• Making sure we have good people on the ground, easily accessible to customers and potential customers throughout the world
• Making sure that during the execution of a contract both our customers and GE Energy share a complete understanding of all critical matters
• Making sure that our products are designed specifically to help our customers realize their business goals

Customer-focused innovation
Our customers expect innovation from their suppliers, but not just innovation for its own sake. At GE Energy, before we introduce any new technology, we must prove – both to ourselves and to our customers – that it will pay off in the form of higher standards of performance, greater capacity, and lower lifecycle costs, while improving reliability.

When thinking of service to customers, it’s important to bear in mind that many different types of innovation can contribute. From ground-breaking technology advances to simple process improvements, we are constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve performance.

Better documentation for improved productivity
Recently, GE Energy has been taking a close look at how we can improve our documentation process during the fulfillment of large contracts. We are currently working with another large Six Sigma company to find better ways of integrating our processes with those of our customers, to create real value. Central to our efforts is the need for complete understanding, on both sides, of each other’s critical needs, tolerances and schedules in order to bring these complex facilities into commercial operation.

The prime channel for exchange of information on a large project is documentation. In a typical GE Energy project as many as 800 documents may be generated and shared with the customer. But our studies show that only a small fraction of these are critically important to the efficient completion of the project. Identifying the critical documents, and setting the optimum time in the development process at which designs and specifications must be frozen, can prevent wasted effort, and help the project to a no-surprise, on-time, under-budget completion.

Advanced technology for superior solutions
Generally, when we think of innovation, it is of revolutionary innovation. Breakthrough advances. Innovation that makes everything that went before it look old-fashioned. Within GE, one of our competitive advantages is our Global Research Centers (GRC) and GE Energy Oil & Gas is making major investments in Global Research activities. Being connected to GRC brings two advantages. First, they give us the proven capability to re-shape future technologies; second, they draw on technologies from across GE’s entire range of businesses to deliver today’s innovations.

Today’s innovations are evolutionary. Though somewhat less glamorous, these evolutionary innovations fit the risk profile of the oil and gas industry. Evolutionary technology involves taking existing technology or existing products and enhancing them to provide unique performance solutions. One example from the LNG industry, referred to in Claudi Santiago’s article in this newsletter, is GE Energy’s adaptation of standard gas turbines for driving compressor trains, over the past decade. Customers enjoy the benefit of customized performance and efficiency from a standard, proven, product. To give another current example, GE Energy has recently implemented a new manufacturing process that enables compressor impellers to be machined from a single forging. Not only does this process eliminate the time and expense of welding, with its inherent repair cycles, it opens the door to new geometries – defined by GE computational methods – that were not feasible using the old fabrication process. Innovation starts with an idea but its real value is extracted through years of cross functional efforts to bring to market optimized and validated processes, products and systems for increasing value to our customers.

Leveraging the best
GE Energy design teams work through Centers of Excellence around the world. In this way, the entire strength of the GE organization can contribute to local solutions. Centers of Excellence serving the oil and gas industry include:

• Gas turbines – Led from Greenville, SC
• Steam turbines – Led from Schenectady, NY
• Controls – Led from Salem, VA
• Compression Technology – Led from Florence, Italy

At the end of the day
The first task on any project is to understand our customers’ needs. We are striving to become better and better listeners! Our focus in engineering is to transform those needs through robust fulfillment processes into reality while increasing customer value through technological innovation. There’s simply no other way.