Analytics and iPads on the Factory Floor

When people visit the plant floor of GE Energy Storage’s new industrial battery factory in Upstate New York, it’s not the gleaming white equipment nor the high tech assembly machines that draw the most attention. Instead, it’s the fact that workers are constantly using iPads that draws the comments and the stares.

According to Randy Rausch, business analytics and manufacturing information leader for GE Energy Storage, those iPads are instrumental in the collection and dissemination of data on the factory floor.

“We put the [iPad] device right in front of the people manufacturing the part,” he says in a video from February. Whether it’s information about the assembly of a part, what’s in the queue, or an alert about pending maintenance required on a machine, those iPads have become a critical component of the manufacture of GE ES’s sodium nickel chloride-based Durathon batteries.

Supervisors and executives also use the iPads and the Global View software program to monitor a range of variables occurring at the $100 million factory in Schenectady, which opened about a year ago. This includes quality control, production results, key performance indicators, instant messaging, weather data, and above all, email. All this data is displayed in a graphical format on the iPads, enabling managers and executives to maintain a valuable presence on the factory floor without neglecting their upstairs duties.

Analytics played a role in the development of the Durathon batteries. “When we started on this journey, we knew the key component to manufacturing this product was a ceramic,” he said. “People who have PhDs in ceramics manufacturing are telling us that it’s a black magic. That’s probably not a real good way to run your business, on black magic.”

Instead of black magic, the company sought real answers through big data. “We put sensors absolutely everywhere, and captured all this data in context genealogy and used analytics to find out what the issues were,” Rausch said.

As a startup within one of the most successful US corporations in history–and one with a vaunted software development arm at that–the company has displayed a certain level of scrappiness in its use of commercial off-the-shelf technology.

The company looked at rugged-ized mobile computers, but they cost several times more than the Apple devices. “We didn’t spend a lot of time investing in a cost-benefit analysis of doing mobility,” Rausch said. “It was a matter of downloading a free app and the information showed up on our iPad. It wasn’t any additional work. For us it was a no brainer.”

With all this instrumented data flowing into the iPads–as well as the output from advanced manufacturing executing systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems available–what stands out the most valuable piece of data to display on those iPads?

“The most useful thing was having email available on the shop floor,” he said. “I wish it was a more technologically astounding revelation, but that’s what I got.”

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