GE Vernova's Shane Long Talks Gas Power Supply Chain

During Turbomachinery International's tour of GE Vernova’s gas turbine manufacturing facility in Greenville, SC, Shane Long, Vice President of Global Supply Chain at GE Vernova's Gas Power Business, gave insight into what enabled the most impactful changes in GE Vernova's gas power-generation supply chain in the last five years.

Long said: “Lean transformation has been the most impactful change for the gas-power supply chain in the last five years. Dating back to 2019, we embarked on a journey to transform the way we operate inside our factories as well as with our suppliers. Over the course of those five years, we've been focused on connecting operations together—creating a flow of our products through our factories, which allows us to highlight and isolate problems or inefficiencies. We’ve then organized our team around solving those problems and driving more efficiency in the day-to-day operations. Once we established flow, it allowed the team to understand where our problems were and gave them a chance to focus on root-cause understanding and eliminate those problems.

“Early on, the journey was predominantly focused inside our factory network. Over the last two to three years, we have extended that journey to include our supply base. Now we think about the solution from a value-stream perspective, so we're able to partner with our suppliers, who are critical to our success, and help them through the same steps of the journey, including waste identification, connecting operations, creating flow, and giving them a chance to problem solve, much like what we do in our factories. Now that we have the connected view of the value stream, those inefficiencies start to multiply, resulting in better safety, better quality, improved delivery, and cost productivity. We are seeing that start to emerge from our efforts over the last five years, and it's putting us in a better position to serve our customers.”