Case Study: General Electric Thermocouple Manufacturing Case

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General Electric Thermocouple Manufacturing Case General Electric’s (GE) manufacturing executives attended the GE Impact Program, which encouraged the use of new management strategies of production. Returning from the program, the vice president of the Wilmington facility, Bill Draper, met with his management team to discuss the implementation of JIT in the J-79 thermocouple area. Draper also invited Roger Hyatt, a consultant, who was a knowledgeable in inventory management. The J-79 area was plagued with inventory, supplier issues, and workforce issues. Draper and Hyatt lead the meeting and discussed the current issues that JIT could possibly address. As the meeting ended, many problems were uncovered, but not all managers were convinced that…show more content…
Inventory, quality, vendors, management, and the workforce were all inefficient in the current operations. Various improvements were needed to create a lean operation, starting with buy-in from the managers. Henry Malone, manager of shop operations for thermocouple manufacturing, did not have a positive view of JIT. The facility did not have an integrated system to track inventory and viewed the shop’s floors a “no man’s land” due to goods disappearing after leaving the stockroom. Other issues included setup times and incentive programs. The average setup time on the grinder was four to six hours with a run time of 22 seconds per piece – a system that encouraged large batches. Both sides of the thermocouple probe required grinding; once one batch was complete, the grinder had to be reset for the other end. The workforce was not organized to encourage success. For example, the welders at the end of the production line were rewarded for reworking defective parts at a higher pay rate. Management believed the 22% defect rate was high because the employees were milking the

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