In March 2024, managers at GE Aerospace’s manufacturing plant in Suzhou, China, set themselves an ambitious goal: cutting the lead time for high-pressure compressor (HPC) parts used in CFM LEAP engines* by no less than 50%. The idea was to create a new cell model line for the Suzhou site. For their pilot program, plant leaders chose “LEAP HPC Group B,” which produces rotating parts at the very heart of a jet turbine; they applied tools from FLIGHT DECK, GE Aerospace’s proprietary lean operating model, to every facet of its process as they attempted to cut the time from raw material issue to final machining operation in half. Over the course of the following year, they found they’d overshot even this ambitious aim. What took the line 10.3 days in April 2024 now takes 3.5 days, and that number continues to trend down. This is a story of “a continuous improvement journey,” says Dan Zeng, Suzhou’s operation leader.
The Journey Begins
Zeng and Executive Plant Leader Minna Wu began this FLIGHT DECK journey with value-stream analysis and process mapping, which determined that the machining process called LEAP HPC Group B had the most room for improvement. A FLIGHT DECK–derived “spaghetti chart” revealed a relatively byzantine arrangement of workstations and a chaotic flow of materials. This moved Zeng’s team to reposition the workstations around related operations (like horizontal lathing or axis milling) and to divide parts by their configurations. This reduced the distance a part must travel by 64% — from 1,417 meters to 513 meters. They also eliminated one operation and moved two other operations to a raw materials supplier that performs them at lower cost.
After running a machine capacity analysis (MCA) to improve the plant’s “takt time,” which sets the rhythm a manufacturing plant needs to meet demand, Zeng’s team retrofitted the fixtures themselves. “Our MCA found that we could avoid time-consuming changeovers between operations by changing the machines’ fixtures and tooling combinations,” she says. “That way they could handle different parts at the same station.” After retooling these machines, the team improved their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) from 85% to 88%, reducing the cycle time for these operations by 120 minutes.
“This improvement was the true game changer,” Zeng says. “Because it means that with very few changes we were able to introduce a central modification to the HPC production: one-piece flow. This has been fundamental to changing the line from one that pushes to one that flows.”
Go with the Flow
Suzhou lines traditionally work on a strict sequential batch flow. “But that kind of tight, fixed production schedule is very difficult to sustain,” says Zeng. “Because it’s so inflexible, it can be disrupted by the smallest change.” In one-piece flow, where pieces go through the entire system one by one, the team can improve each operation’s status and reduce changeover time rather than wait for an entire batch to be completed before making one improvement.
While one-piece flow eliminates logjams where nine identical parts might wait for the first one to go through, its introduction at the Suzhou site produced a psychological shift as well. “When we started the pilot last March, frontline operators didn’t feel much difference,” Zeng recalls. “But after the retooling and combinations of fixtures, they started giving us very positive feedback.”
In its roughly 15-year evolution within the lean principles on which FLIGHT DECK is based, the Suzhou plant has gone through several designated stages of a lean journey: from understanding and applying key concepts and tools (roughly 2009–2014) to applying these concepts and tools in a lean-based operating system for daily management (2015–2018) to a third phase focused on improving company culture, which applies those processes and improvements to people.
FLIGHT DECK Fundamentals in Action
Zeng says that another term for the current phase is FLIGHT DECK implementation. “It’s engaging people by applying FLIGHT DECK fundamentals in a systematic way that can do things like produce an entirely new model line,” she says. “Not just to improve overall equipment effectiveness but to build a comprehensive, systematic improvement for the whole line.” And, she adds, those improvements show up in the employees themselves.
“When I first raised the idea of designing the operation model as one-piece flow, they had lots of concerns,” Zeng recalls. “Why wouldn’t they? How can you follow something that doesn’t exist yet?” After more discussion, they tried the new model out. “After we did a test run of two weeks, it was like everyone felt, ‘Wow, this is actually more powerful!’”
According to Zeng, this may be where the most significant change was felt. “It’s one thing to learn the theory,” she says. “But once you practice it, it becomes a reality and the real benefits begin to come. When the leaders and frontline operators saw how well one-piece flow worked, they were inspired to try other new ideas. After trying them and seeing the results firsthand, they really started to believe in the power of FLIGHT DECK.”
*The LEAP engine is manufactured by CFM International, a 50-50 joint company between GE Aerospace and Safran Aircraft Engines.