GE Transportation does the loco-motion

GE transportation is doing a brand new dance. When locomotives steam into one of its more than 40 service centers, technicians no longer have to paw through paper files looking for each model’s documentation. Thanks to GE’s improved Web-based eServices application, repair techs can launch a browser and instantly call up schematics, diagrams, manuals, images, and step-by-step repair instructions.

Using JavaScript and HTML, the company’s in-house team associates each service sheet in its Oracle database with the appropriate documents.

“Imagine a locomotive with thousands of parts,” says Senior Systems Analyst Jim Durovchic. “How can any human know exactly how to wire or assemble a specific product variation?”

He says the hardest part was coordinating the work across several time zones with GE’s overseas development team in Bangalore, India.

Besides saving “thousands of hours of very expensive labor,” Durovchic says eServices helped improve the quality of its locomotives by several orders of magnitude.

The scope of the application affected more than 40 service centers across North America, 12,000 employees, and a very large manufacturing plan. It needed to integrate with all existing applications without ad-verse effects on bandwidth, wireless networks or speed.

“The improvement in quality is like the MasterCard commercial,” Durovchic says. “Priceless.” Company officials claim high ROI.