OREANDA-NEWS. GE Digital announced the availability of a new Brilliant Manufacturing Suite module, Plant Pulse Optimizer, providing manufacturers with the ability to run the plant on up-to-date production, inventory, quality and product delivery information rather than intuition for the purpose of continuous process improvement.  Also shown at GE’s Minds + Machines Europe starting today in Paris, Plant Pulse Optimizer delivers broader visibility to all plant personnel quickly and improves operational execution by coordinating isolated activities. In addition, it can improve operator engagement and motivation ultimately resulting in a marked improvement in labor utilization.

“There’s nothing more critical in manufacturing than staying ahead of your competitors,” said Jennifer Bennett, GE Digital General Manager for Manufacturing Software. “But all too often, before you finish switching over to a new product, market demands shift yet again. If you can’t match these cycle times, your customers won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere. Plant Pulse Optimizer allows you the visibility to flexibly adjust to synchronize and optimize your plant so you can have that competitive advantage.”

Lack of plant wide visibility often results in lost opportunities, and manufacturers’ need to easily integrate, access, analyze and visualize data to improve collaboration and information transparency within the plant. The Plant Pulse Optimizer provides a Panoramic view of all production activity for all factory personnel via real-time, multi-shift based KPIs (machine-material-labor-product intelligence) as scorecards.  The module provides insights focused on production analytics to organize manufacturing data into a structure to provide information on inventory, yield and achievement of production plans. The module is also device and back-end agnostic, which allows it to be connected to both GE and non-GE manufacturing operations systems.

Plant Pulse Optimizer is an out-of-the-box solution that requires minimal configuration, and its consumer grade visualization technology is so intuitive that there is virtually no training needed. The “card”-based views aid in execution for various roles within the plant, with associated drill down cards to allow quick identification of bottlenecks at the operation level.

Field-tested and optimized within GE’s own factories, the Brilliant Manufacturing Suite maximizes manufacturing production performance through advanced real-time analytics and execution to enable all manufacturers to realize GE’s Brilliant Factory vision. The various modules within allow customers to begin to realize their own vision of a Brilliant Factory.

GE Healthcare, in a continuation of its Brilliant Factory initiatives, has deployed Plant Pulse Optimizer in five manufacturing sites, including three in Asia that cover all modalities including Life Care Solutions and Ultrasound. The latest site in Wuxi represents one of the largest GE Healthcare ultrasound manufacturing sites worldwide.