Smart Shop

Year: 2018
Client:
GE Aviation
Role: UX Designer
Industry: Aviation
Challenge
Need
Approach
Outcome
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An enterprise solution
for MRO service shops

SmartShop automates and orchestrates shop floor operations like inspections, work scope determination, repair, assembly, quality assurance, and reporting in GE Aviation and GE Power repair facilities.

The Challenge

Jet engine and gas turbine repairs are complex and long processes that include global transport, disassembly, inspection, main repair and assembly stages. Due to this circumstances they are a costly undertakings that General Electric pays for.
Most of the shops (repair warehouses) in the component repair network were either built or acquired over the last several decades. After acquisition legacy processes were left in place and no cross shop standard was established. Because of that, the service shops are using paper processes and legacy software.

The Need

Because of different standards and processes, GE Aviation and GE Power decided to unify them. The answer to this challenge was to create a softwarethat both businesses could share and that would be:

  • Configurable to suit the various requirements
    of the shops in the short term.
  • Built so that processes could be easily changed at the shop
    without a complete change of current pipeline.
  • Scalable so that new shops could be onboarded quickly.

The Approach

The first development step was to travel to a repair shop to meet end-users. We shadowed their work and observed first-hand the pain points they faced every day. Afterwards we started turning user insights and research findings into software features and processes.

Estimated Outcome

Saved ~40 full time headcount per year in every shop
Up to 50% cost reduction
for specific processes
Estimated 84 099 labor hours saved per year
Increased bandwidth
thanks to cost savings

My Contributions

• Part of a team of three UX designers across US and Europe supporting four teams of developers.

• Participate and coordinate research efforts at GE service shops globally, including on-site research studies, user interviews, and usability studies. Visit in GE service shop in Singapore

• Maintaining UI design system in Sketch libraries and specification documents.

• Ensuring that the product vision of stakeholders is transformed into designed product features

• Help Polish dev teams to quickly implement user stories by providing thorough UX / UI documentation of features, including mockups, user story descriptions and consultations on a two-week sprint schedule

• Establish consistent functionality and interactions by participating in design critiques with the SmartShop UX team members responsible for individual dev teams

• Deliver user insights to the dev team by presenting findings from research trips and usability studies

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