Leaning In to Safety and Quality: GE Vernova’s Wind Business Is Revolutionizing the Manufacturing Line
Global electricity demand busted out of its slumber last year, largely attributed to factors such as industrialization, data centers, and electric vehicles, leaping forward by 4.3%. That’s more than twice the annual average of the past decade, according to the International Energy Agency. The world is doing its best to transition energy demand more widely over to the grid, where electricity’s natural efficiencies can be leveraged to streamline costs and to better control emissions. Electric cars, electric heat pumps in buildings, even the first attempts to use electricity in steelmaking — these are just some of the efforts currently underway.
Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, has called this “an unprecedented era of electric growth,” and it requires an all-of-the-above energy strategy to reliably fill this rising demand, with wind power playing an important role. The guiding light of this effort is the lean approach, a philosophy of never-ending improvement of the manufacturing process, with a focus on safety, quality, delivery, and cost (SQDC) — in that order with safety always coming first.
GE Vernova is integrating lean throughout its global manufacturing sites, including those that produce critical components for the company’s Wind business. Here, teams strive to obtain certification that deems their manufacturing lines “lean” — recognition of their application of principles to improve processes and operations. In line with the lean philosophy, the work never stops, and teams work even harder to maintain and upgrade lean certifications year after year … after year.
Twenty-five wind manufacturing lines received their lean certification in 2024, including at facilities in Salzbergen, Germany; Pensacola, Florida; and Baodi, China. The good-to-better approach is something all three sites have ingrained in their operations, and whether they are producing the smallest bushings or the largest machine heads, it all begins and ends with lean.
But certification isn’t a check-the-box exercise. “Once a line is certified, it implies that the next year there’ll be an upgraded certification as part of this continuous improvement. It’s not a one-off, which makes this quite a challenging endeavor!” explains Stephan Hoevenaars, global lean leader in manufacturing for GE Vernova’s Wind segment. Across GE Vernova’s global Wind footprint, 10 more lines are looking to achieve new certification this year.
Everything in Its Place
Marco Kreimer, manufacturing leader at GE Vernova’s Wind plant in Salzbergen, Germany, knows a thing or two about lean. “Lean has been a part of our operations in Salzbergen’s DNA for over 20 years,” Kreimer says. “Everything we do traces back to comprehensive standardization.” And when he says everything, he means it. Kreimer explains that this includes items big and small, like materials and fixtures, crane parking positions, tools, and even trash cans — everything has a designated place.
Removing guesswork is the name of the game, and a manufacturing execution system deployed across the site through a specially developed app helps facilitate this and set the foundation for achieving SQDC. For example, employees log into their workstations and see their scheduled activities according to the production plan. As they do their work, the program asks them to confirm when steps are completed, safeguarding that nothing is missed and work is performed according to the specifications and expected standards.
“When the activities in the value stream are well known, any deviation from the standard process is immediately visible for everyone — operators and frontline leaders — and it gets addressed in real time,” Kreimer says.
The transparent approach also supports precise planning and continuous improvement — boosting safety, quality, reliability, and cost efficiency. “Operators can keep their focus on the work they do best and not on navigating the complexities that come with manufacturing planning, while frontline leaders know exactly when to step in if help is needed,” Kreimer explains.
The company is committed to the idea that a focus on safety and quality ultimately translates into higher productivity, lower costs, and on-time delivery. The Salzbergen plant produces a number of workhorse products — turbines that boast a repeatable design best suited to be produced at scale with sustainable and efficient supply chains. That means they can be reliably manufactured in duplicates. We often think of higher levels of output as a goal in manufacturing, but big gains in safety and quality can achieve a similar outcome by way of dependability of delivery and maintaining steady flows of products to customers. “When you improve the S and Q, D and C follows,” says Kreimer.
A Workhorse Emerges
When GE Vernova announced that it would be producing 674 wind turbines for the massive SunZia project in New Mexico — what will be the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere when it comes online next year — the team at the Pensacola, Florida, manufacturing plant knew the ramp-up would be quick, and they were prepared.
“One day we started building new units, and then the next week we were building three units, then the next day we’re building five units,” says Cher Maze, Pensacola HR leader. Since then, the team has produced enough turbines to supply more than 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of the 2.4-GW order.
The 3.6-megawatt (MW), 154-meter-rotor onshore wind turbine (referred to as the 3.6-MW-154m) that will power this mega-project has become one of GE Vernova’s latest workhorse products. Making a machine like the 3.6-MW-154m is very much a product of the lean approach.
All that hard work has resulted in the Pensacola facility receiving its lean certification, according to Brandy McGraw, the plant’s executive site leader. How did they do it? Through a series of kaizens, a Japanese term meaning “change for the better.” These are lean-driven events where the goal is to achieve greater efficiency, higher quality, and less waste.
Great ideas can also come from anywhere, says McGraw, noting that her team recently hosted a weeklong kaizen event. Throughout the week, employees collaborated on isolated projects to drive continuous improvement, with a focus on SQDC. “One of these projects was born from an idea of one of our wirers on the line, who suggested we work with our supplier to create some quick connects on panels that we could use to eliminate unnecessary wiring.”
And he was right. That particular project yielded safety and quality improvements while reducing the standard work time. “So absolutely, we have really good ideas that come right from the shop floor,” McGraw says.
The most important principle in lean, however, is that there’s no end point to improvement. Indeed, when McGraw and the Pensacola plant got the happy call that they’d been awarded lean certification, the next question was, “So what is your team going to do to keep it?”
No Task Is Too Small
Downriver from Beijing, China, in the industrial city of Tianjin, GE Vernova’s Wind business runs a wind turbine manufacturing plant in the city’s Baodi district that manufactures bushings. A bushing is a metallic cylinder, fashioned together in two parts, that helps attach a wind turbine’s blades to its hub. Sounds simple enough, but for a global supply chain that supports the deployment of wind power equipment, you are going to need a lot of bushings.
The Baodi plant recently overhauled bushing production in an interesting way. Using lean manufacturing principles, workers and managers have improved both the safety and the quality of their operations. Today the assembly line has robotic support, reducing human handling of each bushing from 12 encounters to just two. As demonstrated by Qin Lu, the Baodi plant’s lean leader, lasers and cameras now achieve greater precision, while machine lifting means far better ergonomics and lower safety risk for workers.
This is precisely the kind of innovation, brainstormed directly from the shop floor, that the lean approach hopes to capture. And while the bushing is just a small component, managing its quality while improving ergonomics for the operators is exactly what lean is all about.
GE Vernova has been a global leader in the wind industry over the past two decades, with more than 57,000 turbines installed across more than 50 countries. As the need for more and more electricity around the world continues to surge, the Wind manufacturing team is ready, realized by continuous improvements with lean and a sustainable quality that allows customers to deploy, deploy, deploy all that wind power.
GE Vernova | https://www.gevernova.com/
