David is the Senior Operations Manager at the GE Aviation plant in Wilmington, NC. The main role of his position is to apply the “lean” principles to the plant’s operations. Whether through reducing inventory or shortening cycle times, David works on producing zero waste in the production process.
Transcript
>> Okay, so my name is David Allen, my title is senior operations manager. I work for GE Aviation and I'm based in the Wilmington factory where we make components for jet engines. We typically get the orders from the actual airplane manufacturers, sometimes we get orders internally for spare parts. Then there is a scheduling team that creates a schedule that we're working to. Our suppliers work to the same schedule, so they're actually making forgings well ahead of when we need the park to manufacture it, to have it ready to go to our assembly plants. And then once the engine gets built this gets sent to the customer, Boeing or Airbus or somebody like that and then they put it on their planes in their assembly schedule. What I'm focusing on at the moment is optimizing your use of cash right, so what does that mean? That basically means that I'm looking at uses of cash and saying where can we reduce our uses of cash and that's mainly in two areas. One is inventory and the other is how long does it take us to make the parts. So, I get to go to different areas of the plant and use skillsets that I have developed over my career to look at ways to reduce inventory, shorten cycle times for the time it takes for us to make parts and those kinds of things. Because I've done a lot of different things in my career I can pull from different skills that I have. I can lead for example a lean workout where we're trying to implement principles of lean into the manufacturing process. I can also go and look at the way that we're operating the machines and try to come up with ways to speed up the way that that machine routine is working. So that's a very I would say wide variety of things that I can do. Well we've been working on a series of lean activities throughout the plant and we've started with one business unit and we found a series of lean projects there which has helped us reduce inventory by 30% so far this year. And now we're moving that same template of activities to the other business units in the factory.
Download transcript