GE Healthcare welcomed dignitaries, visiting hospital personnel and members of the media to the grand opening of its innovative new Repair Operations Center (the ROC) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin on March 17. At the grand opening, GE Healthcare announced that it plans to add 70 jobs at the ROC bringing the facility’s total workforce to 220 people.
Joe Shrawder, GEHC Global Services, President and CEO, spoke to the importance of the ROC describing it as a “key pillar of our service business.”
“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,” he said. “We also get quality, efficiency and scale by bringing all of these repairs together in one place.”
“Besides repairing here, what you will see in our facility is that we refurbish, we harvest parts and we do recycling,” Shrawder said. “So, bringing everything through one site here in our repair world allows us not only to achieve economic performance but it’s the right thing to do ecologically. We get the maximum reuse of every return, end of service life medical device we bring in here and ensure we get the utmost out of recycling opportunities as well as refurbishing and reuse.”
“Soon, this will be the center for all of our returned asset recovery, including our GoldSeal refurbishing business,” he added. “Refurbished medical devices are an important contributor to our health care economy for smaller, more remote providers, for independent outpatient imaging centers, for customers who just need high technology but can’t afford the price of something brand new. We bring it here, refurbish it and make it like new, give it a second life. It is a huge part of our business and we’ll be doing that right behind the walls over here.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was at the grand opening and addressed those in attendance.
A guided tour of the 280,000-square-foot facility provided an up close look at the repair, remanufacturing and recycling center. The ROC is the consolidation of several facilities and is GE Healthcare’s largest and most advanced repair center in the world.
The ROC is an innovative repair, remanufacturing and recycling facility servicing imaging, diagnostic and patient monitoring equipment. It is located just a few miles away from GE Healthcare’s industry-renowned Global Healthcare Institute and several GE Healthcare corporate offices.
GE Healthcare’s Brilliant Factory platform combines lean and advanced manufacturing, 3D printing and advanced software analytics that enable productivity and impact customers’ satisfaction. The ROC is ISO 13485 and 14001 certified, and fully aligned with the GE Brilliant Factory standards for efficient and quality repair services. One example of the center’s advanced automation technology is OTTO, self-driving vehicles that streamline material flow throughout the facility.
The ROC is equipped to handle much more than repairs. When a piece of equipment has reached the end of its service life, it offers a wide range of recycling and remanufacturing programs that keep 94 percent of the material it receives out of landfills.
The GoldSeal program is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a move to the ROC.
The GE Healthcare Institute (HCI) in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, is also undergoing changes from asset performance management to the latest in education and training techniques. Renovations are in the plans for this global training facility to enhance onsite learning and hands-on training, including simulator training in the traditional sense as well as via the use of a HoloLens. Post-training support is also something GE Healthcare is working on at HCI.