GE Corporate Research and Development Centennial Web Site

Corporate Research and Development...Leadership Technology for GE's Growth.

The GE Corporate Research and Development is closely linked with all of GE's global businesses, providing technology and leadership for a continuous stream of new products and processes and for the company's key initiatives in Services, Six Sigma Quality, e-Business and Globalization.

Services

The premise of GE's product services initiative is that GE, with its large installed base of power generation, medical diagnostic, transportation, and industrial equipment, is uniquely well qualified to provide high-technology services that help customers increase profitability. Under the leadership of Corporate R&D, the initiative fueled by this premise has paid off handsomely, propelling GE's services revenues from $8 billion in 1995 to $17 billion in 2000.

Developing new information-based service businesses that improve customer profitability is a major new Services initiative for the company and Corporate R&D. This approach builds on the technology developed at Corporate R&D for remote monitoring and diagnostics of customer's equipment such as medical imaging systems, power turbines, locomotives and aircraft engines around the world. The idea is to exploit the Internet and advanced communications technologies to utilize existing customer data in ways that help them not only get the best performance out of their GE equipment but to also improve their operational effectiveness and competitiveness better managing their inventories, energy use, etc.

Global Vendor Managed Inventory is a new service offering from GE Operation Services that’s helping plastics fabricators increase their efficiency and profitability by better managing their raw material inventories.

One of the first success stories is Global VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory), a new Corporate R&D-developed service offering from GE Operations Services that's helping plastics fabricators and material suppliers increase their efficiency and profitability by better managing their supply chains and raw material inventories. A second e-Service offering that was co-developed and launched by Corporate R&D, GE Global Exchange Services and GE Industrial Systems is called Ener.ge.com. It is an Internet-based energy management service that employs the fundamentals of Six Sigma to improve the energy efficiency of industrial manufacturing plants in today's deregulating environment.

Six Sigma Quality

"Design for Six Sigma" (DFSS), a quality-focused approach to design engineering, is Corporate R&D's primary Six Sigma Quality initiative. With R&D leadership, DFSS is fast becoming engrained in company operations and is beginning to reap huge payoffs in the way of flawless products and services that fully meet customer expectations. Some examples: The Performix 630 x-ray tube that provides a nearly ten-fold increase in service life over its predecessor and the new ConstantColor™ ceramic metal halide lamp, which boasts reliability ten times better than competitors' products.

The next step...e- Engineering...will make DFSS fast, global, and available to the entire company. The enabler: state-of-the-art Internet business collaboration software, that will permit the sharing of DFSS tools, data, processes, and resources among GE operations, vendors, customers, and partners all over the world.

Physicist Dr. Timothy Sommerer, a member of the joint development team checks out ceramic metal halide lamps.

e-Business

Corporate R&D technology and leadership are helping to fuel the e-Business revolution on all fronts: in the company-wide drive to conduct more and more business via the Internet...by expanding the ever-widening array of Internet-based services that will help GE's global customers increase their profitability... and by employing the Internet to "globalize" Design for Six Sigma quality tools so that they are available to all who can benefit from them.

Among early successes of the R&D Center's many collaborations with the businesses are ColorXpress, a service that enables GE Plastics' customers to instantly choose from thousands of colors via the Internet, and iLinq, a GE Medical Systems service that, among other things, employs the Internet to remotely monitor, diagnose, and, in many cases, repair magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scanners at hospital sites around the world.

Globalization

		To gain access to the world's best talent and technology, the company, led by Corporate R&D, has established dozens of collaborations with people and institutions all over the globe...extending from Canada, Mexico, and key universities and the national labs in the U.S.; to Italy, Germany, and France in Western Europe; to Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, and Turkey in Eastern Europe; to India, China, and Israel in Asia, and to South Africa.
An artist's rendering of GE’s new India Technology Center that will open in Bangalore, the fall of 2000.

Helping to establish and maintain these collaborations is a key initiative of Corporate R&D, and, where it makes sense, bricks and mortar extensions of the organization also are taking form.

For example, a new GE India Technology Center has been established in Bangalore, India, to capitalize on that country's rich technology in areas ranging from polycarbonate chemistry to software development to computational fluid dynamics to design analytics. In Monterrey, Mexico, a new GE Center for Manufacturing Technology has been established as a focal point for indigenous manufacturing expertise in support of GE's varied manufacturing operations in Mexico. And in Shanghai, China, a new technology center is being established to support GE's China operations.

Breakthrough Products

		From its very beginnings, the Corporate R&D and its predecessor organizations have been a source of world class technology that has spawned dozens of revolutionary new products and processes. The list includes ductile tungsten filaments for light bulbs, the first practical and safe X-ray tube, the direct process for making silicones, Man-Made™ diamonds, Lexan® polycarbonate, the Lucalox® lamp, the fan-beam computed tomography scanner, and many more.
A GE Medical Systems engineer inspects part of a new computed tomography (CT) scanner detector.

Those sorts of "home runs" still happen today. Take digital X-ray, for example. Soon X-ray films will be a thing of the past thanks to a digital X-ray detector developed at the R&D Center in a thirteen-year, $100-million plus effort that produced more than 100 U.S. patents. This technology is the basis of a whole new family of products from GE Medical Systems that will produce instant, filmless, electronically transportable X-rays of a patient's chest, heart, breast, abdomen, bones, and blood vessels.

Other recent examples of comparable importance in their respective industries include the new H-technology gas turbine from GE Power Systems that incorporates advanced combustion and coatings technology from GE Corporate R&D that will enable it to provide an incredible 60% combined cycle power generating efficiency. There are also such industry leadership products as GE Aircraft Engines' GE90 engine, GE Transportation Systems' AC6000™ locomotive, and GE Medical Systems' LightSpeed computed tomography scanner, all of which benefited from Corporate R&D's breakthrough technology.