to provide the speaker introductions. Then we'll provide an
overview of the challenge. After that we'll present the frequently-asked
questions of the challenge. Then as stated earlier, the live Q&A will be
provided in transcribed form. We will not be going through the questions
live. Then to finish, we will wrap up the information on what we can do
today for the challenge including where to register, how to stay
connected and how to submit your proposal. Now I'm pleased to
welcome the following speakers to our webinar this morning.
From GE, we have Lisa Ralph, Open Innovation Operations and Fastworks
Integration Leader. And Wayne Spence, Chief Manufacturing Engineer,
Rotating Parts and Airfoils Value Stream. Then from NineSigma we have
Paul Musille, Program Manager. The topic of today's webinar is GE's high
accuracy, high throughput inspection technologies challenge. NineSigma,
representing the General Electric Company, invites proposals describing
technologies, processes or approaches that can increase the speed and
accuracy of aviation parts inspection. Now we're going to hear from Lisa
Ralph on GE's vision for this challenge. Lisa?
Lisa Ralph:
Great. Thanks so much, Kacey. Everyone, welcome back and thank you
for listening to our re-recording. My name is Lisa Ralph. I am the Open
Innovations Operations and Fastworks Integration Leader at GE
Corporate, Open Innovation Center of Excellence. That is a lot of words,
but what do I do really? I am responsible for scanning the landscape
inside GE to look at what are we doing? What are our business needs
outside of our walls to say what's happening within the world? What's
does the landscape look like? And being able to pair the two together. I'm
codifying a lot of best practices, a lot of processes. Then what I'm doing
on a day-to-day basis is actually running and managing a variety of
campaigns across our business portfolio.
Open innovation at GE. Open innovation is something that is new for us.
The mere thought of looking outside our walls after 125 plus years is
something that's a little bit novel. Shall we say it's also something that's
incredibly exciting. It's really allowing us to collaborate with brilliant
people like you guys who have been there before and listening today in
our forum and some of our highest-value, highest-priority problems. It's
really throwing the status quo of what we've been doing out the window
and again allowing us to perforate the walls of our constrains and
reframe what's possible, redefine as we've said here. To underscore that,
it's not just about ideas.
Ideas are great. We love to see them, but what we want to do is be able
to execute them and bring them to life. Here with GE you'll have the
ability to look at our highest-value problems through a new lens but it's
yours, not ours, 125 your way to be hugely impactful because potential
fail while implementing your solutions. What we're talking about here is a
cross of industrial businesses. We are conglomerate. So, there's a lot of
opportunity for cross-pollination at huge scale. We are one of the largest
companies in the world. Therefore, we make a lot of stuff. It has a lot of
US ground to be applied and then as well across the globe. We're actually
in over 170 countries across the world.
What I personally think is neat though, about these opportunities to
collaborate with GE, is that because of this amount of skill, because of the
global reach, that your solutions can literally have the chance or potential
to be impacting and improving the lives of tens of thousands if not
hundreds of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people all over
the world, not to do a job for a day or a couple of days of work. Really, for
you listening here and then for us as GE, this opportunity to partner
together is something that we are super excited about, being able to
partner on our toughest challenges. It's really a charge to develop better,
to develop more efficient outcomes. Together, we can define tomorrow,
today. That's a very nice, very pretty 500-foot view of our open
innovation but as great as that it, what does that actually mean?
How can we bring it down a notch to something that's a little more
acceptable and relevant. The way we're doing that is through aviation. If
you switch to the next slide, we're actually here today beginning our
journey with this high-accuracy, high-throughput inspection technology
challenge. As I mentioned on or in the previous slide, open innovation is
something that we are choosing to apply to our highest-value priorities.
So high accuracy, high equipment inspection technologies. Why is this
one of them? First off, GE Aviation has a huge installed base. I believe
there are about 33,000 commercial engines in operation in 2013.
