John PanozzoGE Appliances’ New Zero-Distance Formability/Feasibility Process
June 22, 2023Comments
GE Appliances (GEA), a Haier company, has undergone sweeping internal transformation since 2016, driven by a “zero distance” strategy: zero distance between what the company makes and what its customers want; between ideas and innovation; and between where products are developed and made.
GE Appliances (GEA), a Haier company, has undergone sweeping internal transformation since 2016, driven by a “zero distance” strategy: zero distance between what the company makes and what its customers want; between ideas and innovation; and between where products are developed and made. Toward that end, GEA has transformed its business model toward a seamless and digital supply chain—internally and externally.
Here we’ll focus on what transformation looks like inside the process of designing and producing sheet metal parts, developed with attention paid to form and function, as well as to manufacturability, which has an eventual and overwhelming influence on final-product cost, quality, timing and profitability. GEA’s internal transformation as it relates to this sector was anchored in its early commitment to taking control of the cost-timing balance in the design and production of desirable and high-quality products.
The Traditional Process
GEA designers develop products through multiple iterations or revisions over which form-and-function targets converge. When close to finalization, the design is released to external die shops for planning and cost estimates toward building dies to produce parts.
In the traditional process, this represented the first opportunity for the design to undergo a detailed assessment of its manufacturability, and an estimation of production cost. Product designs and sheet-forming behavior being complex, these assessments invariably would result in infeasible manufacturing callouts, and suggested changes to product designs to overcome them. Typically, not all of these suggested changes could be implemented, as they would affect mating components in complex assemblies. And, even once implemented, such revisions rarely are “once and done,” requiring multiple time- and resource-expensive exchanges over the supply chain before finalization.
GEA also understands that the later product changes are initiated the more expensive they become to implement. And they shrink the timeframe available to build dies capable of robust and quality-compliant production, while increasing overall cost.
The design team’s responsibilities remain largely the same, working either from Appliance Park or other locations. And while this team still designs parts with a focus on appliance appearance and functionality, part designs now go through the simulation team for formability before being released to the die shop.
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