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Behind the scenes at GE’s new U.S. repair headquarters

by Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | March 22, 2017
Business Affairs HTM Parts And Service
Last week GE Healthcare celebrated the grand opening of its new Repair Operations Center in Oak Creek, Wisconsin — a massive equipment repair headquarters and the company's latest investment in the Badger State.

The 280,000 square foot facility, known as the ROC, is a hub for equipment repairs and testing, built on lean manufacturing principles. Formerly a Staples warehouse, the building will bring together disparate GE repair facilities under one roof.

Currently, the facility encompasses a Life Care Solutions unit from Jupiter, Florida, specializing in patient-side diagnostic equipment, as well as three repair operations formerly based in Texas, Milwaukee, and elsewhere in Oak Creek.

The space is only partially filled and more of the company's repair locations are slated to be incorporated — including the entirety of its GoldSeal refurbishing operations for imaging equipment and the Unisyn ultrasound probe repair subsidiary.

"We do things here rather than out in the field so that our field engineers can spend more of their time helping customers on more critical issues," Joe Shrawder, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Global Services, told a room full of visitors. "But we also get quality and efficiency and scale by bringing all of these repairs together here in one place."

Shrawder stressed the importance of the repair center's proximity to the GE product design centers scattered throughout Southeast Wisconsin, citing the dynamic relationship between product design and repair.

Touring the facility
According to Sean Holloway, repair team manager, the repair operations are largely divided between the GE owned diagnostic imaging equipment and the Life Care Solutions devices — such as patient monitors and anesthesia modules — and ultrasound devices which are customer owned.

A Dash patient monitor repair station
Visitors were taken on a tour where they saw repairs being performed on broken monitors; some of which had minor technical issues and others had sustained significant physical damage. The repair teams had a range of testing equipment at their disposal to isolate the issues and verify the fix.

Before the ROC, it was not uncommon for Life Care Solutions devices to take 40 days to repair, but according to Holloway they're now completing the same jobs in five days.

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