Hey, Flexible Production Line! Do You Have Magic? | GE Healthcare's CT Detector Smart Manufacturing Project Named One of the 'Top 10 Cases'

GE Healthcare's Beijing Imaging Equipment Manufacturing Base, Hangwei Factory (hereinafter referred to as "Hangwei"), with its "High-end CT Detector Intelligent Flexible Manufacturing Project," at the recently held Fifth Global Industrial Internet Conference (hereinafter referred to as "the Conference"),Awarded "Top Ten Typical Cases of the Year", standing out from 1,000 outstanding cases of industrial digital transformation, and was showcased and received attention at the conference. The conference also released the "2023 Industrial Internet Industry Convergence Innovation Application Report" and launched the "Comprehensive Index for Evaluating Industrial Digital Transformation."

GE Healthcare's first joint venture in China, Hangwei, has grown over the past 30-plus years. The GE Healthcare Beijing Imaging Equipment Manufacturing Base, where Hangwei is located, has become one of GE Healthcare's largest equipment manufacturing bases globally. Over the past decade, leveraging its strong foundation in lean manufacturing, the GE Healthcare Beijing Manufacturing Base has vigorously developed advanced manufacturing, industrial internet, and digital information technologies, fully building a smart digital supply chain. A typical example of Hangwei’s digital exploration is the "Digital Empowerment for High-End CT Detector Intelligent Flexible Manufacturing Project."

High-end CT, as an important high-precision medical device, has the detector as its most core component. Due to the demanding requirements for raw materials, complex manufacturing processes, and high technical difficulty, the supply chain for detector products is extremely lengthy, making traditional manufacturing technologies struggle to meet the rapidly growing market demand.

To overcome technical challenges, Hangwei Factory fully utilizes industrial internet and digital technologies, integrating advanced management theories and techniques such as Six Sigma quality management, lean management, statistical analysis, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to build a highly flexible, high-quality, and highly intelligent manufacturing system for high-end CT detectors. During the system construction, GE Healthcare’s Hangwei Factory took the lead in applying its proprietary patented artificial intelligence algorithms in the detector testing process, promoting process optimization in production and achieving adaptive flexible production of detectors. This significantly improved the quality of each procedure and the overall quality of the core components throughout the entire production process. By establishing industrial equipment interconnectivity and data cloud sharing, it effectively ensured quality management and stable delivery across the entire supply chain of detector production.

Driven by five major innovations, GE Healthcare's Beijing site has gained more core and advanced capabilities in the intelligent manufacturing of high-end medical equipment. The digital supply chain benchmark, under the combined influence of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and lean production technologies, is fully demonstrated.

The selection of GE Healthcare into the "Top Ten Cases of Industrial Internet Integrated Innovation Applications in 2023" released at the 5th Global Industrial Internet Conference fully recognizes its achievements in the domestic production of high-end medical devices and digital supply chain construction, which will undoubtedly further drive the development of China's high-end medical device intelligent manufacturing.