The number is one that is only continuing to grow at an ever-increasing
rate which means they're going to be increasing the pressure to inspect
the key components more quickly as well as maintaining or improving
accuracy. What this means, is that we need to inspect more components
at higher efficiencies while providing the same or improved level of
service. This really parlays into our second reason this is such an
important, needy challenge. That's something that probably is not all
unusual given it's an aviation challenge, but that's safety. As you can
image as the number of commercial engines grow, so does the number of
components that go into them. And that's maintaining the accuracy on
each and every one of those parts. It's absolutely critical because safety
and compliance is something that is a nonnegotiable in this industry.
Currently for your reference, components are precision-crafted to tight
tolerances. Then they're actually individually inspected for compliance.
That is a lot of work when you're considering an installed base of tens of
thousands that is continuing to grow and grow and grow. It's a big
process. It's a very big job but it's actually one of our most important
which is why we're so excited to see what you have here.
What we're seeking from you are new technologies, new methods, to
inspect the components more efficiently and more importantly,
accurately. To reinforce what I was saying earlier, when a product fails
your solution here has the opportunity to save an immense number of
hours for that manufacturing process which we know is outstanding as
well as keeps all those passengers good, etc. on the thousands of planes
and operations safe. Obviously, a very needy, impactful challenge in
terms of its application but one thing I'd like to mention here is the thing I
find actually really interesting in this challenge, and I run many of them,
something that's very unique. It's a fact that the team is actually using a
physical artifact so that during this, you'll see written throughout the
website to substantiate their proposal.
In the very beginning I said, "Here are some ideas that are great, but
what we're here for is to really make it happen for you." We're really
committed to creating real outcomes. Again, what pairs really well with
this challenge and what's compelling here is the opportunity to literally
show off what your stuff can do.
Kacey Shapiro:
Great. Thank you so much, Lisa. Now we're going to go ahead and turn it
over to Wayne who's going to review the technical goals of the challenge.
Wayne?
Wayne Spence:
Yes. Hello. Thank you, Lisa. What I would like to do is walk you through
the artifact that we're going to use and a little background on me. Again,
my name is Wayne Spence. I'm a chief manufacturing engineer in aviation
in web. What I do, in this large, what we call value streams, and we make
rotating parts on all the airfoils, is guide the strategic path of our value
stream which includes all of our inspection technologies as well. As Lisa
mentioned, our airfoils are becoming very, very harder to make. They're
very tight tolerance, low surface finishes. In other words, they're shiny.
We want to inspect every one of these. We make millions of new ones a
year. So, It's critical to us to have a full data set of every one of these
airfoils so we can continue to improve our process and to also help the
customer when it comes to performance.
We contemplated how we could handle giving you something to use your
process on. We obviously couldn't send out airfoils all over the planet. A
gentleman had a great idea of using a knife. You see a knife here on the
screen. It's not an exact replica, of course, of an airfoil but it gives us
something that we can all shoot for. It is shiny. It's relatively thin. It has
sharp edges. What you see on the screen is where our minimum type of
inspection requirements.
Now obviously, we would like to have the entire surface of the knife, not
counting the handle, inspected if possible but what we do in our shops to
save time is a compromise. We pick 5 equally-spaced sections. Usually it's
on the drawing, 5- equally-spaced sections along the airfoil, in this case
along the knife, pretty much equally spaced where you would do a
complete inspection around that section. You have to pay a lot of
attention on the leading edges and the trailing edges, of course, and, of
course, across the surface. That's just the reason we go to the minimum
of five sections. The more, the better, but if you can hit the three minutes
target and do it in a minimum of five sections, then that is really
tremendous.
Of course, the denser the data set is the more accuracy you're going to
have. That's really critical as well. The next page.
To really emphasize the leading edges, on the top right you see some
basic pictures of our airfoils. Of course, this is a cartoon, but the way this
usually works with all the current technologies is that we're looking at is if
you follow the green points with an orange line through, that's basically
the actual surface of this airfoil. The green points is where the machine
cuts to measure the location. The blue lines represent basically the
tolerance band of where it could be and still be acceptable. This is a
typical thing as you've seen.
This is blown up hundreds of times obviously around a leading edge. Of
course, you can see the density of the points get a little tight around the
leading edge. This is the typical thing that we do. We have to do it to get
as much data as we can on this but we are reaching the limit of how fast
and, of course, even more importantly how accurate we can be to what
the truth is of that airfoil. This is just something for you to contemplate as
you're looking at your own technologies of what we're doing today and
how we really emphasize the edges.
The next page. Here's just a snapshot of all the different processes,
different equipment, different suppliers, that we've evaluated that we
were using, not using, and through time. It just shows how extensive it is,
our research and our supply base is. Now we have pretty good suppliers
now but again, we're looking for something that may just be the next
generation of inspection technology of airfoils. Everybody should be in
this game, everybody from scanning like CMMs, any type of optical
solutions, who knows, any current solutions. There could be many, many
solutions out there. That's why we're coming to this type of crowd
sourcing concept is because we want to give to everybody in the world
that's got something on a work bench an opportunity to be able to take a
shot at this.
A lot of this information here that you see, it's open information. It's
public information. You can go to these companies' brochures, web
pages. You can get a lot more technical data that might be able to guide
you, bound what you're thinking and how good you have to be and how
fast you've got to be. Again, we picked this type of thing like inspecting of
airfoils because it's manageable in size we believe. It's not an
overwhelming capital cost. It's not like the monster mills or anything like
that. We believe there's a lot of people that has things all ready.
I also want to emphasize clearly many of you will be able to do inspection
data and turn it in per the challenge requirements, but what I really,
really recommend, and everybody if you have a concept that you really
think has a great opportunity to get here, you just don't have the time to
get to the data, still turn that in. We always follow up on great ideas and
concepts and work with you. You won't be obviously eligible to win the
challenge, the awards, but you clearly can be in the game for something
big later as well if your concept works out and we end up working with
you for your inspection technology. Again, don't be totally discouraged if
you can't get there to the data set. That's what I have. I guess I'll turn it
back over.
Kacey Shapiro:
Thanks so much, Wayne. Now I'm going to work through the challenge
FAQs. The first one is when is the deadline to submit an entry?
Paul Musille:
The deadline to submit your entry will be February 24, 2015 at 5:00PM
Eastern Time. I just want to point out that this is an extra couple weeks.
We anticipate that people would like a little bit of extra time to finish
collecting their data and working on their submission. We went ahead
and extended that deadline to make sure everyone has enough time to
get in their submission.
Kacey Shapiro:
Great. How do I a submit an entry?
Paul Musille:
You can submit your entry online through the digital form at the
challenge web page listed here and which will also be listed available
through a link later as you're looking at it.
Kacey Shapiro:
When will GE announce the winners?
Paul Musille:
GE is going to have an internal team of experts review all of the entries.
After they are finished with this review, they'll announce the challenge
winners in May of 2015.
Kacey Shapiro:
Great. What should I include in my entry?
Paul Musille:
Entries are asked to have an inspection data set that includes both a
description of the equipment and the amount of time it took to do the
inspection. This should come in an ACS I-to-I data file that you can attach
with your submission as an online form.
Kacey Shapiro:
Great. Where can I ask more questions after this webinar?
Paul Musille:
The challenge forum is a great place to ask these questions. Just go ahead
and post your question there. I'll work with the GE team to make sure
that the correct answer gets posted there. Other people can benefit from
the answer to your question as well.
Kacey Shapiro:
Great. As I said earlier, we will not be working through the live Q&A at
this point but you will be able to find that on the challenge forum with
this recording. If you have any additional questions just like Paul said, add
them to the challenge forum. We'll provide the answers as soon as
possible.
To wrap up, what can you do today? You would want to visit the
challenge website which is listed in this link on the screen. You want to go
there to register to receive updates, use the FAQs and join the
community. You want to stay connected at the community forum that we
keep mentioning. It's there at the link on the screen. Like I said, you can
also use that to continue to ask any additional questions that you might
have. Then, of course, you want to submit your proposal.
The deadline for submission as we said earlier is February 24, 2015 at
5:00PM Eastern Standard time. That concludes our webinar. For
additional information again, we encourage you to visit that challenge
website. Then as Paul said earlier and as I just stated, please note that
the deadline for submission has been extended to February 24, 2015.
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again to our speakers for
their time and expertise and for joining us again to help rerecord this. We
appreciate your time and look forward to receiving your submission.
Thank you so much. Have a great day.